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“All in all, everything else going okay?”
Suddenly, I wanted to confess everything. The otherworldly letter. The road trip. The overwhelming desire to doallthe things. The strange butterfly that might or might not be Alex.
I knew, however, that if I did, she wouldn’t sleep tonight. “I’m good. Really.”
“All right. But remember if it doesn’t work out with your new job, my offer still stands.”
She had been trying to lure me to Tampa since she left Ohio, and after Alexander passed away, I’d actually been tempted to take her up on the offer once or twice. But I knew if I moved near her, she’d fall into old habits of watching over me twenty-four/seven. Neither of us needed that again.
“I’ll remember. Thanks, Mom.”
“Call if you need anything. Anything at all.”
We said our goodbyes and I hung up. Somewhere in the distance, I heard a fiddle. It wasn’t crying like it had been last night, but the song was still full of melancholy and heartache.
Without really thinking about what I was doing, I tucked my phone in my pocket and followed the sound. As I walked along, I soaked in the gorgeous sky, the sound of the waves, the call of a chickadee, the trill of frogs. Only when I turned onto Eventide Lane did I notice the fiddle had quieted. I glanced toward Dez’s house at the end of the lane. It sat dark and his truck wasn’t in the driveway, either. Where was he? Was it my job now to know?
I worried about that for a moment before I heard the jingle of dog tags and a softquabark,so quiet it was nearly drowned out by the sound of the waves and the sighs of the wind. I squinted and smiled when I saw Norman wagging his tail from the gravel driveway of the home across the street from Dez’s. The one-story house stood proudly on piers and its pastel-yellow paint glowed like moonlight in the growing darkness. A newer-model truck was parked in the carport.
I walked over to Norman, crouched down, and let him lick my chin.
“Hey,” Sam said, coming down the steps with a leash in hand. “Didn’t expect to see you here tonight. I heard you weren’t moving into Dez’s for a few days yet.”
No doubt he knew my whole life story already. Most of it, anyway. “I was just out for a walk and couldn’t resist saying hi to Norman when I saw him. I didn’t mean to trespass.”
I caught a flash of light out of the corner of my eye comingfrom Dez’s house. I looked that way. A white light flickered in the attic. I blinked, sure I was seeing things, and the light disappeared.
“I’m not sure what all mean streets you grew up on in Ohio,” Sam said, “but around here it’s calledneighborlywhen people stop and say hi, nottrespassing.”
I smiled, thinking about the street I’d grown up on, lined with crabapples and picket fences. Hardly anything mean about it, unless you counted the time one neighbor chopped down another neighbor’s sweetgum tree because its branches stretched into his yard and he was sick of the spiky pods littering his lawn. That incident had been talked about for years.
“Besides,” Sam added, “I’m fairly sure Norman would’ve run off to meet you if you didn’t stop. He’s taken a liking to you. He’s shy, so that’s saying something.”
“Really?” I bent and took Norman’s face in my hands, then ran my thumbs up the bridge of his silky snout, up to his forehead, and over his oval eyes. There was a hitch in my voice when I said, “I’ve taken a liking to him, too.”
Norman nudged his nose into my stomach and wagged his tail, and I fell just a little bit harder in love with him.
“I’m glad you stopped by, actually,” Sam said. “I have something for you.”
Reluctantly, I stood. “You do?”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. From it, he took out a dollar bill and handed it over.
“What’s this for?” I asked, perplexed.
“After we talked yesterday morning about luck, I hopped in my truck and drove over to Perdido Key—just over the border in Florida—and bought a dollar scratch-off lottery ticket. We won two dollars. That’s your half of the win.”
“But it was your ticket.”
“But it was your luck,” he said.
I laughed. “All right, then. Thanks.”
My attention drifted back to Dez’s house, specifically to the attic, and listening intently, I swore I heard something moving up there. Sparrows, I told myself, glancing away. Sparrows.
“Well, I should be getting back.” I had the shivers all of a sudden. The sky had started looking like a bruise, all traces of the orange glow gone now.
Sam’s knuckles whitened as he gripped the leash. “We were just heading out to get dinner. Did you want to join us?”
