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Glenys laughed. “That word sounds plain wrong coming from your lips.”
“What do you mean? I said the F word last Saturday. When I landed in a heap and bust my ankle—I said it. Out loud, in public. They probably heard me in Washington Square.”
“Shocking, but it’s not enough.” Glenys gave a placid smile and put her fork down. “Now, if you’d grabbed that sexy doctor and planted one on him, that might have improved your badass credentials.”
“Fliss said the same thing. Are you two colluding? I’ll say what I said to her—he would have had me arrested for assault.” As it was, he’d seemed surprised at some of the things she’d said. As if he’d been expecting something different.
She couldn’t even begin to imagine what it was like to work in a department like that. In the short time she’d spent in the waiting room, she’d heard people yelling abuse and several of them had been drunk. It had made her feel more than a little uncomfortable. How must it feel to handle that day after day? That was one of the things she loved most about working with dogs. They were always so thrilled to see you. There was nothing better than a wagging tail to lift the spirits, nothing more motivational than an excited bark. Dr. E. Black didn’t have that when he went to work. She suspected there was a distinct shortage of wagging tails in his life.
She watched as Glenys finished the omelet, policing every mouthful. Then she got Harvey ready for his walk. She maneuvered him into his little red coat, attached his leash and helped Glenys find her coat and her gloves.
It was true that if she’d taken the dog on her own the walk would have been finished in half the time, but that wasn’t what life was about for Harriet.
Glenys needed to maintain her independence and no one else was going to help her.
They walked slowly down the street, admiring the decorations in the store windows.
“I love this time of year.” Harriet slid her arm through Glenys’s. “It’s so buzzy and exciting.”
Glenys was concentrating on where she put her feet. “At my age, it’s just another day.”
“What? No, you can’t think that way. I won’t let you. I hope you’ve written to Santa.”
“Does he deliver new hips or new husbands?”
“Maybe. If you don’t write, you’ll never know.”
“Maybe I should try online dating.”
“It didn’t work for me, but no reason why it shouldn’t work for you. Go for it, but don’t ask me for help with your profile. I’m too honest. You need to present yourself as a twenty-year-old pole dancer.”
Glenys tightened her grip on Harriet’s arm. “Next time, I’m writing your profile. No more nice girl Harriet. How are your adventures going? What was today’s challenge?”
She’d told Glenys about her determination to stretch herself.
“I called someone who is always rude to me.” She was careful not to mention any names. “Normally Fliss does it.”
“If she’s rude, why do you keep her as a client?”
“I never said she was a client.”
“Honey, life is too short to hang on to friends who are rude to you so it has to be a client.”
“She has two dogs and a huge network of wealthy friends. Fliss says we can’t afford to lose her.” Although if it had been left to Harriet she would have done exactly that months ago. Life was too short to have rude clients too.
“So you let her say bad things to you?”
“It’s not that she says bad things, exactly. It’s more that she’s one of those people who thinks no one can possibly understand how busy and appalling her life is. So she is infuriated when I talk slowly. But I’m afraid of speeding up in case I stammer.” Harriet paused as they passed a side street. “She makes me feel small. Not small as in slim and attractive. Small as in less. She makes me feel incompetent, even though I know I’m not. She reminds me of Mrs. Dancer, my fourth grade teacher.”
“I’m assuming that’s not a good thing.”
“I wasn’t the type to talk much in class, so she used to single me out. Harriet Knight—” she imitated Mrs. Dancer’s sarcasm “—I presume you do have a voice? We’d all love to hear it.”
“I don’t see why not talking all the time should be a disadvantage in life.”
But Harriet wasn’t listening. She was looking at the man huddled against the wall next to a Dumpster. She looked at his shoulders, hunched against the wind, and at the defeated look on his face. “Billy?” She checked that Glenys was steady on her feet, and hurried across to him. “I thought I recognized you. What are you doing here?” She crouched down and put her hand on his arm.
“Trying to stay warm.”
“It is a cold one. Tonight is going to be worse. Can you go to the shelter? Anywhere?” She dug her hand into her pocket and pulled out a couple of granola bars. “Can I get you a hot chocolate? Tea?” She talked to him for a while, fetched him tea from the food cart nearby.
When she finally returned to Glenys, her friend was frowning.
“Didn’t your mama teach you not to talk to strangers?”
