Saving Sadie

Jan had been miserable. She hadn't even known what she wanted, what she'd been denying she wanted, before Dennis died—or hadn't been sure, at least. He certainly hadn't done anything about it. He'd been too ill for sex, but there were ways, techniques, substitutes, and he hadn't even tried. Moving on to other men after Dennis died was messy, yes, and a crushing blow to Rick. But it was what it was.

Or at least what it had been. Jan couldn't see herself being in any such relationship like that ever again now. She was truly too damn old now. Who would have her—in the condition she knew she was in? And in that was a sense of loss nearly as large as having unexpectedly lost Greg.

"Listen, Ann, I think that's a call for your plane. I don't want you to miss it."

"OK, I guess it's time," Ann said. Jan wasn't sure whether that was regret or relief in Ann's voice when she said it. But she wouldn't regret it of her daughter-in-law if it was relief. Ann was taking so much of this on herself. And Jan wasn't her mother—not really. And she had a mother. A normal mother that Rick had been quick to bring up as a comparison to Jan. Not one who had been shacking up with a younger man—two of them, albeit not simultaneously. Probably the mother Rick had adopted as the one he wanted now.

"But think about it, won't you? When you've had time to recover a bit. Think about coming down and visiting us for a couple of weeks. Or a month or more. I hate to see this . . . this nothingness between you and Rick. I know it's just a matter of getting you back together again. And there's nothing holding you here now. Now that you're retired, of course." She slipped in that last bit, seemingly out of fear that the conversation would head down one of those dangerous paths again.

"There's Sadie," Jan said.

"Sadie?" Ann asked. And she asked it as if she genuinely didn't know who Sadie was.

"Sadie, Greg's dog. Mine now. Could I bring Sadie?"

"Oh, well. Our apartment is only two bedroom. And we have cats, you know. Perhaps a kennel?"

This stung Jan. It was a sticking point for her that Ann and Rick had not had children. Jan took it as a rejection by Rick. She knew that Ann would have like to have them. But Jan considered that Rick was so put off by what he saw in the relationship between his own parents and how that affected him as a child that he didn't want to repeat what he saw as mistakes. Jan thought that unfair, though. She could have risen further at the university if she hadn't put husband and family first. And it was hardly her fault that she always had brought more home than Dennis had. Lord knows she'd balanced as best as she could—and had made unknown sacrifices that Rick apparently had no understanding of or feeling for.

"Sadie's just lost her master," is what she responded to Ann. "I'm the only one she has now. And if I leave . . ."

"Oh, well." Ann was quite at a loss for words, and Jan didn't need a roadmap to figure out how happy Ann would be for her to arrive on her doorstep with Sadie in tow. But she wasn't kidding about the part of being sensitive to Sadie losing her master and then having the next in line disappear for several weeks as well. Sometimes Jan thought that people didn't realize that household pets were people too—or something close to that.

"There's the announcement again, Ann. You'd better go. You know how getting through security can be these days."

"Oh, well. Yes. But you'll think about it, won't you?"

"Yes, Ann, I'll think about it."

Ann stood and picked up her jacket and carryon. She gave Jan a peck on the cheek and then a close hug. "I'm so sorry, Mom," she said. "I know it's a blow and a great loss to you. I understand that."

Jan hugged her back. "Thanks. And thanks for being here for me, Ann. And, yes, I'll try to get down there before winter," she said, with a slight sob from somewhere down in her throat.

Ann smiled a wan smile at Jan and turned and started walking off toward the security gate.

"Oh, and Ann," Jan called after her, making Ann turn back toward her, "Please give my regards to Rick . . . and tell him . . . tell him I love him."

"Yes, I will. I most certainly will," Ann said, tears now coming to her eyes.

It had been a struggle for Jan to say that. Rick hadn't been the only one hurt; his unwillingness to try to understand Jan and her needs was also hurtful to Jan. She said it for Ann as much, if not more so, than for Rick. And she'd said it for herself too, she knew. She knew bridges needed to be rebuilt and that the initiative would have to be hers. And she also felt she had a limited amount of time—and that she owed it to Rick to set things right again. She didn't want Rick going through life with this on his shoulders. And there would be nothing Jan could do about it after she died.

