books. Pace! Jo had begun to snap in her editorial comments, where once she would have written: Nice!
It seemed to Frances that readers once had more patience, they were content for the story to take its time, for an occasional chapter to meander pleasurably through a beautiful landscape without anything much happening, except perhaps the exchange of some meaningful eye contact.
The path steepened, but they were walking so slowly that Frances’s breathing stayed steady. The trail curved and slivers of views appeared like gifts between the trees. They were getting quite high up now.
Of course, Jo’s editing had probably taken on that frenetic tone in response to Frances’s declining sales. No doubt Jo could see the writing on the wall and that accounted for her increasingly feverish pleas: Add some intrigue to this chapter. Maybe a red herring to throw the reader off the scent?
Frances had ignored the comments and let her career peacefully pass away, like an old lady in her sleep. She was an idiot. A deluded fool.
She walked faster. The thought came to her that she might be walking a little too quickly at the exact moment her nose slammed straight into Zoe’s shoulder blades.
Zoe had stopped dead. Frances heard her gasp.
Heather had somehow veered off the trail and onto a large rock that overhung the steep side of the hill. The ground fell away directly in front of her. Another step and she would have gone over.
Napoleon had his wife’s arm in a fierce grip. Frances couldn’t tell if his face was white with anger or fear as his hand closed around her thin upper arm and he hauled her back onto the hiking trail.
Heather didn’t thank her husband or smile at him or even meet his eyes. She extricated herself from Napoleon’s grasp with an irritated shrug of her shoulder and walked ahead, tugging the sleeve of her threadbare T-shirt straight. Napoleon looked back at Zoe and his chest rose and fell in tandem with his daughter’s audibly ragged breathing.
After a moment both father and daughter lowered their heads and continued their slow hike up the trail, as if what Frances had just witnessed had been of no consequence at all.
18
Tony
Tony Hogburn had just returned to his room after yet another hellish experience of a “guided sitting meditation.” How much more meditation could a man do?
“Breathe in like you’re breathing through a straw.” Jesus wept, what a load of absolute horseshit.
He was humiliated to realize that his legs ached from the excruciatingly slow walking meditation they’d done this morning. Once upon a time he could have run that trail, no problem at all, as a warm-up, and now his legs felt like jelly after walking it at the pace of a hundred-year-old.
He sat on the balcony outside his room and yearned for an ice-cold beer and the feel of an old collie’s silky, hard head under his hand. It should have been a mild desire for a beer and a sad ache for a beloved pet, but it felt like a raging thirst in the desert and the deepest of heartaches.
He went to stand up for the two hundredth time to get relief for this pain from the fridge before remembering for the two hundredth time that there was no relief to be found. No refrigerator. No pantry. No TV to turn on for a distracting documentary. No internet to surf mindlessly. No dog he could summon with a whistle, just to hear the obedient patter of paws.
Banjo made it to fourteen years old. Good innings for a collie. Tony should have been ready for it, but it seemed he wasn’t. In the first week, great gusts of grief hit him whenever he put his key in the lock of his front door. A grief hard enough to buckle his knees. Contemptible. A grown man brought to his knees by a dog.
He’d lost dogs before. Three dogs over the course of his life. It was part of being a dog owner. He didn’t get why he was taking Banjo’s death so hard. It was six months now, for Christ’s sake. Was it possible that he grieved the loss of this damned dog more than any human he’d lost in his lifetime?
Yes, it was possible.
He remembered when the kids were little and the Jack Russell they gave their youngest, Mimi, for her eighth birthday escaped from the backyard and got hit by a car. Mimi had been devastated, crying on Tony’s shoulder at the “funeral.” Tony