“Billy isn’t a stranger. I see him every time I walk Harvey. He used to be a university professor, then he had an accident and became addicted to painkillers.” Was that why the doctor in the ER had made a point of telling her he wouldn’t write her a prescription? Presumably he knew how easy it was for pain management to turn to addiction. “He lost his job, couldn’t pay medical bills.”
“How do you know all that?”
“We started talking one day in the summer when I was walking Valentine, Molly’s Dalmatian.”
“So you can’t talk to a guy you’re dating, but you can talk to a stranger on the street?”
“He wasn’t exactly a stranger. I have been walking past him every night for eight months. We always said hello. He was so polite. Then we started saying more than hello. I got to know him a little. Do you know that sometimes, when it’s freezing cold, he rides the train all night, from the Bronx to Brooklyn? How sad is that.” It depressed her that people had to do that to stay warm in New York’s freezing winter. To stay alive. “Anyone can end up homeless.”
“You must have talked to him for a long time to know so much.”
“I did. He was lonely.” She paused. “And I guess I was a little lonely too. I was getting used to being in the apartment without Fliss.”
Glenys patted her on the arm. “You miss her. I understand. I miss my Charlie. It’s the little things, isn’t it? Charlie always used to make the coffee in the morning. Now I do it and I can never get it quite right. And he fixed anything that went wrong in the apartment. He was handy like that.”
Harriet realized she had to stop moaning.
Glenys had suffered a serious loss. She hadn’t lost Fliss. Her sister was still in her life.
“I do miss her, but it was always going to happen one day. The alternative would have been living together until we were ninety, sharing false teeth, and that wouldn’t have been great, either. Since Fliss moved out, I don’t have anyone to cook for.” She didn’t confess that some days she made huge batches of her chocolate chip cookies, or her granola bars, and distributed them to anyone who was interested. And she knew, with brutal honesty, that she was doing it as much for her as for them. She needed to feel needed, and since Fliss had moved out and Daniel had become involved with Molly, she rarely felt needed. She missed having someone to fuss over, to cook for and nurture. There were few people she felt able to admit that to, but Glenys was one of them. “I’m not ambitious in the way Fliss is. I mean, I love our business, but what I love about it is the lifestyle. The dogs. Being outdoors. Doing something I love. Fliss likes the success of it, the growth, the bottom line. We’re different like that.”
“You’re different in lots of ways. Fliss is always in a hurry. She never has time to chat the way you do.”
Harriet sprang to the defense of her sister. “Because she’s building the business. We have the Bark Rangers because of her.”
Glenys stopped walking and Harriet looked at her in alarm. “What’s wrong? Is your hip hurting?”
“No. Right now it’s my heart that’s hurting, and you’re the one hurting it. Your problem is that you don’t see your own qualities.” Glenys waggled her finger. “The Bark Rangers is as much about you as it is about your sister.”
Fliss had said the same thing.
“It was her idea. She’s the one who handles all the new business.”
“But why do you think people come to you for dog walking? Because of you.” Glenys patted her arm. “Because everyone in Manhattan with a brain and a dog knows that Harriet Knight is the person they want. Customer service. Individual attention. Caring. That’s what it’s about. That’s why the Bark Rangers is a success. You are to dog walking what Tiffany’s is to jewelers. You are diamond and white gold. The best.”
Harriet was touched and ridiculously flattered. “What do you know about Tiffany’s?”
“I was young once. I used to stand outside that store dreaming, like so many women before me. And then Charlie made my dreams come true. And he didn’t do it by walking into Tiffany’s and spending all his money. Love isn’t a diamond. You can’t buy what we had, and that’s what you want too. Love. Nothing wrong with that, honey. You show me the person who doesn’t want love in their life, and I’ll show you a liar.” Glenys started walking again, Harvey trotting by her side.
“What makes you so wise?”
“Age and experience.”
After two blocks Harriet insisted they turn round, afraid that Glenys might overdo it.
“It’s enough for one day. I don’t want to tire you out, and I have another dog to walk before I go home.”
“Are you sure you should be doing this much walking?”
“I’m doing a favor for a client who has had a family emergency. She has left Madi, her dog, with her brother and I promised to walk him. This was fun. We’ll do it again tomorrow.”
“If my joints haven’t seized up. So what are you doing for the holidays, pumpkin? Have you decided?”
Harriet kept her eyes straight ahead. “You’re coming. I’m already planning the menu.”
Glenys gave her a keen look. “You’re not staying with Fliss?”
