I nearly spit my wine back into my cup. Drinks are never safe with Jo. You never know when she’s going to say something that makes you shoot it out your nose.
“Where’s Gary tonight?” I ask later after she and I packed up our canvases and moved to the couch. Her painting looks like a masterpiece of bright, delectable fruit. Mine, a plump booty covered in an orange spray tan. “And why doesn’t he ever get dragged along on these hobby adventures?”
Gary is Joanna’s husband—and is just as likable as she is. He’s a sixty-six-year-old journalist who can work from anywhere and loves his job more today than he did the day he started thirty years ago. Joanna and Gary Halstead are just the sort of people to make my mama and daddy turn up their noses. Gracious me, do you mean he had to work for his money???
The Halsteads moved into the Charleston area about five years ago simply because they’d always wanted to live here. That was when Joanna founded Southern Service Paws. These people are as down to earth as the dirt itself.
I aspire to have what Jo and Gary have—the kind of love where a man will still walk into a room and pinch my butt after forty years of marriage. And I know this from witnessing it a few too many times for my liking.
A mischievous glint enters Jo’s eyes, and she wags her eyebrows playfully. “Gary’s not invited because I don’t like to mix my hobbies. And he already participates in a very favorite pastime of mine.”
“Ew,” I say, shoving my face into one of her oversized throw pillows dramatically.
Suddenly, I’m thirteen, and she’s my mama telling me about the birds and the bees. Except the irony is that Mama never actually told me about the birds and the bees. She gave me a book and walked away, because Melony Jones doesn’t have personal conversations.
I remove my face from the pillow and toss it at Jo instead. “Gross. I don’t want to know about your nighttime hobbies with Gary!”
She catches the pillow, laughing. I know she takes great amusement in the fact that I turn red easier than an albino on the beach with no sunscreen, because she always, always, always takes her inappropriate jokes a step further.
“I never said they are nighttime hobbies. Honestly, Evie, where’s your creativity? Thinking like that is going to give you the most boring marriage on the planet one day.”
La, la, la, not listening.
Don’t get me wrong. I love a good inappropriate joke. But from the first day I met Joanna and Gary, they became the parents I never had—meaning, the parents I wish my current parents were. Because of this, I absolutely do not want to hear about my surrogate parents’ bedroom endeavors.
I curl up in a ball in the corner of Jo’s massive couch and shut my eyes. This day felt way too long, and now it’s catching up to me. “I don’t think you’re going to have to worry about the creativity in my marriage, because it’s starting to look like I’m going to die a lonely old maid. Just me and Charlie forever.”
I gaze longingly at Charlie curled up at my feet. There’s so much comfort in him resting. If he is resting peacefully, it means I’m safe too—no danger of a seizure.
“He won’t live as long as you.”
My eyes fly up to Jo, and I take in her smiling face. If I had another pillow, I’d throw it at her too.
She laughs. “I’m sorry! I was just tryin’ to lighten your heavy mood.”
“By telling me my dog is going to die?!”
She shrugs. “My humor is dark.”
I shake my head in a mock reprimand and sink back into my corner. I wish my couch was this big and comfy, but that tiny loveseat was hard enough to fit in my apartment.
“Joking aside, I have no idea how you’re still single, Evie. You’re gorgeous. Funny. Driven. Leggy.”
Epileptic.
“As it turns out, men don’t really like to approach a woman with a dog wearing a bright-blue vest and a patch sewn on that says, “Hi, I’m single, and occasionally I lose consciousness and convulse on the ground.”
I can see in Jo’s eyes that she wants to make a sarcastic joke about the patch reference, but she refrains and instead says, “I wish there was something I could say to make it better. But I know there isn’t.”
Reason #12,345 why I love Jo. She understands people because she’s a good listener. She’s been listening to people with every disability under the sun for the past five years of working for Southern Service Paws. She understands that sometimes people just need to talk and be heard—not fixed.
“Can we change the subject?” I ask, feeling a little too spent from this day to go down a deep, heartfelt tunnel.
“Sure.” She pulls her legs up onto the couch to mirror my position. I swear she looks closer to thirty than seventy. And yet, she’s sixty-five years old. “Tell me how your meeting went today.”
I groan. Maybe I should just go home. Apparently, there is no acceptable topic for me and my I-hate-everything mood tonight. “I wished him good luck trying to walk with his head up his butt.”
Jo’s mouth falls open just as I suspected it would. “Gracious, girl! Why’d you say that?”
I skew my face up and then shove it into the collar of my t-shirt to hide. What I said to Mr. Broaden was so unprofessional and a drastic overreaction to what he said. Sure, he was a class-A jerk to me, but I shouldn’t have responded the way I did. I should have smiled politely, thanked him for his time, and then went home and stuck a hundred pins in the voodoo doll I made of him. Instead, I cast a bad light on our company.
“Well, in my defense, he was rude to me first. But still, I shouldn’t have said what I did. And definitely not in front of his ten-year-old daughter.”
“All right, here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to pop some popcorn, and then you’re going to start from the beginning.”
And that’s what I do. I tell her everything. Well, almost everything. I leave out the part about him being ridiculously hot and me replaying the scene in my head a hundred times, except changing the course our conversation took and ending it with us making out in the corner. She doesn’t need to know any of that.
When my monologue is finished, Jo laughs and tells me she would have done the same thing. But I don’t believe her, because she treats the company like it’s her baby. She’s helped train over sixty dogs that have literally changed people’s lives—giving them freedom in ways that medicine never could. She would never have let one stinging comment from an attractive guy undo her like it did me.
Jacob Broaden struck a nerve inside me. It still hurts.
Before I leave, Joanna and I discuss the plans I made that day for the fundraiser, and then I spend the rest of the night continuing to obsess over that five-minute conversation in the coffee shop. I teeter between embarrassed of my actions and spitting angry that he would say something like that to me, because:
1) YES, I am hard up for money, and how dare he point that out.
2) Everyone knows that car salesmen are probably the most annoying humans ever, so I take great offense to that comparison.
3) He was right.
I was pushy and obnoxious. I was acting like I would be fired if I didn’t meet my quota, because something in me actually does feel that way—not that Jo would actually fire me, but like I constantly need to prove my worth by helping every single person struggling with a disability. Every time I match someone with one of our dogs, I feel like I’m earning my keep in this world. Like maybe, one of these days, my parents will see the grand total of people I’ve helped and finally say, “You know, Evie, I’m glad you took your own path in life. I’m proud of you!”