Glancing across the room, she noticed Brad standing by the table, engaged in conversation with Amelio, the composer. Alissa couldn’t imagine what they had in common, unless it was Brad’s famed bongo drum collection. Content to sit in her chair and watch the celebration go on around her, Alissa thought about Meg’s comment that Rosie had made a commitment to Christ and how Rosie had kept her commitment so completely. Alissa didn’t feel she could say the same thing about the promises she had made to God many years ago. So much had happened in her life. For some reason she felt she had the right to straight-arm God and hold him at a distance.
It didn’t appear that Rosie had done that, in spite of all her heartaches. Her face had such a deep beauty to it, not just because of her love for Chet. It was obvious it went much deeper than that.
That night, as Alissa lay awake in her new room, listening to the night sounds of determined crickets and a twittering bird who refused to go to sleep, she thought of nothing but Chet and Rosie.
I hope they like the hotel suite I arranged for them. It’s all so romantic. True love never dies. Passion is alive within a human heart until death, and even then it can live on just as strong in memory.
Alissa gave up trying to sleep and wrapped herself in her favorite plush, peach-colored robe. She padded out to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of juice. Tomorrow she would attack all these boxes.
When Brad had driven her back from the wedding that evening, it was nearly seven. They both had been unusually quiet on the ride home except for his ribbing her for forgetting the present and leaving it on the front seat of his truck.
She’d simply replied she would take it over when the couple returned from Italy. They weren’t going to have time to open gifts before then, anyhow.
Placing her glass in the sink, Alissa checked the green numbers on the microwave clock: 11:52. She unlocked the door that led to the backyard, and opened it to a midsummer’s eve fairyland. The full moon smiled on the silent garden, turning everything golden.
The night air was cool but not cold. Alissa stepped outside barefoot, and Chloe, who had stirred from her spot on the couch, came alongside, rubbing her fluffy fur against Alissa’s leg.
“How you doing, baby?” Alissa whispered, picking up her long-time companion. “You like our new home?”
Chloe purred and settled herself in Alissa’s arms, eager for her head to be stroked. This appeared to be as soothing for Chloe as it was for Alissa.
Alissa walked in the cool, damp grass as she stroked Chloe. They settled on one of the bench seats under the vine-trimmed arch. Alissa imagined a hundred sets of eyes watching them from behind the fox-gloves, pansies, and daisies. It was an image she’d adopted from her favorite childhood book about a special garden where every summer the fairies gathered to sing and dance. They drank evening dew from the bluebells and played petunia trumpets. At the slightest sound of human feet, the fairies would hide, watching with unblinking eyes, waiting for the human intruder to leave.
“It’s okay,” Alissa whispered to her imaginary friends. “I won’t hurt you. You can come back out to play.”
Then she realized how silly she had just been, talking to the fairies. She hadn’t done that since she was ten years old. She hadn’t even thought of fairies since then. What brought back this image from her days of childhood innocence?
Alissa looked up at the moon. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt his approval as he gazed down on her. Probably since she was a child. Alissa used to think of the moon as God’s face. She was most comforted when it was a full moon and he was smiling on her. But he was always so, so far away, so removed from her life. He only appeared every now and then, when the celestial conditions were cooperative. But the moon did follow her everywhere she moved around the world—Germany, Argentina, California, Massachusetts, and Hawaii. But he was never involved in her life, watching from a distance. Was that how God really was?
Before she had turned eleven, Alissa had begun to read beyond her age level. The books had transported her from childhood to adulthood in a few short pages. No longer did she think of fairies dancing in the night. Instead, her dreams turned to boys, and her thoughts turned to how she could get boys to notice her.
It wasn’t hard. She was beautiful and acted older than her age. She received her first “promise” ring from a boy on her twelfth birthday. Every few months, and sometimes every few weeks, she had a new boyfriend. By the time she was fifteen, she had pretty much experienced everything she had read about on the pages of those novels. None of the rings had held any true or lasting promises. Nothing lasted in her life. Nothing gave her hope.