“She’s invited me, but I don’t know Seth’s family and it’s their first Christmas all together and I know Fliss is a little nervous—”
“All the more reason to have you there.”
“No.” Harriet shook her head. “She doesn’t need her twin, she needs Seth. She has a new family now.”
“You don’t throw out your old family just because you have a new one. You blend them together, like that cookie mixture you’re so good at.”
“For some things, yes, but not always and at Christmas it feels like an intrusion. And it will be good for me to spend Christmas without my family. I’m way too dependent on them. I’ll probably watch back-to-back Christmas movies and gorge myself on unhealthy food. I’m hoping you’ll join me.”
“What about your grandmother? Can’t you stay with her?”
“I’m staying right here. I’ll still be walking dogs if people need me. Providing the snow isn’t too bad.” She glanced up at the sky. “Do you think they’ll be right this time? Will it be a big fall?”
“Maybe. It’s the holidays, Harriet. At your age you should be out partying.”
“I can hurt my ankle when I’m not partying. Imagine the damage I could do if I started partying. Never been much of a party person, Glenys. You’re talking to the woman who can’t even walk confidently in high heels.”
“I worry about you coming out here alone at night. It isn’t safe.”
“That’s good. I’m trying to be less safe. Stepping out of my comfort zone. Is Darren coming to see you at all over the holidays?”
“Not this year. He’s going to visit Karen’s parents in Arizona. They’ll probably cook the turkey by leaving it out in the sun for half an hour.” They’d reached Glenys’s apartment block and the doorman smiled and held the door open.
“Please come to me.” Harriet gave her a quick hug. “It will be so much fun. Bring Harvey.”
“You’re a kind girl, Harriet Knight, but you don’t want to spend your holidays with a creaky old bird like me.”
“I do. And if you can’t come to me, I’ll bring the turkey to you. One creaky old bird to another.”
“You’re a soft touch.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I know—” Glenys nudged her “—we could both slip on the ice and spend Christmas Day in the emergency room with that sexy doctor of yours. It’s warm, and we’d have plenty of good company.”
“He’s not my sexy doctor, and I don’t think he’d be amused to see me twice in the same month.”
But if Santa wanted to drop a man like him down her chimney, that really would make for a perfect Christmas.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_2325ad39-3d49-50f7-a023-6b7d1ff452c9)
THE SNOW CONTINUED to fall.
In the emergency room, Ethan was busier than ever.
Before he’d left for work, his sister had arrived at his apartment with Madi. He’d been surprised by how calm and well behaved the dog was. Over Thanksgiving her behavior had been close to manic but his sister assured him she’d been overexcited because of the number of people in the house.
It was certainly true that today she seemed like a different dog.
If she carried on like this, they just might make it through.
“So the dog walker—”
“Her name is Harriet, Ethan. Why are you so bad with names?”
“Because people move through my department so quickly I don’t need to remember them. I don’t care about their names or their ambitions. I fix them. That’s it. So Harriet—” Harriet, Harriet, he repeated to himself “—will be coming twice a day? What about snow? Is that going to keep her away?”
“She has never let me down in two years. She’ll be here. I stopped by her apartment on the way here and gave her your key.”
“You gave my key to a stranger. Thanks.”
“She’s not a stranger. She’s a lifesaver—yours. Make sure you’re home to meet her later.”
Satisfied that Madi’s needs were going to be met by someone, if not by him, Ethan focused on his work.
His first patient was a forty-five-year-old male who had suffered chest pains while shoveling snow.
The first responders at the scene had already transmitted the twelve-lead EKG. Someone showed it to Ethan and he instructed them to page the on-call interventional cardiologist.
Moments later the man arrived in the department.
“I was clearing the snow from the steps and I started to feel funny,” he told Ethan. “My chest was kind of tight, like someone was squeezing it. And I thought I was being a wimp, so I carried on. But then my wife appears at the top of the steps and she says, ‘Mike, you’re whiter than the damn snow.’ She called 911.”
“Good decision. I’ve already checked the EKG the first responders sent through and it shows that you’re having a heart attack.” Ethan saw the fear in the man’s eyes and placed a hand on his shoulder. “You’re in good hands, Michael. We’re going to take good care of you and I’ve called the cardiologists.” He turned to the team. “Can we get a repeat EKG? We need two large-bore IVs and let’s get him on a nitro drip. We need to prepare him for the cath lab.” He turned back to his patient, explained what was happening and questioned him carefully.
