St. Francis Society for Wayward Pets

by Annie England Noblin

  It was already dark by the time I made it the couple of blocks to Three Sheets. The same bartender as before greeted me with an eye roll when I told her I’d placed an order to go.

  “Give me a sec,” she said.

  I sat down at the bar and glanced around. It wasn’t as crowded as it had been on Saturday. I figured it was probably the sudden cold snap keeping people at home inside their houses. In the corner, however, Abel sat in the same spot I’d seen him in the other night. He looked up and caught my eye, and I gave him a little wave.

  “Don’t waste your time,” the bartender said, heaving a white plastic bag up onto the bar. “He’s not interested.”

  I stared at her in a vain attempt to keep my neck from reddening. “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t take it personal,” she said. “Abel Abbott ain’t interested in nobody.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks for the tip.”

  “I’m just giving you some friendly advice. Don’t waste your time.”

  “I didn’t know you were friendly,” I said, grabbing my food and putting some cash on the counter. “Keep the change.”

  I started to walk away, but stopped at the door and turned around, glancing between the bartender and Abel. It irritated me that she thought I was interested, and it irritated me even more that she thought she could tell me who I should and shouldn’t waste my time on. If anybody was my friend in this damn tiny town, it was Abel Abbott. Ignoring her stare, I sauntered over to where Abel sat and set my food down on top of his table.

  “How’s that arm?” I asked.

  He gestured to the chair across from him, and I sat down.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “Alice called me four times this afternoon until I went to urgent care. They gave me some antibiotics and a butterfly bandage. I don’t think I needed either.”

  “Do you help her out a lot?” I asked.

  “From time to time,” Abel replied.

  “That’s nice of you,” I said.

  Abel shrugged. “What did you order?”

  “A burger and fries,” I said. “The food here is fantastic.”

  “Go ahead and eat,” he said. “It’s only good when it’s hot.”

  “You sure?” I asked. “I don’t want to interrupt you.”

  Abel waved to one of the waitresses and held up two fingers. “Might as well have some company.”

  I opened the plastic bag and dug in, trying not to feel self-conscious as he watched me while I chewed.

  The waitress came over and set two dark-colored beers on the table. Abel shoved one over to me. “Try it,” he said.

  I swallowed and took a sip. “Tastes familiar,” I said.

  “Better not drink three this time.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes while I ate, and I glanced around the bar. Several of the patrons were looking in our direction, and the waitress who’d served us was at the bar talking to the bartender. I shoved a few fries in my mouth and tried to ignore it.

  “So,” I said, after I’d finished every last fry, “have you heard that I’m your new neighbor?”

  Abel set down his beer glass and looked at me. “So you’re staying?”

  I shrugged. “For a little while, at least.”

  I prepared myself for the storm of questions that were sure to follow—What about your life back in Seattle? Don’t you have a boyfriend? A house? A job?

  Instead, Abel simply said, “Well, then welcome to the neighborhood.”

  “I feel like people are staring at me,” I said, glancing around. “I don’t feel very welcome.”

  “That’s because they are,” Abel replied. He took a long drink of his beer.

  “Why?”

  “You’re new in town, for one,” Abel replied. “And for another, you’re sitting with me.”

  “Your table off-limits?” I asked. “I didn’t see a sign.”

  “What did the bartender tell you about me before you came over here?” Abel wanted to know. “I bet she told you something to the effect of, ‘Don’t even try,’ right?”

  I stared at him from over the top of my beer glass. “More or less.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “I’m confused,” I said, sitting up a little straighter in my chair. “Aren’t you some kind of famous writer and thrill seeker? I figured you’d be the town hero.”

  “Town disappointment is more like it.”

  “I doubt that,” I said.

  Abel let out a throaty chuckle before downing the rest of his beer. He stood up and placed a crisp twenty-dollar bill down onto the table. “Thanks for the company,” he said. “But you got some sound advice earlier—don’t even try. I’m a lost cause.”

  I threw a tip down on the table and followed him out the door while the barmaid stood behind the bar. I didn’t know it was possible to want to slap someone I’d just met, but she was pretty high on my list right then.

  The crisp air hit me right as I exited the bar, and it felt good against my beer-warmed cheeks. “What is your problem?” I yelled at Abel. “You going for some dark-and-mysterious vibe?”

  He turned around, a smile inching up on his face, although he was doing his best to contain it. “You aren’t buying it?”

  I waited for him to jog back to where I was standing. “Nope,” I said.

  “I guess I’ll have to work a little harder at it, then,” Abel replied. He took a step closer to me.

  “You probably should.” All my instincts told me to answer his step toward me by closing off the space between us, but I knew that I shouldn’t. I didn’t know him, not really, and the last thing I needed was to get involved with another quasi-famous guy with no concern for anybody other than himself, especially if this quasi-famous guy fancied himself the dangerous type.

  The door to the bar opened, and a wave of people spilled out onto the sidewalk, laughing and joking with one another. One of the men in the group stepped off the curb and stumbled forward, crashing into me as he struggled to gain his footing. I pitched forward and fell into Abel, who caught me by the arms before I face-planted onto the parking lot.

