Stepping Into Sunlight (20 page)
I scrolled back and read through my letter. He didn’t need this from me. His job held enough stress. If he thought I was struggling, he wouldn’t be able to focus on his work. And I’d be to blame for the people he couldn’t help.
The mouse targeted the Delete icon, and clicked away my moment of raw honesty.
T
HE SMELL OF CEDAR
shavings and pet droppings blended with the chaotic sounds of yipping and chirping. The pet store was a carnival of sensations, and so noisy that even if I had a panic attack, no one would notice. I found comfort in that fact and relaxed while Bryan ran up and down the aisles, pointing out the tarantulas (Not in your lifetime, buddy), the St. Bernard puppy (Yes, he’s adorable, but do you know how big they get?), and the skink (What’s that? A cross between a skunk and a mink?).
“These goldfish look nice. We could get a little bowl and some pebbles and you’ll be all set.”
Bryan shook his head. “You can’t play with a fish.”
This from the boy who played all afternoon with a dead crab.
“How about one of those?” Bryan’s eyes lit as he reached over a wire pen to let a ferret sniff his hand.
“Buddy, our house is small. We need a little pet that can live in your room.” I glanced around for a sales clerk and another adult voice of reason.
A young woman with thick glasses and uneven bangs who had been restocking a shelf of chew toys came to my rescue. “Ferrets are fun and playful, but they have a very distinct . . . scent. So if you’re planning to keep the pet in your room they might not be the best choice. And they get into everything.”
Bryan’s face fell. The woman, whose name badge read
Sandra,
knelt beside him. “Let’s see. You’re a big guy. Do you go to school?”
He puffed out his chest. “Yeah.”
She nodded seriously. “That’s what I thought. The ferret would get lonely.”
“I could bring it to school.”
“I’m sure the ferret would love that, but for some reason, schools around here won’t let you bring a ferret with you. Isn’t that the pits?”
They nodded together in mutual sadness about the lack of pet-friendly policies in the public schools. But Bryan wasn’t ready to surrender. “Mom could play with him while I’m at school. Then neither of them would be lonesome.”
Sandra glanced up at me and smiled. “But this is supposed to be your pet, right? You don’t want to have to share with your mom.” She made it sound very uncool.
Bryan turned from the pen with a sigh. “I guess not. But I want a pet I can play with.”
“Well, if you like furry critters that like to play, maybe a—”
“Rat?” Bryan jumped up and down a few times.
I chewed the inside of my cheek and gave another subtle shake of my head to Sandra.
“How about a gerbil? They’re lots of fun to play with.” She led Bryan to a display of small rodents. He dismissed the gerbils as not furry enough and the guinea pigs as boring. He finally narrowed the choice to hamsters. The Habitrail playland was so entrancing that my son abandoned his earlier longings for horses, dogs, and ferrets.
The hamsters were a bargain at only five dollars, but the cage, bedding, wheel, space-age connecting tubes and observation deck added up to a staggering bill.
“I should have gone ahead with the goat idea,” I muttered as I pulled out my checkbook.
Sandra laughed. “I think you’ll enjoy this more. It’s a good choice for a boy his age.”
An older Asian man with a spindly mustache hurried in behind the counter. “Sandra, I need you to clean the cages in the back and restock the kitty litter shelves.” He clapped his hands a few times. “Lots to do today. Hurry up.”
His name tag read
Manager.
I breathed a quick prayer of gratitude that I didn’t have to work for someone so gruff and demanding. Sandra didn’t lose her smile. She handed me my receipt with genuine warmth.
Inspiration hit me. “Excuse me, sir. You’re the manager?”
He turned from rummaging in a box behind the counter. “What? You have a complaint?”
“No. I just wanted to tell you that Sandra is the most helpful sales clerk I’ve ever met. She made this experience a pleasure, and I wanted you to know that.”
He did a comic double take, and his mustache wiggled as he pursed his lips in confusion. Sandra pushed up her glasses higher on her nose and blinked. “Thank you, ma’am.” A small blush spread across her cheeks.