When she opened her heart to the Lord at age eighteen, it was as if her innocence had been restored. She zealously read her Bible from cover to cover within the first six months of her conversion. She told Jesus she loved him all the time, and she told everyone she knew that they needed Christ.
That was eight years ago. Now, rather than feeling as if she were in love with Jesus, she thought of their relationship as a cordial agreement. She would live a sin-free life to the best of her ability, and he would keep an eye on her and make sure she didn’t become an alcoholic like her mother. What this arrangement didn’t have room for was celebration, a grand rejoicing such as she had witnessed with Chet and Rosie today. Or even a fanciful dance in the moonlight like her imaginary fairy friends, who simply danced because it was summer.
Alissa felt as if her emotions were on cruise control. She was moving down the road of life without much variation. Nothing really bad had happened since Phoenix. But nothing really good had happened either—except for maybe Chet and Rosie and moving into this charming new home.
Chloe nestled closer to Alissa’s warm robe and wrapped her tail around her backside. “Come on, baby,” Alissa said. “Let’s go back inside.” She checked on the moon one more time and padded across the bricks to her back door.
To her shock, the door had closed on its own, and it was locked. She stole through the cool grass in her bare feet and checked the front door, even though she already knew it would be locked. Chloe stopped purring as Alissa checked her bedroom window. She had left it open about two inches for the fresh air, but the security locks were in place behind the tightened screens. She was locked out.
A car pulled up out front. She heard the engine turn off and the door close. Alissa hoped beyond hope that it would be Shelly, coming home a few days early. She skittered around to the front, still holding Chloe close. A tall, broad-shouldered man, wearing a white shirt, black slacks, and black bow tie, strode up the path headed for Brad’s side of the duplex. Alissa tried to duck behind one of the tall cypresses along the side of the house, but Chloe meowed loudly. The man turned toward her, startled.
He stopped and stared at her in the moonlight. Alissa curled and uncurled her cold toes, realizing how ridiculous it would be to run. The man came closer, and she could see his clean cut auburn hair, his perfectly chiseled features, and his engaging smile.
“Alissa, I presume?” His voice carried the timbre of a Shakespearean actor, his face the tenderness of a big brother.
She nodded.
“I’m Jake. I heard you had a cat.”
Alissa grinned at her new neighbor. He certainly looked like a movie star. “This is Chloe,” she said.
Jake studied the moon. “Nice night for a walk.”
“Yes, it is,” Alissa said.
“Well, nice meeting you.”
“Nice meeting you,” Alissa said, feeling foolish for having locked herself out. How could she tell this guy? Worse yet, what could she do about it?
Jake turned to go, and Alissa impulsively followed him. He turned to look at her over his shoulder.
“Can I ask you something?” Alissa said, stopping when her cold feet touched the hard bricks. “By any chance do you know if Shelly keeps a key hidden anywhere?”
Jake covered his mouth with his hand to hide his grin. He appeared to be thinking about Aliss
a’s question. “Brad might know.”
Alissa’s eyelids fluttered in frustration as she pursed her lips together. She did not want to wake up Brad with the admission that she had locked herself out. “That’s okay,” she said. “Never mind. Thanks anyway.” She turned to go into the backyard where she could hide. Maybe a light would still be on at Genevieve’s, and Alissa could work up the nerve to bother her new landlady for a spare key.
“I could help you crawl through a window,” Jake suggested, coming after her.
Alissa thought that was the nicest thing any man had ever said to her. Obviously Jake had sized up the situation, but he wasn’t going to embarrass her by making her admit her dilemma, nor was he going to force an encounter with Brad on her. She liked this guy.
Chapter Ten
Well,” Alissa said, trying to hide her embarrassment over locking herself out, “I checked my bedroom window, and the security lock is in place. I’m sure Shelly locked her window. The only other one, I guess, is the bathroom.”
“Let’s have a look,” Jake said.
