“Tova, dear. How are you doing?” Barb leans over as far as the helmetlike dryer will allow, putting undue emphasis on the word “doing.” As if preemptively cutting off any attempt Tova might make to feign her own okay-ness. Barbara has always been efficient about slicing away other people’s nonsense, a quality Tova can’t help but admire.
But Tova also prides herself on maintaining no such veneer. She answers, truthfully, “Quite all right.”
“Lars was a good man.” Barb removes her glasses, letting them dangle from the beaded chain around her neck, and dots her seeping eyes with the corner of a handkerchief. Tova bites back the urge to scoff. It isn’t the first time she’s watched Barbara insert herself into another person’s tragedy like this. Barb and Lars couldn’t have met more than a handful of times, back in those early years, before Tova and Lars began to fall out of one another’s lives.
“He went peacefully,” Tova says with an air of authority, not adding that this is thirdhand knowledge. But the woman at Charter Village had clasped her arm intently while assuring her that Lars would’ve felt no pain at the end.
“It’s a blessing to go peacefully,” Barb says, clasping her bosom.
“And the facility was quite nice.”
“Oh?” Barb cocks her head. This is new information to her. Tova hadn’t mentioned her trip to Bellingham to the Knit-Wits, and it seems, for once, Ethan Mack has kept mum about something while ringing up groceries at the Shop-Way.
“Yes, I went to fetch his personal effects. Mind you, there wasn’t much. But the home was clean and well-run.”
“Where was he?”
“Charter Village. Up in Bellingham.”
“Oh!” Barb jams her glasses back on and thumbs through the magazine on her lap. “This place here?” She holds up a full-spread advertisement featuring a photo of the stately Charter Village campus, its lawn unnaturally green under a cloudless sky.
“Yes, that’s the one.”
Barb moves the page inches from her nose, squinting at the small print. “Look! It says they have a saltwater pool. A movie theater.”
Tova doesn’t look. “Do they really?”
“And a spa!”
“It was certainly fancier than expected,” Tova agrees.
With a dismissive exhale, Barb shuts the magazine. “Still. My Andie would never put me in a home . . .”
“Of course not.” Tova nods, her lips not quite a smile, not quite a grimace.
Barb fans herself with the magazine. It gets hot under the helmet dryers.
“Yes, well.” Tova picks up a well-worn copy of Reader’s Digest from the low table next to the dryer and pretends to read the table of contents. Naturally, she knows about the saltwater pool and the movie theater and the spa. The packet she’d taken from Charter Village is sitting on her coffee table at home. She’s read through it three times, at least.
“Ready, Tova?” Colette’s chipper voice calls from across the salon. Tova pushes the space-age helmet up and gathers her pocketbook, bidding Barbara Vanderhoof a polite farewell before going to get her hair finished.
THAT EVENING AT the aquarium, Terry’s office light is on. Tova pokes her head through the door to say hello.
“Hey, Tova!” Terry waves her in. A white takeout carton sits atop of a pile of papers on his desk, a pair of chopsticks sticking up like antennae, propped in what Tova knows is vegetable fried rice from the one Chinese restaurant in the area, down in Elland. The same sort of carton that lured the octopus from his enclosure that night.
“Good evening, Terry.” Tova inclines her head.
“Take a load off,” he says, nodding at the chair across from his desk. He holds up a fortune cookie in a plastic wrapper. “You want one? They always give me at least two, sometimes three or four. I don’t know how many people they think I could be feeding with this one pint of fried rice.”
Tova smiles, but doesn’t sit, remaining in the doorway. “That’s kind, but no thank you.”
“Suit yourself.” He shrugs, tossing it onto the clutter. The state of Terry’s desk, with its haphazard piles and scattered papers, always makes Tova’s palms itch. When she comes through later with her cleaning cart, she’ll empty the trash, dust the trio of frames behind the desk. Terry’s toddler daughter on a playground swing. Terry with his arm draped around an older woman’s shoulder—his mother, with deep brown skin, a crown of dark curls, and Terry’s same broad smile. An unseen breeze lifts the sleeve of Terry’s gown, a purple-and-gold tassel dangling from the his mortarboard cap. Next to the photo is the related degree: bachelor of science, summa cum laude, in marine biology, awarded to Terrance Bailey from the University of Washington.