“She does all right,” the manager conceded gruffly.
“Mom, come
on
.” Bryan tugged on my purse. “Gimli wants to get out of his box. We have to go home.”
I smiled a last good-bye to Sandra and let Bryan propel me out of the store. “Gimli?”
“You know. Like the dwarf?”
Ah, yes.
Lord of the Rings
. We settled into the car, and I pulled my notebook out of my purse.
“Mom, whatcha doing? Gimli’s gonna surf-ocate.”
“That’s suffocate. They don’t make surfboards for hamsters. And he has holes in the box.” The cardboard conveyance to get Gimli home looked disturbingly like a Happy Meal container. If Laura-Beth’s dog got a hold of him, Gimli
would
be fast food.
A blue paper clip marked the page of my last entry and I quickly scribbled,
Saturday, October 9. Praised pet store clerk, Sandra,
to her manager.
Another good deed. A flush of pleasure filled me. A kind act toward someone new each day. So far, I hadn’t missed a day. I wondered what stories the victim support group would have to share on Tuesday.
“Why did you talk us into this lame idea?” Ashley narrowed her raccoon eyes at me and propped one thick-soled boot on the table.
Dr. Marci walked past to take her seat and gently pushed Ashley’s foot off the table. “You sound angry.”
The unwashed girl growled and crossed her arms.
Ashley’s personality was as prickly as the metal piercings sticking out of various places on her face, but her instant attack when I walked into the conference room wasn’t fair. I sat down and scooted my chair in to the table. “It was
your
suggestion that the whole group try this. I never asked you to.”
Her lip curled. “Whatever. It’s still a mistake.”
Dr. Marci’s calm expression never wavered. “Okay, Ashley. Let’s start with you. What experiences did you have this week?”
Our strange clan was all present and accounted for. Camille wore an elegant blazer, and hadn’t bothered with sunglasses. Makeup was enough to mask the last faded bruises on her face. Henry sat stiffly at the far end of the table, drumming his fingers and picking at his watchband. Daniel sat closest to the door, his chair angled for a strategic getaway in case his agoraphobia got the best of him. I’d had to edge around him to get to an empty seat.
Ashley glared at me. “So, I told a guy at work that he was good with people. He thought I was coming on to him, and the rest of the day he found a dozen excuses to rub up against me on his way past the register to the kitchen.”
Henry’s lips twitched, but Dr. Marci leaned forward and met Ashley’s eyes with compassion. “And how did you handle that?”
Ashley bared her teeth and cracked her knuckles. “Let’s just say I set some boundaries.”
Daniel and Henry gave each other worried looks. Dr. Marci cleared her throat. “All right. But what about the other people you did something nice for?”
“I don’t know. I helped some old bat in my building carry her groceries up the stairs. But she didn’t even say thank you. She looked at me like I was a bug.” She swung an accusing look at me again. “I suppose you had fun sprinkling sunshine everywhere, huh?”
I opened my notebook and stared at the pages. “Not really. I called my sister and she gave me an earful about how I need to snap out of it.” Sympathetic murmurs hummed around the table. “And I gave a Farecard to a guy at a bus stop, but I had to talk him into it.”
I looked at Dr. Marci. “I went to the pet store with Bryan this weekend and got him a hamster.”
“Hey,” Camille interrupted. “That doesn’t count. Bryan’s not someone new.”
“No, that wasn’t the good deed.”
“How was it?” Dr. Marci asked.
“I didn’t freak out or lose it in the store—which was a huge success. Bryan was thrilled to get a pet. And I told the store manager that his clerk had been really great. I think that was my favorite good deed of the week. She was so surprised.”
Henry reached down to grab a pen that someone had dropped under the table and pocketed it. “What’d you do for the other days?”
I looked at my notebook. “I posted encouraging comments on a few blogs and sent an e-mail card to a friend back home.”
“E-mails?” Camille looked at Dr. Marci. “Does that count?”