He followed Alissa and Chloe around to the side of the house and rattled the pull up bathroom window. “Aha!” he said, jiggling the window until it easily slid up. “You really should check these windows before you go to bed, you know. Anyone could break in.” With that, he hoisted himself up on the wide wooden windowsill and slid into the bathroom. “Go around to the front,” he said. “I’ll let you in.”
Alissa trotted around and found Jake standing at the open front door with the porch light on. Between the bathroom and front door he had managed to slip Shelly’s blue-and-white-checkered apron on over his formal waiter outfit. “Welcome home, honey,” he said in a playful, high-pitched voice. “I’ve made all your favorite foods for dinner.”
Lowering her head, Alissa hid her smile and walked in past him.
“Now you just put up your feet, honeybunch,” Jake continued in his Harriet Nelson voice. “I’ll fetch your pipe and slippers for you.”
“Thanks,” Alissa said, putting Chloe down and wiggling her cold toes into the warm rug.
Jake took off the apron and hung it back up on the hook in the kitchen. “Any time. Welcome to the neighborhood. I think you’ll like it here.”
“I think I will, too.”
“Don’t let my roommate scare you. He looks like an escapee from a forced labor camp, but deep down he’s really a terrible person. I mean a nice person.”
Alissa smiled. “If you say so.”
“Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite,” Jake said.
“There are bed bugs here?”
Jake put the back of his hand to his mouth as if he were telling her a secret. “I hear they enter through open bathroom windows after midnight.”
“I’ll be sure to close mine.”
“I already did. You’ll find the itemization on my bill.”
“Thanks again,” Alissa said.
Jake gave her one of his winning smiles. If she had seen that smile on a pain reliever commercial, she would have believed his headache was all gone. “I’ll see you later,” he said, slipping out and closing the door behind him.
Alissa was sorry he was gone. She thought he was an engaging person as well as entertaining. If he had stuck around, they could have made coffee and sat around talking all night. That would certainly be more fun than trying to sleep.
But to her surprise, she fell right to sleep as soon as she double-checked the bathroom window and her feet began to warm up under the covers. As a matter of fact, Alissa slept well every night for the first week and a half in her new room.
Shelly was proving to be the perfect roommate, open and talkative, but not pushy. She was extremely considerate of Alissa’s privacy.
They worked out the blending of their furniture and belongings and decided to hold a garage sale at the end of the month.
Work continued to be busy, and Jake and Brad only gave an occasional wave in passing as the week turned into the weekend and then eased into the next week. While her other three duplex-mates all seemed to have on-the-go lives, Alissa was content to come home from work, sit down with a good book, and listen to everyone else come and go.
On Alissa’s twelfth night at the duplex, the phone rang in Shelly’s room at 2:30 in the morning. She knocked on Alissa’s door, waking her with the words, “Can you take the phone? It’s someone named Rosie, and she says it’s important.”
Alissa sprang from her bed with her heart pounding. She reached for the cordless phone in Shelly’s hand. “Rosie, is everything okay?”
“Alissa?” came the voice from the other end. “Why, you sound as if you’re in the next room, dear. We had such a hard time trying to figure out how to call you. I hope it’s okay that we called you at home. You left this number on our itinerary.”
“Yes, of course, it’s fine. Are you two all right?”
“Oh, yes, we’re fine. But we want to come home. Do we have to stay for the rest of the trip?” She sounded like a child after her first week of summer camp.
Alissa motioned for Shelly to go back to bed. “It’s not an emergency,” she whispered.
Her sudden fear that one of them had suffered a heart attack or slipped on the pigeon goo was for naught. Alissa actually felt like laughing at Rosie’s timid voice asking to come home.
“You can come home any time you want,” Alissa said. “Have you had enough of Italy?”
“I’m afraid we have. We ended up changing our hotel reservations, and we stayed in Venice the whole time instead of taking the train down to Florence. We were supposed to leave yesterday, but we were so tired. You don’t know what being on your honeymoon does to a person, especially at our age!”