"Damn," she thought. "Why did Greg have to go first? He promised me he wouldn't."

* * * *

"Hello, I'm Harold. Harold Dandridge. From 1124, just around the corner from you, at the mailboxes. I'm new here and just getting acquainted. I thought I'd do it by fixing that loose shutter you had around at the side of the your unit." He was standing there, with hammer and screwdriver in hand, symbols of his indispensability to a woman living alone.

Jan stood at the front door of her condo, at a loss for words for a couple of moments. She couldn't decide which one of them was older—or in more deteriorating shape. She had no trouble deciding who was more hopeful, though. Sadie peeked out around the side of Jan's leg, and the man took one step back.

"Umm, uh, nice puppy. He doesn't bite, does he?"

"Only selectively—and Sadie's a she. Come on girl, let's show this gentleman your manners. Hi. My name's Jan. And thanks for fixing the shutter—I hadn't really noticed that it was broken—and welcome to the neighborhood."

"Yes I heard your name was Jan." The man said it as if he'd researched Jan well. But not too well, Jan thought, or he wouldn't be standing at her doorstep making preliminary moves on getting his dinners cooked and laundry done—unless he was a bit kinky himself or if he was so desperate that any woman would do. But he was going on, "It was no bother, really"—referring apparently to the minor handyman work—"and I thought I should stop by anyway. Did you know that the hose on your patio is running water into the street. I thought someone should let you know. It's the neighborly thing to do—at least where I came from. They don't seem all that friendly around here, I'm sorry to say."

"Oh, Lord, it's not, is it?" Jan exclaimed. "I must have left it running when I was watering the border flowers. I'm getting so forgetful."

Actually, Jan was delighted. She now had an excuse to go outside rather than invite Harold in and to be doing something that he might get wet for if he came anywhere close to her. Jan already was running through her mind a scenario of this paunchy old man chasing her around the yard trying to put a peck of a kiss on her cheek.

"Well, it was nice meeting you—and thanks for fixing the shutter," Jan wafted in Harold's direction, giving him what she hoped was the polite kiss off. She wondered how long it would take for word to get to him that she'd been living with a much younger man—and then how long after that it would take him to add one and one together and get grasping cougar. Jan was up on such jargon; she'd heard that word whispered about her and had made sure to find out what it meant.

"Umm. Don't mention it. Glad to have met you. I'm just around the corner if you need anything. 1124, over by the mailboxes."

Happily, Harold was gone when Jan turned from shutting off the water. Jan could see that, indeed, she had been deluging the storm drains on the street. And they were in a near drought too. She had breezily passed off her forgetfulness, but it did worry her—more than she was prepared to tell anyone it did. Anyone but Greg, of course.

When she reentered the condo, she found Sadie perky, as if she had enjoyed the unexpected visit by a male figure far more than Jan did—and, possibly, that she wasn't as picky about her men as Jan was.

On the whole, Jan was happy to see Sadie happy, if only for a moment. She had dragged around the condo even more than he had since Greg's death. The worst part—which Jan knew was cruel and would fix as soon as she could find the directions and someone who could understand them—was the telephone answering machine recording. Greg had recorded the answer, and each time Jan couldn't get to the phone quickly enough, Greg's voice came on the machine and Sadie's ears went up and she and wandered around the condo, looking for Greg, before she came back to the foot of Greg's empty recliner in the living room and flattened herself on the floor and whined her mournful whine.

Sadie was still spending the nights there by Greg's chair. When Greg had been here, all three of them had retired to the bedroom at night, and Sadie had lain at the foot of the bed until the bed stopped rocking—on the nights it did that—and then she'd be up at their feet while they drifted off to sleep. And invariably they would wake in the morning with her stretched out between them. They had had to go to a king-size bed just for her, as they hadn't been able to change her habits. When they had tried to lock her out of the bedroom, she scratched the door and whined until they let her in.

After Harold's visitation, Jan went to the condo's second bedroom, which had been made into a workroom for both her and Greg, both of them using Jan's accumulated vast collection of books on the early Romance writers that each of them drew on, Jan now for writing for publication and Greg as a junior member of the faculty of the university where they had met.