Dr. Marci drew a slow breath, probably feeling weary of herding cats. Counseling our group of quibbling misfits clearly required vast reserves of patience. “Penny designed the project to help her growth. I’m sure you can adapt it to—”
“So e-mails count?” Camille looked at me.
“Well, after we got home from the pet store, Bryan couldn’t stop chattering. Then we had an hour of panic when Gimli escaped through a loose connector tube in his Habitrail and disappeared. He finally showed up under the couch, and Bryan had to coax him out with sunflower seeds since I was scared to touch the little fur ball. It squeaked its exercise wheel all night and scratched in its cage, so I didn’t sleep well. Sunday I was too wiped out to go to church, and Bryan threw a tantrum about missing Sunday school. So my good deeds for Sunday and Monday had to be something easy.”
The faces around the table stared at me in silence, apparently taken aback by my burst of words. Then Ashley gave a slow grin. “Soundin’ a little defensive there, Supermom.”
Henry nodded. “You gotta be careful about spending all your time on the Internet.” Dull color rose up his neck as he glanced at Dr. Marci. “It’s not healthy. Some people can get, you know, addicted to stuff.”
Ashley snorted. “Hey, don’t talk to me about addictions. My problem with this whole scheme is that people don’t really care. It doesn’t make a difference. Let someone ahead of you in line, and they don’t even thank you—you just lose your own place. People need to stick up for themselves.
We
need to stick up for ourselves. That’s why we’re here, right?”
Daniel shifted in his chair. “L-l-l-little things. Well. Th-th-they can matter.” He leaned his bald brown head forward like a shy turtle extending his neck, but he didn’t raise his eyes. “One time Sammy got out of the yard and ran down the block, and a lady brought him back. She didn’t yell at me. Sh-sh-she said, ‘You have a beautiful dog.’ ” He suddenly looked up and beamed at us. “It still makes me happy when I remember it.”
My heart throbbed with tenderness for the timid man. One tiny act of kindness had meant the world to him. How little we realize the secret wounds and longings in the people we see each day.
Dr. Marci nodded. “I think the challenge of Penny’s Project is that you aren’t guaranteed to see results. You offer a kind act and move on, without knowing the rest of the story.”
“Until heaven,” I blurted.
Again, startled faces turned toward me.
“I mean, my mom used to say that when we get to heaven, we’ll find out the rest of the story. She thinks God will open up some sort of scrapbook and show us the things we did for other people, and the behind-the-scenes ways it made a difference that we never knew.”
Ashley slouched lower in her chair. “If God’s keeping a scrapbook on me, I’m in big trouble.”
“Let’s get back to the updates on our week,” Dr. Marci said. “Camille?”
The discussion continued, sometimes encouraging, sometimes cranky, and sometimes weird. In spite of, or maybe because of, the diverse personalities of our group, I again drew comfort from the evening.
When I got home and settled Bryan down with a tape of
Adventures in Odyssey
, I even felt strong enough to listen to the phone messages. The light had continued its angry beeping since Cindy’s message on Friday, but I hadn’t worked up the strength to listen to them over the weekend.
“Penny, why haven’t you called me back yet?” Cindy sounded more like her irritable self in the second message she’d left. “Fine. Be that way. But you better call Mom and Dad if you won’t call me.”
Predictably, the next message, which had been left on Sunday, was from my mom. “Penny, this is your mother. I asked Cindy to call you, but she said she didn’t get a hold of you. You know I don’t like talking to these machines. Would you call me?” There was a pause, and I heard my dad’s voice mumble in the background. “Penny?” she continued. “Your dad wanted me to tell you. It’s about Alex.”
Alex?
Shock froze my breath in my lungs. What possible news could there be about Alex? Had the police identified a body?
The room seemed to tilt. I slid to the floor in the kitchen while the rest of the collected messages played out, but I couldn’t hear them over the roaring in my ears.
I
HAD BEEN
a single girl spreading my wings at college when I got the phone call from my dad. His voice was hushed, and I had to ask him several times to speak up.