Again Alissa resisted the impulse to giggle. “I’ll make all the arrangements for you in the morning and fax the information to your hotel. Can you hang in there one more day until I can get you on a flight?”
“We can last another day,” Rosie said. “I wouldn’t mind one more gondola ride.”
“Well then, you take one more gondola ride, and I’ll get you back home as soon as I can.”
“Thank you! What’s that?” Rosie said, apparently listening to Chet in the background. “Oh, Chet says, ‘Ciao, baby.’ He likes to practice his Italian words.”
This time Alissa did laugh. “Tell him ‘Ciao’ from me. Good night.”
“Oh, goodness! Is it night there? I suppose I didn’t think about that. I called the travel agency, and no one was there.”
“It’s okay,” Alissa said. “Bye, bye.” She hung up and thought how Brad was going to love it that Chet and Rosie liked riding in the gondola. She would never live that one down. She didn’t even want to ask if they had made the pigeons flutter at St. Mark’s Square.
It took nearly three hours the next morning to work through all the arrangements for their flight home and to cancel their hotels in Florence and Rome. That Friday afternoon they arrived in LA. Alissa arranged for a limo to pick them up and to take them home to their love nest.
Even though she was dying to check on them, she waited until Sunday morning to give them a call. No one answered, and she began to be concerned. She tried again that afternoon. Chet answered the phone.
“I’m so glad you’re home,” Alissa said. “I tried this morning but didn’t catch you.”
“We were at church. How is everything with you?”
“Fine. I wanted to make sure you arrived okay and to see if you had a good time.”
“Wonderful! Simply wonderful. Here, say hi to Rosie.”
“Hi, Rosie. It’s Alissa. How are you doing? Are you getting settled in?”
“Oh, yes. Thank you for calling. We’re so tired, though.”
“That’s normal. The jet lag will take a few days to wear off. I’m glad you had a good time. Call me if you need anything, okay?”
“I don’t think we’ll be taking another trip for a while,” Rosie said.
“I didn’t mean just travel arrangements. L
et me know if there’s anything I can do for you.” Alissa wondered if she was being condescending. She meant it as a friendly gesture. But then, she realized, even though they were elderly, this couple had just been halfway around the world and back. They probably wouldn’t call her if they were running low on milk.
“We’d love to have you over in a few weeks,” Rosie said. “I’ll give you a call.”
“Wonderful,” Alissa said. “I’ll look forward to it.”
Right after Alissa hung up, Shelly stepped into the living room. She had changed from her Sunday dress into shorts and a T-shirt. “Genevieve and I are going for a walk. You want to go with us?”
“Sure.”
Alissa and Shelly met Genevieve at her front door, where she was watering her potted plants. “Hello,” she said when she saw Alissa. “I was hoping you would join us. How are you doing? Getting settled in okay?”
“Yes. I really like it here. Your garden is so beautiful; I love looking out my window at it.”
“Did you put your desk there like you thought you would? Under the window, I mean,” Genevieve asked as the three began to walk down the sidewalk with Alissa in the middle. It startled her how fast a pace they set. This wasn’t a leisurely afternoon stroll; these women were serious about walking.
“Yes, it’s perfect.”
“And did Brad come over to fix the electrical wiring?”
“Yes.” Alissa decided the less said about that incident, the better.
They turned east at the corner and headed uphill. Alissa was already breathing hard and felt frustrated that she was so out of shape. Genevieve and Shelly seemed to be able to keep talking, with their breathing only slightly elevated as they hoofed it uphill. Alissa listened and answered in monosyllables when necessary. She kept up with them, feeling the perspiration beading up on her forehead.
The neighborhood was beautiful. Their walk along the tree-lined streets was lovely, and the conversation delightful. At the end of their forty-five-minute trek, Alissa made a decision. She needed to do that every day. Her mind felt clearer, not to mention her pores. Genevieve had said along the way that she took this route four times a week, and anytime Alissa wanted to join her, she was welcome to.