Jan was working on a new book—but she hadn't been able to concentrate since Greg's passing. That was what she had been doing when Greg died. They had had dinner together, and Greg said he felt he had a little indigestion and wanted to lay on the sofa for a bit. Jan had gone on into the study and was so engrossed in what she was doing that the hours passed, and, although she could now remember Sadie having been restless and coming in to the study several times and nudging at her without response, Jan just ignored her at the time. And then she stopped coming in and it progressively crept into Jan's consciousness that she was whining strangely in the living room. When Jan went to investigation, she couldn't rouse Greg. He was already gone.

Jan had no idea what could have been done if she had paid attention to Sadie when she first came into the study, and she was able to reason with herself that Greg's passing wasn't her fault, but she now just couldn't concentrate on anything in the study. And Sadie wouldn't come to her in the study now at all. She remained loyal to Greg—laying at the foot of Greg's recliner out in the living room. She didn't even come into the bedroom anymore when Jan went to bed.

Jan knew she'd have to move to exorcise the presence of Greg. What she was dragging her feet on, though, was that she didn't want to exorcise Greg any more than Sadie did. She couldn't go to sleep at night without moving her hand below her belly and imagine Greg inside her, making her feel alive.

The bottom line was that Jan knew that if she didn't make some sort of changes—ones she really didn't want to make at all—sooner rather than later, the decision would be taken out of her hands. That hose thing, for instance, was just a small matter—but it was happening more and more frequently.

Jan worked in the study for a couple of hours and felt a minor feeling of victory that she had made some progress—at least in deciding what she wanted to say about the writer she was studying, if not yet having put it to paper. She jotted some notes down. All the time she was working something at the back of her brain told her that there was an angle on the criticism that she had wanted to pursue—a possible new line of enquiry that had come to her at an inopportune moment. But she couldn't think of it, and that was a bit frustrating, taking the edge off of the feeling or progress she'd made on the writing. Giving up and trying to remember, she stood and stretched and went out into the living room.

"Time for your walk, old girl," she said, and Sadie stood right up and trotted over to her, tail wagging.

Jan smiled. This was a bit of progress too. Greg had always been the one to walk Sadie. Since he'd been gone, Sadie had been hard to motivate when Jan walked her. She'd tell the dog it was time for a walk, which she obviously understood and certainly didn't reject in principal, but then she'd go to the back hallway, thinking Greg would come out of one of the doors there to snap her leash on her collar. But Greg didn't do that anymore.

Jan went into a crouch beside Sadie when the pooch reached her side by the front door and ran her hands into Sadie's fur and put her face to the dog's neck and mumbled, "Thanks, Sadie. I know I'm no substitute, but it's just you and me now, girl. Well have to muddle through this together."

Sadie turned and licked Jan's cheek, maybe brushing away a tear and maybe not, and the two survivors walked out into the late-afternoon shadows.

Harold waved at her from his dining room window as Jan passed his condo on the way to the mailbox. When she and Sadie returned from their walk to the designated area of dog business in the condo area, Harold was standing at his door holding his screw driver. Jan giggled to herself inside at the symbolism of Harold's choice of a pledge of his competence—or perhaps his not-so-subtle offer. A screw driver. Still, she had to acknowledge that she could use a good screw now.

Once back in the condo, Jan took a family-sized TV dinner from the freezer and popped it into the microwave oven. She laughed again wondering if Harold also could cook, because it was something she had never mastered. The meal was lasagna. Sadie sat and whined beside the dining room table as Jan ate. And, of course, she wound up getting some lasagna. Not as much as she wanted, of course, but "as much as she wanted" wasn't something that was going to happen in this lifetime. There was more than enough for both of them, though, and Jan put the more-than-half-full dish in the refrigerator and the dishes in the sink. She decided he'd do the dishes after she watch Jeopardy on TV.

