her seriously when she’d told him to leave the adoptions to the rest of them, but with him there was no way to tell. And that—that right there—was what made him so impossible to deal with.
When Rita answered the door, Shannon saw a plate of chocolate chip cookies on the coffee table and Ollie sitting on the arm of Rita’s recliner. With his paws tucked under him and his eyes at half-mast, he looked perfectly happy as an only cat. After Rita’s two dogs had passed on a few years ago soon after her stroke, she decided feeding and cleaning up after a single cat was about all she could handle.
Shannon didn’t watch much TV, but Rita had hooked her on Dancing with the Stars. Shannon had a tremendous amount of respect for bad dancers who worked hard to get better and then were willing to potentially embarrass themselves in front of millions of people.
Then Shannon looked at the TV. Instead of a picture, there was nothing but a blank screen with a bunch of funny numbers and letters going down one side.
“Uh-oh,” Shannon said. “What’s with the TV?”
“I don’t know,” Rita said. “The remote’s messed up. Or the TV’s messed up. Or somebody shot a satellite out of the sky. Hell, I don’t know. But that,” she said, pointing at the screen, “is all I can get.”
Shannon reached for the remote. “Let me try.”
She poked around on it. After a few stabs, the funny numbers and letters disappeared, but now all they had was a blank screen.
“Well, that helped,” Rita said.
“We have to fix it. We cannot watch this episode on my crummy thirty-two-inch TV.”
Shannon heard a knock at the door. “Who’s that?”
“Somebody who’s going to fix it, I hope.”
“Thank God.”
Rita opened the door, and Luke walked in.
Luke?
He stopped short when he saw Shannon, then turned to Rita. “What’s she doing here?”
Shannon sat up straight. “Excuse me? What am I doing here? What are you doing here?
“I got a nine-one-one call from Rita. She said it was a matter of life and death.” His gaze fanned across the room. “Ah. There’s the patient.”
Luke walked over to the TV. Picked up the remote. He poked at it for approximately fifteen seconds, and the picture popped up.
“How did you do that?” Shannon said.
“I’m a man.” He handed the remote back to Rita, eyeing the TV like a starving dog checking out a T-bone steak. “Nice looking TV you’ve got there, Ms. Kaufman.”
“Why, thank you.”
“What is that? A sixty-inch?”
“You have a sharp eye.”
“LCD?”
“Yes.”
“HD, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Don’t believe I’ve ever seen a picture that clear. Shannon? Have you ever seen a picture that clear?”
Go home, Luke. Go home right now.
“And Dolby sound,” Luke said. “Of course it has Dolby sound.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know about that,” Rita said.
“How about picture-in-picture? There’s nothing better than watching two channels at once, particularly when—”
“Okay!” Shannon said. “Enough! Luke has no TV at the shelter, so he’s going through TV withdrawal. That’s why he can’t stop yapping about it.”
“Luke?” Rita said. “Would you like to stay and watch TV with us?”
Luke said yes at the same time Shannon said no. They turned and glared at each other.
“Is there a problem here?” Rita said.
“Shannon’s mad at me,” Luke said.
“I’m not mad at you,” Shannon said, even though she was. But the way Luke said it made her sound petty. Which she wasn’t.
“You did a pretty good imitation of it this morning.”
“I said I’m not mad at you!”
“Great! So you won’t mind if I hang around and watch TV?”
Shannon twisted her mouth with irritation.
“After all, he did fix it,” Rita said.
“He punched three buttons!”
“It’s not the button punching,” Luke said, plopping himself onto the sofa next to Shannon. “It’s knowing which buttons to punch.”
“You told me you didn’t care about having a TV,” Shannon said.
“I lied.” He rubbed his hands together with anticipation. “So what are we watching?”
“Dancing with the Stars,” Shannon said.
Luke’s face fell, and the hand rubbing ceased. “Oh.”
“The competition’s really heating up,” Rita said.
He leaned against the back of the sofa and folded his arms. “Dancing with the Stars? Isn’t that the show where a bunch of over-the-hill D-list celebrities make idiots of themselves by trying to dance when they can barely put one foot in front of the other?”
“Stop being judgmental,” Shannon said. “You like to dance.”