• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 813 0

his best friend, Aaron Davidson, San Celina’s former chief of police and Gabe’s first partner when he was a rookie cop, died from liver cancer. It was the Sunday before Labor Day weekend. We had just visited him at the hospice before attending a barbecue at my dad’s ranch. Later that evening, Aaron died, his wife, Rachel, dozing at his side. Gabe accepted his friend’s death with quiet dignity and no fuss, helping Rachel with the funeral arrangements and giving a eulogy at the service that left most of the congregation, including a bunch of tough, cynical cops, in tears. He had taken care of all the millions of irritating but necessary details that arise when someone dies. Esther, Aaron’s daughter and only child, told me they would have never made it through those first few weeks without Gabe’s calm, gentle strength. What no one knew but me was that he’d never taken the time to grieve himself. And still hadn’t. And that worried me.

I peered out over the Laguna Lake. The waterline was higher than usual this year due to the heavy spring rains that flooded most of California. The Central Coast had taken a particularly harsh beating. In North County, many of the small tourist-supported towns had experienced massive damage in their trendy art galleries, restaurants, and vineyards. Half the cattle roads on Daddy’s ranch had washed away, and Gabe and I had spent most of our spare weekends helping clear them with his Kubota tractor. Luckily San Celina’s new library resided safely on a high bluff overlooking the lake. Morning sun glinted off its dark tinted windows, causing a ripply reflection in the brown muddy water. The gray, prisonlike structure continued to win all sorts of architectural awards, but even a year after its completion, people still grumbled and complained about its land-scarring ugliness. Behind it rose the late September hills of San Celina, mountains of butterscotch gold marching all the way to the Pacific Ocean five miles away. I glanced back at the library. It was closed on Sundays, and the park was still relatively empty. Gabe and I had passed only two other people on our jog around the lake—an elderly man and woman walking a basset hound. But in the parking lot there were now three more cars parked next to Gabe’s sky-blue 1968 Corvette. I smiled at the license plate frame I’d had made at the mall for our six-month anniversary. GABE AND BENNI—IN LOVE FOREVER. With a good-natured shake of his head, he’d attached it to his car. Apparently he’d taken quite a bit of ribbing about it from his officers at the police department.

“So I’m crazy about my wife. Sue me,” he’d told them, according to his new secretary, Maggie, who kept me informed on all the office scuttlebutt.

After a long drink of bottled water, I stole a handful of parking-meter quarters from his glove compartment and purchased some veterinarian-approved duck chow from the dispensers the city had recently installed. The humane society and local wildlife lovers, concerned for the wild bird population’s long-term health, were attempting to discourage people from feeding them processed bread and junk food. The blue-and-white Wonder bread wrappers floating in the marshy grasses of the lake testified to the fact that they hadn’t quite persuaded everyone yet.

I stuck the pellets into the pocket of my zip-up sweatshirt and headed down to the lake, where I was enthusiastically greeted by a contingent of local waterfowl. The speckled brown ducks, white geese, and nervy seagulls were old hands at being fed by sentimental human beings and assumed that any person walking near the lakeshore was automatically a soft touch. As I tossed bird feed out to them they crowded around my feet, nudging each other aside like jealous schoolchildren. My thoughts drifted back to Gabe and how both our lives had radically changed in the last year.

It had been a little over a year and a half since my first husband and childhood sweetheart, Jack, was killed in a senseless car accident involving too much liquor and a split second of young, foolish judgment. A lot had happened in