“Hop up here, you can stay the night,” I relented.
—-
Daylight arrived too fast as I rolled away from the sunlight streaming through the slit in my drapery. I pulled the blankets over my head to block out the light. That’s when I heard Mickie jump off the bed and hit the dog door with a bang. I had drifted back to sleep but my dog came running in and jumped on my bed with his wet feet. All of a sudden, I awoke when he crawled on top of my back with his freezing cold paws. Then he flattened himself on my stomach and let out a loud bark.
“Okay, okay, I hear you,” I said, swinging my legs out to the carpeted floor causing him to jump off of me.
I hurried into the bathroom and returned to get dressed. My dog barked at me again. I took that as an “I’m hungry” bark.
“I’m coming,” I said and followed him down the hallway as my feet tapped on the linoleum tile from my soft-soled slippers.
When the furnace turned on, I raised the temperature from the sixty-five degrees I had left for my trip, to seventy-five. The lower heat was adequate for Mickie but not hot enough to run up a bill with no one home. Scuffling through the hall, I entered the cool air of the kitchen.
I pulled out his sack of kibble and a ‘thump’ sound hit my front door. When I walked into the living room, I noticed René had stacked my newspapers in a neat pile on the bare floor near the fireplace. I guess I forgot to call the newspaper office to stop delivering them.
Forgetting the frigid world outside, I opened the front door and got a blast of sleet in my face. I grabbed the newspaper off of the ice-covered step and slammed the door shut. I tossed the rolled up paper onto the newspaper pile and rushed into the main bathroom off the hallway to dry off the icy water.
Returning to the living room, I gathered up the bundle of newspapers and brought them over to my kitchen table.
“Let’s see, where’s today’s copy?” I asked under my breath.
Before I could pick up one to read the date, someone knocked on my back door. I walked over and let Trisha in.
“Well, hi stranger,” I said.
“I’m glad to see you’re up. Any plans for today?” she asked.
Anticipating another surprise, “Nooo, I don’t suppose you have something cooking up your sleeve,” I replied.
“No, I thought maybe we can go to Bosloe’s for lunch and seeing as you probably need groceries, we can hit the store on the way home,” she said.
“I have canned soup.”
“You didn’t have too much to eat yesterday, night–whatever.”
“Okay, what about Romero’s. I miss their lasagna.”
“Oh, I see you’re going through your newspapers,” she said, pointing to the one I had in my hand.
“I must have forgotten to stop the paper delivery.”
“Well, well, is this today’s paper?” she asked, picking up one from the pile.
I opened the Blackfoot News up and was shocked to see the headline: “Local Idaho Woman Kidnapped in Hawaii.”
“Oh my–Trisha, you didn’t do this did you?”
“Not me. Look it’s a copy from the Hawaiian News source and one of the Blackfoot reporters interviewed... Colin,” she read.
“Remind me never to tell him anything,” I said. “Did he say good things about my apple pie at Bosloe’s.”
“No, just about the stew and chili they serve. Come on. Let’s go to an early lunch. It’s now eleven o’clock and then we can go to the grocery store afterward.”
“Agreed,” I said.
—-
The lunch crowd we encounter every time we go to Romero’s is exciting with servers and customers walking and talking at once, and yet if someone didn’t know this place they might find it confusing. The smells of cooking tomato sauce and oregano in the air make one feel at home. Trisha and I found a booth over at one side of the room and before we removed our jackets, a cute young girl trotted over to us with a pitcher of water and glasses. She set the glassware down and held up her note page to take our order.
I ordered lasagna and Trisha ordered a small pizza.
I watched the young lady slip away with our orders. I sipped the cold water but set it back on the table.
“Oh, my phone is ringing,” Trisha said as she began to search her purse. “I could tell them to call back, oh–wait a minute. I have to take this, sorry.”
I smiled at the normalcy of the noisy chatter in the room. This is where I wanted to be.
“Hello, Yes it is. How are you? She’s doing fine. Do you want to talk to her? Just a moment,” Trisha said and looked at me while she held one hand over the phone’s speaker.
“Susan, while I was in the Honolulu Airport with David, he wanted your phone number. Since I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to give that out, I told him he could call me. He’s on my phone right now and wants to talk to you. What shall I tell him? Yes or no,” she asked me.
“David? Oh. Yes, I’ll talk to him,” I said, reaching for her phone.
I paused and then spoke into the device.
“Hello? Yes, I’m doing fine. How about you? Oh, you are?” I asked as our meals arrived at our table. “But what about your job? Oh, maybe we will. Yes, I have your phone number. Mine is.... Take care. Bye.”
Trisha was starting to pull apart one of the pizza slices from her plate when she looked over at me.
“Well, what did he say?” she asked.
“He has a month off this summer, July I think, and he wants to know if it would be okay if he comes to Firth to visit me. I said yes, but now I’m not so sure.”
“You have