  “Sorry, lady!” the man called over his shoulder as he staggered after his friends.

  “Watch where you’re going, jackass!” Abel yelled. “Are you all right?” he asked me.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “You’re, uh, you’re losing your jacket,” Abel replied. He reached over to pull my hoodie back over my shoulder, and my body responded with an involuntary shiver when his hand brushed my bare skin.

  I was getting ready to apologize and blame my reaction on the wind chill when Abel grasped at the fabric of my hoodie and pulled me closer to him. When he looked down at me, I saw his teeth graze his bottom lip, and that was all the invitation I needed to reach up and draw his mouth down to mine.

  When he finally pulled away from me, we were both breathless.

  “I should go,” I said, fumbling with the zipper on my hoodie to keep from looking at him.

  “Me too,” Abel replied. “I’ll, uh, I’ll see you around.”

  Chapter 17

  SHERBET WAS ON THE PORCH WHEN I GOT BACK TO THE house. He was lying in front of the door, cleaning himself, as I stuck my key in the lock. When I opened the door, he shot inside.

  When I hesitated at the threshold, the cat looked at me as if to say, “Well?”

  I stepped inside, and he jumped up onto the couch and resumed his cleaning.

  It had been an interesting day in Timber Creek, that was for sure. I supposed sitting on a ragged couch with a strange cat was the least of it, so, after taking a quick shower, I changed into my old, ratty sweatpants and a city-league softball shirt I’d stolen from Eli and plopped down onto the couch, but I couldn’t get my mind off Abel, which annoyed me.

  To keep myself from overanalyzing everything, I scrolled through my phone, logging into various social media networks to see what I’d missed, to keep myself from dwelling on a man other women told
me to stay away from and of whom my own heart told me to be wary.

  Besides my family, the only people I’d really been close with were Holly and Christine. I’d always kept to myself, preferring to stay in rather than go out, a piece of my personality that my mother was forever lamenting. Judging from the worn spot on the couch where I sat, Annabelle had been like that too.

  As I scrolled past the posts of people I didn’t really care to interact with, I stopped on a picture of Eli’s on Instagram. It was of his new bookshelf, which took up an entire wall of his study. He’d had it built-in, and he had one of those ladders that I’d seen only in the Beast’s library in Beauty and the Beast. He and Kate stood next to it, grinning proudly. “Finally finished!” the caption read. I enlarged the picture to get a better look at the books just behind them on the top shelf. All of my brother’s books were in alphabetical order, which meant that Abel Abbott wrote the very first books on the bookshelf. I’d never read them, but I knew the titles well. They were Eli’s favorites.

  It occurred to me that I should probably have told Eli about Abel the last time we talked. He probably would have been more excited about packing up my clothes and bringing them to me. As it was, he was less than thrilled about the eight-hour round-trip, and he’d told me as much. He didn’t get many days off, because he often volunteered at the low-cost clinic downtown. I made a mental note to tell him the next time we talked.

  He’d agreed only because he was worried about me, and I felt bad for taking advantage of that fact. I was fine, I guessed, for the most part. Still, he knew what it was like to lose a birth mother. Eli encouraged me, the summer I was sixteen, to reach out to Annabelle, and I don’t think he’d ever quite forgiven himself. He told me later that he thought if I could connect with my birth mother, then maybe he wouldn’t miss his own quite so much.

  After all my letters came back unanswered, he’d been angry, and I’d caught him one night in his bedroom, furiously writing in his notebook. One of the unopened letters was propped up against the lamp on his desk.

  “What are you doing?” I asked him, angry that he’d taken one of the letters out of the trash. “That’s not yours!”

  As I went to grab the envelope, I glanced down at Eli’s notebook and saw Annabelle’s name. I saw the words he’d written after it, and I was surprised a kid his age knew them.

  “I was just . . .” Eli trailed off, and I noticed his cheeks were tearstained.

  “Are you all right?” I asked. “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

  “I’m not crying,” he replied stubbornly.

  I knelt down in front of him and looked him in the eyes. “I know what you’re doing, and I love you for it,” I said. “But it’s okay. She doesn’t want to know me, and neither one of us can bully her into it.”

  “It’s not fair,” he’d said. “It’s not fair that she gets to be alive and my mother is dead. She doesn’t deserve it.”

  I hugged him close to me while we both cried, and I promised myself right then and there that I’d never contact Annabelle again.

  The next morning, I found the letter ripped to shreds and thrown in the hallway bathroom’s trash can. We never talked about that night, but I wondered if he sometimes thought about it the way I did—on nights when the memories he never got to make with a family that didn’t exist were nearly too much to accept.

  Chapter 18

  THE NEXT MORNING, I WOKE UP WITH A START, THE FEELING of being smothered pulling me out of sleep. I bolted upright, and Sherbet clung to my chest like Velcro, a displeased meow emitting from his throat. I managed to pry him off me without losing any skin, and he sat at my feet, alternating between vocalizing his displeasure and purring. Groaning, I forced myself out of bed and padded into the kitchen, scooping up a bit of the cat food I’d brought in from the porch and pouring it into an empty bowl for Sherbet. He wasted no time and began to eat. I silently cursed him for waking me up at the crack of dawn—my phone screen read six thirty a.m.—but I decided that I might as well start the day by picking up around the house.

