Dying Wishes (28 page)

“No,
I thank you,” I protested. “You probably won’t believe this, but you made my
day.”

I
went in search of Armando, telling myself that the dreaded birthday was turning
out pretty well in spite of everything. Best of all, I still had
Jersey Boys
and my quiet dinner with my
husband to look forward to.
 
How would he
put it? Oh, yes. Life, it is a trade-out.

Epilogue

Jasmine
left us on a Tuesday in early November. I noticed a tremor in her hind legs
when I fed her at noon, and half an hour later she couldn’t summon the strength
to climb out of her litter box. She threw herself down on her side and meowed
piteously for me to come and help her, and of course, I did.

When
we arrived at
Catzablanca
, the Rocky Hill clinic
where our cats had been cared for their whole lives, Jasmine and I were both
treated with extraordinary compassion and gentleness. After Mary Jean and the
doctor administered the intravenous overdose that ended Jasmine’s futile
struggle peacefully and quickly, she returned the body to me in an examining
room. I squeezed Jasmine’s little toes, half of them pink and half of them
black, for the last time and said my silent goodbyes. Then I went home and
cried for three days.

When
the worst of the storm had passed, Emma and I took our customary walk and stood
by the Spring Street Pond watching the adult swans prepare to leave for the
winter. The cygnets had already departed, heeding some call only they could
hear, and we knew George and Laura would be next.

“Jasmine
had to die someday, and nearly twenty-two is a crazy age for a cat to live to,”
I said.

“I
know, but she was always so feisty, she seemed younger to me,” Emma said sadly.

“Just
like me,” I joked, “but I’ll be leaving, too, one day.”

She
frowned. “Will you send me a message from wherever you go, Momma?”

I
shook my head slowly. “No can do,
Dearie
. If that
were possible, there are about six people I would have expected to hear from by
now, including my own mother, but so far, radio silence. Don’t worry. You
already have everything you need from me inside you for good or bad, like it or
not,” I added to lighten the somber tone of our conversation.

“I
know it will happen someday, but I don’t like thinking about it.”

“Nobody
does. It’s a burden of being human. As far as anyone knows, we’re the only
species that’s aware of our mortality. It takes courage to face up to that, and
a lot of folks just can’t without some sort of crutch. The fear of death is the
foundation of all religious dogma, but I go along with Stephen Hawking. He says
heaven is just a fairy tale for people who are afraid of the dark.”

“What
makes him right and everybody else wrong?”

I
laughed out loud. “An excellent question, but it’s not everybody else, not by a
long shot. About a million of our best thinkers happen to agree with him. I
guess it’s comforting to believe one has an inside track to life everlasting,
but nobody really does … in my opinion,” I added with a smile. “Feel free to
disagree with me. I’ll love you anyway.”

“So
according to you, all we’ve got is each other for as long as we’re here.”

“That’s
quite a lot,
Em
, don’t you think? I’ve got you,
Armando, Joey, Justine, some of the best friends in the world, and a raft of
other good, smart, caring people in my life.

“Daddy, too?”

“Michael and Sheila for sure.
We don’t think alike about a lot of things, but I’m so grateful that we’re all
friends. Now there’s little Allison coming along, a whole new person for us to
get to know and love.”

Emma
was quiet for a while.
Then, “And our pets.”

“Absolutely.
Who else loves
us no matter what, as long as we feed them and love them back? Jasmine never
gave a fig if I looked like hell or had PMS or forgot to do the laundry. She
forgave you kids everything, even when you left her behind to live your own
lives. She was still glad to see you every time you walked in the door, never
judged,
never
criticized. She just purred like crazy
when she saw you coming. She taught us all a lot about living.”

“Dying,
too, she taught us a lot about that. When the time came, she let you know so
you could help her. Thank goodness you could, as hard as it was for you to do,
right?” She looked at me questioningly, and I nodded.

“What
will happen when one of the swans dies?”

“The
remaining one will find another mate, and life will go on. That’s the way it
works.”

After
another minute, we turned back toward the green, where our cars were parked.
The peacefulness of early November, compared to the frenzy of the last week of
October, allowed us to take our time. We admired the new landscaping that had
restored the area following a freakish tornado that zigzagged through Old
Wethersfield a couple of years ago, carelessly selecting its victims. The fact
of the tornado itself, a weather phenomenon rarely experienced by New
Englanders, had been terrifying, but the devastation of our beautiful green had
been heartbreaking. For days we viewed the corpses of trees that had withstood
hundreds of years of all sorts of weather, only to be torn savagely from the
earth in a matter of seconds by the capricious twister.

Before
long, though, the townspeople put aside their shock and made quick work of
clearing up, restoring and replanting. It wasn’t the same, of course. It
couldn’t be, but anyone who hadn’t seen the green before the tornado would
never know anything had happened.

We
looked up at the Victorian that had been the
Henstock
sisters’ home until a few years ago. It, too, had been lovingly restored to its
former glory by its new owners.

“When
are
Ada
and
Lavinia
moving
into Vista View?” Emma asked.

