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She turned around, and I decided to abandon my dinner. “Let me help you. You can show me how to make this potion of yours.”
She grinned. “You don’t care that it smells like a fart in my house right now?”
I snorted out a laugh. “Nah, that’s what a shower is for,” I replied. “I mean, like, when I get back to my place. Not a shower at your place.”
This time, she laughed. “I didn’t think you meant that.”
SIXTY-FIVE
LETTIE
I couldn’t believeTuck wanted to spend his night bathing my dog in a house that smelled like eggs, but here we were, side by side, scrubbing Gilbert with what I hoped was a magic concoction to get rid of the skunk smell.
It was weird, the way we were able to go right back to laughing and joking and talking like we hadn’t lived an entire lifetime apart from each other. It was seamless, like we had always been Lettie and Tuck, despite the fact that we hadn’t been for far longer than we ever were.
It was impossible to explain the connection between us. If anything, I realized I had missed being so completely and utterly free with someone. Tuck made me feel like I didn’t have to hide any parts of myself, and he had always brought that out in me.
“Okay,” I said in a nasally voice, trying to keep from breathing through my nose. “We need to really get in there. Scrub hard, because that skunk smell absolutely penetrated.”
Tuck squirted some more of the mixture onto his hands and placed it onto Gilbert’s back as my larger-than-life dog stood still as a statue in the bathtub. “How do you bathe him by yourself? He is impossible to move, and he barely fits in here.” Tuck struggled to reach around to the other side of Gilbert.
I poured water from an old cup over Gilbert’s neck and shrugged. “In the summer, I hose him down. Then I use a shop vac and give him a lovely blow out. It’s so much easier to do it outside because he doesn’t have the chance to—”
In seconds, before I could finish my sentence, my enormous, one hundred ten pound dog turned his head from one side… to the other… before he began to shake all the way from his head down to his tail. Thick water droplets cascaded over both of us, causing Tuck and I to jump back from the bathtub and cover our heads.
As soon as Gilbert stopped shaking, I looked up hesitantly and then peered over at Tuck who had retreated from behind his hands as well. “As I was saying… he doesn’t get the chance to cover my whole bathroom in water… like that.”
I grabbed a towel and wiped up some of it before moving back to Gilbert. Tuck followed and scooted to the tub next to me.
“I can see why you wouldn’t want that to happen.” Tuck chuckled. “Does he like the… what did you call it? With the shop vac? A blow up?”
I giggled. “A blow out. Like at the salon.” I poured some more water over Gilbert’s back and began scrubbing again. “He only likes them whenIam in control of the shop vac. He just stands there with his tongue out like he’s having a spa day.”
“And what if someone else is doing it?”
“Well, one time, Darcy was helping me. She started the dryer, and Gilbert got so scared, he peed on her foot. She didn’t have any shoes on.” I laughed at the memory.
“Okay, then.” Tuck chuckled. “I willnotbe giving him a blow up.” Tuck had just begun rinsing off Gilbert’s back end when the familiar tilt of the dog’s head gave me an indication of what was to come.
“No. No, no, no,” I said, grabbing the towel and scooting back. “Tuck, it’s coming!”
The shake began, and I threw the towel over both of us. There we sat, the two of us huddled together in an old, yellow beach towel, and I couldn’t help thinking that—despite the circumstance and the smell—I kind of liked where I was.
When we were finished bathing Gilbert, I placed him in the back laundry room to dry off with a dog bed and his food and water bowls while I started a load of laundry. I sprayed the house down, lit candles, and when I sniffed the shirt I was wearing, I winced.
Tuck followed me back to the bathroom where I continued to clean up. “I should probably just burn these clothes. I don’t know if I can save them.” I peered down at the large t-shirt I had on and shrugged. “Not that it matters. This was Parker’s shirt, and as you can see”—I gestured to the paint splotches covering it—“I don’t really cherish it or anything.”
“Oh, yeah? Who’s Parker?” he asked.
“Oh.” I blew raspberries with my lips. “He was just a guy. We were together for a while, but it didn’t work out.” I paused and decided to be honest. “Actually, he was my fiance,” I admitted. “But he felt LA was more his speed, and I wouldn’t go with him.”
Tuck began walking closer to me, and I felt my pulse quicken. I had tried to deny that the old feelings were creeping up every time I was around him, assuming that he hadn’t held on to the same ones for as long as I had. I’d tried to deny the fact that every time I saw him, my chest got heavy and my heart beat so fast, I thought it was going to pump out of my chest. I’d tried to deny that, all along, for years and years I had waited for him because I knew with everything that if Tuck had wanted to go to LA or Turkey or Antarctica for that matter, that I would have gone without another thought.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice quiet.
I chuckled awkwardly. “I’m not. Parker was nice, but we just didn’t—”
“Belong together?” He was right in front of me now, gently tucking a piece of my hair behind my ear.