The game show led into a situation comedy and then a drama and the news, and ended with a late-night talk show before Jan got up the gumption to move again. When Greg was here, they went to meetings and lectures and concerts and jazz bars, their favorite of those being Hudson's. Jan hadn't been to any of those since Greg had died, though. Tonight had been just about like any other night. The whole evening Sadie had lain, a bit restlessly, next to Greg's recliner and had moaned and whined a bit in a trouble sleep.

When the TV went into a later-night show that was too "hip" for Jan to follow, she clicked off the TV, went around turning the lights off in the living room, and drifted back to the bedroom.

Her heart did a little zing thing as she got into bed after taking her shower and saw that Sadie was laying down in the hall next to the open door into the bedroom. She patted the bed and called Sadie's name, but the dog stayed where she was.

"No matter, girl," Jan murmured. "It's a start. We'll make it yet, you and I. I know it. We're not ready for the nursing home yet."

But then Jan felt a little catch in the back of her throat. This was what she'd been thinking about, worrying about in her mind. But this was the first time she'd said it out loud: "ready for the nursing home." Not so much because she was getting old as because she felt she was losing her mental grasp. And the thought it sickened her. Not so much for her. But what about Sadie then? Sadie was the last link to Greg, and anyway, Sadie was now Jan's responsibility—her responsibility to Greg. What about Sadie?

She turned off the light, ready for sleep. But sleep wasn't that ready for her.

Chapter Three

Jan was pretty tired when she woke up in the morning. She'd been stewing through much of the night. The first thing she did when she opened her eyes was look at the hall floor beyond the door into the bedroom. Sadie wasn't there, though. Jan sure would have liked to have seen her laying out there—or, better yet, on the bed. When Jan made it into the living room of the condo, she saw that Sadie had returned to the foot of Greg's recliner.

Jan also noticed that the dinner dishes she'd left to wash later the previous night were still piled in the kitchen sink. When Greg was here, this would never have happened. They ran a tight ship when Greg was here.

Jan took Sadie for a short walk—being happy to notice that the dog came to her when called like she had the previous day. It was still dark out. They rounded the corner on the side by the mailboxes, but Jan saw lights on in Harold's condo and the curtains in his dining room moving, so she backtracked and they went in another direction. Jan was hungry and tired but knew she was procrastinating on something she really had to do, so she wasn't in the mood to fall into her cheery neighbor's clutches this early in the day.

Returning to the condo, Jan flipped the TV on to CNN and turned the volume down low enough that she knew it was there and could latch into a news report if she was truly interested but that it didn't pound the world's problems into her brain. What turning it on showed that she really lacked was conversation—the presence of someone else even if the discussion was desultory. She could spend an entire day with Greg with neither of them having said anything much, and she would have felt that she'd had companionship. It was the same way with Frank before that. It was something Jan felt was important to have. She hadn't had it much with Dennis in his declining years. There'd been tension in the air then. And that probably had been what led her to Frank. Frank was a different from Dennis as a man could be.

How could Jan tell her son that it wasn't just the sexual allure of the younger men—although it certainly was partially that. It was at least partially his father, Dennis. There had been the illness, but Dennis was done with sex before he even reached fifty. And all those years, Jan had stayed faithful to him. But she had never been done with wanting the sex. When Dennis died, she regretted it, yes, but in some ways it was a release. But how could she tell her son that without Rick hating her more for what she had become in his eyes?

Frank had come to the university to give some "first-hand-experience" lectures in the English Department from the perspective of a working actor. Jan had made some dismissive remarks from the audience on modern-day playwrights, and Frank had challenged her to accompany him to some Off-Broadway plays with a discussion to follow on what the playwright was trying to do and how well that had been accomplished.

Jan had been impressed with the seriousness and depth of that discussion.

Dennis had died earlier in the year and Jan had withdrawn into herself, feeling that everyone was just waiting for her to die too—were reacting like her whole life should have been Dennis and she should have thrown herself on his burning funeral pyre, or something. Rick was already off at university himself then, a couple of thousand miles away, and Jan had been left all by herself to grieve and to feel guilty that the last years with Dennis had been rocky, not least because of her own brushes with cancer that led to a full-blown bout of it and endless chemo therapy sessions followed by long weeks of recovery. None of that had helped her disposition or wish to chat much, nor was there any reason why it should have.