“The
fifteenth, I think. Bert Rosenthal is planning a little social to welcome them.
He’s becoming quite attentive,” I chuckled.

“To
Ada
or
Lavinia
?”

“Both,”
I shrugged. “He seems up to the task.”

Emma
grinned at the thought of a geriatric
ménage
a
trois
.
“Whatever,” she said. “I’m glad someone
has a love life.”

“No
hot prospects on the horizon? Somehow I doubt that.”

She
smiled again enigmatically. “Oh, there are always prospects,” she assured me.

There
are indeed, I thought, and at the moment ours are looking pretty darned good.

Meet Author Judith K.
Ivie

A lifelong Connecticut resident, Judith K.
Ivie
has worked in public relations, advertising, and the international tradeshow
industry, as well as serving as an administrative assistant to several corporate
and nonprofit executives.

Along the way Judi also produced three nonfiction books, as well
as numerous articles and essays. A few years back, she broadened her repertoire
to include fiction, and the Kate Lawrence Mysteries were launched.
Dying
Wishes
is the fifth title in the series. All are available in trade
paperback format from
www.MainlyMurderPress.com
and as
e-books for the Amazon Kindle reader at
www.Amazon.com
.
To read a sample
of
Waiting for Armando,
the title that launched this series, please turn
the page.

Judi strives to provide lively, entertaining reading that takes
readers away from their work and worries for a few hours, stimulates thought on
contemporary issues, and gives them a laugh along the way. Proceeds from all
on-line sales benefit the Our Companions Domestic Animal Sanctuary in Ashford,
Connecticut.

For more about Judi and her books, please visit
www.JudithIvie.com
.
Judi
loves to hear from readers at
[email protected]
.

Sample Chapter from

Waiting for Armando

by
Judith
K.
Ivie

No. 1 in the Kate Lawrence Mysteries

Have you ever
wondered what your secretary really thinks of you? I’ll tell you what she
thinks of you. If you would just get out of her way, she could run the office
far better without you. And that’s on a good day.

On a bad day,
her thoughts about you are probably homicidal, and that’s when being a legal
secretary could work to her advantage. If you work for lawyers long enough, my
new friends tell me, you can easily learn how to commit murder. Even better,
you can learn how to get away with it. At least, that’s what everyone thought
happened last summer at
Bellanfonte
,
Girouard
&
Bolasevich
,
three
names so unpronounceable that the Hartford law firm is
known throughout New England simply as “BGB.”

Had I been less
preoccupied with my own impending death on that steamy Thursday in June, I
could have killed Donatello
Bellanfonte
. Following
him reluctantly into the elevator, I tried unsuccessfully to distract my
thoughts from the thirty-six stories of empty shaft Donatello had reminded me
were beneath our feet.

“Actually, it’s
a thirty-seven-story drop, counting the cathedral ceiling in the lobby,” he
amended as the doors slid shut in front of us, “but anything over six stories,
and we’re dead anyway.” He whistled cheerfully as the express car plummeted
toward the street level, and I clung to the side rail, ears popping in the
changing air pressure.

I reflected
sourly that if I had suffered from a dread of arachnids instead of heights,
Bellanfonte
would have produced a rubber tarantula from his
suit pocket and dropped it down the neck of my dress; but since I had made the
mistake of making my new boss, an estate law guru, aware of my lifelong fear of
heights, he made elevator jokes. Irrational fears were not to be tolerated in
an adult human being, he maintained in true U.S. Army, Ret.,
fashion
.
It was simply a matter of confronting one’s demons, and he had made
desensitizing me his personal mission. So far, it wasn’t working.

As cloying as
the heat and humidity of a Hartford summer were, I welcomed them as evidence of
my survival as, wobbly kneed,
I
preceded
Bellanfonte
through the revolving door that spun us into
the lunch-hour crowd on Trumbull Street. He lifted a hand briefly in farewell
and charged off to his meeting with the editor of the New England Law Tribune,
where they would review the periodical’s editorial calendar for the coming year
and identify the topics Donatello would cover for them as one of their regular
columnists. During the more than twenty years he had practiced estate law, he
had written dozens of articles for legal and trade magazines. He had also
untangled the snarl of tax regulations for some of the biggest names in the country.
Whenever he got the chance, he indulged his appetites for golf and racquetball
the way he did everything else, aggressively and to excess.

Despite the
city’s blast furnace ambience, city workers strode purposefully in all
directions as
Bellanfonte
disappeared down Church
Street into the crowd. Although we had left the office just moments ago, he
consulted his cell phone for effect, hoping for a message to prove how
indispensable he was to his clients.

Relishing the
free hour ahead of me, I considered my lunch options.
A
little fish at No Fish Today?
Salad at Au Bon Pain?
But instead of growling happily in anticipation, my stomach roiled. It was
barely noon, and my stress level was already over the top. I waited impatiently
for a walk light and sympathized with the professional dog walker who was
attempting to keep four leashed animals under control and untangled.
Maybe just a glass of iced tea, then.
No gastric
protests followed this thought, so I headed down the block to where the food
wagons habitually lined up, collected my tea, and took it with me into Bushnell
Park, where I sagged onto a bench.