AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I carry Smuckers down all six flights. Smuckers is for shit on stairs.
I never saw Bernadette after that day in the hospital with Henry Locke. She died soon after and Henry’s assistant called me with an alert that Smuckers was being sent over, and it was indeed in a limo. Carly and I just laughed, seeing his furry little snout in the backseat window of the sleek, black, mad-money ride.
Instagram time!
I didn’t go to Bernadette’s funeral. Nobody invited me—not that I expected it after meeting jerky hard-ass Henry Locke. Smuckers and I said goodbye to her in our own way, sitting on their favorite bench together. Dog treats were involved.
Carly’s been telling me all along to track down Henry and make him follow through on Bernadette’s promise to defray Smuckers’s upkeep. I told Carly I’d take a job as a gloryhole attendant at the Glory Daze massage parlor before I’d approach Henry for money. The Glory Daze is an actual place in the shitty Bronx neighborhood where we used to live before we got our very sweet long-term apartment-and-parrot sitting gig. And it’s what you think.
I will never ask Henry for anything.
Henry is exactly the kind of rich, entitled asshole I’ve constructed my life around avoiding.
I find a courier waiting outside the doorway. He hands over a large envelope and gets my signature.
I thank him and put Smuckers on the green leash that goes with today’s green bow tie.
I open the envelope while he poops next to his favorite light pole with its graffiti-covered base. My heart sinks when I see there are only some letters inside.
No check.
Oh well. I walk Smuckers up to the block to throw the poop bag in the trash. He smells the small fence around the scrubby little tree, investigates a sticky dark puddle with yellow bits in it that I’m hoping is a smashed ice cream cone.
I pull him back to the stoop and we sit, just outside of the stream of people rushing back and forth. I pull out the papers and get to reading.
It takes a good minute for me to get that it’s not just any letter; it’s a summons to a reading of the last will and testament of Bernadette Locke.
“Because that would’ve been too easy,” I say to Smuckers, who is straining in the direction the suspicious possible ice cream cone.
A young woman with wild magenta hair that has a streak of yellow down one side comes by, and Smuckers forgets about his quest for food in favor of stranger petting, which he gets.
Carly arrives and smiles at the woman. “I love your hair! I want your hair.” The woman smiles and walks off, and Carly discreetly snaps a photo. “Did you see that?” Carly says. “That’s the exact hair I want.”
“Mmm-hmm,” I say.
“There’s this cute place on Eighty-fourth that does it. Bess is doing purple there this weekend, and I’m thinking about maybe a change.” She twirls a red curl. “Of the purple and yellow kind…”
“You know the rule,” I say.
“But I want to go with Bess. She’s not going to want to delay.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Twenty-one-day cooling-off period. All major financial and appearance decisions.”
“Colorful hair is not really major.”
“That’s what you’re going with? Hair in two different Skittles colors is not major?”
She pouts.
I grab her backpack. “Come on. That’s our pact.”
“It’s not fair. You never make money or appearance decisions. You have everything the same all the time.”
“It’s our pact. End of story.”
We head down the crowded sidewalk, expertly sidestepping people on their phones and navigating around wandering tourists with the precision of fighter jets in formation.
“I’m going to tell Bess to delay twenty-one days and then I’ll do it with her,” she says when we come back together.