  By midmorning I’d managed to clean the kitchen and rid it of all the spoiled food. There wasn’t much by way of food to begin with, and I found it interesting that in practically every drawer, there was a set of knitting needles. There were knitting needles in the silverware drawer, in the pantry, and even one very cold pair of metal knitting needles in the freezer. I put the collection in the middle of the dining room table.

  In the spare bedroom, I discovered a huge pile of blankets in the cedar chest, and underneath the blankets, I found more skeins of yarn. I was beginning to wonder if Annabelle had done anything other than sit in her house and knit. Sherbet made himself a bed on one of the blankets, and so I left them all out on the floor as I continued to make my way through the house. There was a large bookshelf in the other spare bedroom. It was so crammed full of books that I couldn’t even see what the titles to any of them were until I started pulling them off the shelves.

  There were all kinds of books on the shelves, and most of them appeared to have been read multiple times. Some of them looked waterlogged, like they’d been read in the bathtub with a good glass of wine—really, in my opinion, the only good way to read. The majority of the books were nonfiction true-crime books. There were a few women’s fiction novels with cutesy covers. There were books of poetry and short stories, and there were several classic gothic novels like Wuthering Heights and Dracula.

  Toward the middle of the bookshelf, sandwiched in between books about John Dillinger and the Dillinger Gang, were two of Abel Abbott’s books. I picked one of them up and turned it over in my hands. It was clear the book had been read, because there were creases in the spine. But it wasn’t beat up like the others. I opened it up to the title page and was surprised by what I found. There was an inscription to Annabelle.

  For Annabelle,

  Thank you. Your kind words and understanding ears were what I needed to get through my darkest days.

  Always,

  Abel

  I stared at the ink-smeared words for a long time, trying to figure out exactly what it was they meant. The other book had a similar note. I remembered Alice mentioning the day before that Annabelle had been friends with Abel, a fact that I found odd yet interesting. I took both books and set them in the middle of the table along with the yarn and knitting needles.

  I’d just piled everything up nice and neat on the table when I heard a knock at the door. Half expecting to see a Jehovah’s Witness at the door with a pamphlet for the Watchtower, I opened it up to see Yulina standing there, a nervous smile on her face.

  “Hi,” I said, stepping back to let her inside.

  “I hope I am not intruding,” she said. “Alice told me you were still here.”

  “Of course not,” I replied. “Come in.”

  I wondered why Gary hadn’t told her I was still here, but figured that maybe Alice had gotten to her first.

  She gave me a hesitant smile. “I cannot stay long. My mother-in-law has Ani, and I need to pick her up soon.”

  “Ani?”

  “My daughter,” Yulina explained. “She’s two. Her name is Anichka, but we call her Ani.”

  I motioned for her to sit down on the couch. “Anichka,” I repeated. “That’s . . . Ukrainian?”

  Yulina’s face lit up. “Yes. It is both Hebrew and Ukrainian,” she said. “How did you know?”

  “My father worked with a man who was originally from Ukraine,” I replied. “His wife was named Anichka. I was friends with their daughters before they moved out of state.”

  “I am from Ukraine,” Yulina said. “Originally.”

  “Where in Ukraine?” I asked.

  “You’ve heard of Chernobyl nuclear disaster, yes?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “You’re from there?”

  I tried not to sound too incredulous, but I wasn’t sure that I was entirely successful. I’d first learned about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster when I was in junior high
. I’d always found it fascinating, especially because I knew people from Ukraine when I learned about it. My father, however, told me never to ask my friends, the two daughters of the man he worked with, about it. He said it might be too difficult for them to speak about, although I couldn’t imagine why. They’d been children when it happened, and lived far away from the disaster site. As an adult, though, I understood his hesitation and was glad I’d never stuck my foot in my mouth by asking nosy questions.

  “I was born in Pripyat,” Yulina continued after a short pause. “It was the city built to house the power plant workers. My father was one of them.”

  “I read about that place,” I said. “In a global history class I took in junior high.”

  “My father died the day of the disaster,” Yulina said. “My mother, sisters, and I were relocated to Slavutych.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. I reached out to her and stopped myself just in time when I saw her stiffen. “I can’t imagine how terrible that must have been for your family.”

  Yulina shrugged. “I was not yet two, so I did not get a chance to know him,” she said. “My mother remarried a kind man. I had a good life.”

  I wanted to ask her what brought her to the United States and ask her about how she met Gary, but I didn’t want to pry, especially after her admission about her father. Instead I said, “Do you miss it? Ukraine?”

  The wistful look on Yulina’s face faded and her eyes became hard. “No,” she said at last. “This is my life now.”

  “That’s a good way to look at things,” I said. “I should give that philosophy a try. Because I don’t have any idea what my life is right now.”

  “It can be hard to tell sometimes,” Yulina said. “Life is not always what we think it will be.”

  “That’s for sure,” I muttered. “If someone told me even two weeks ago that this is where I’d be right now, well, I wouldn’t have believed them.”