Beginners Welcome by Cindy Baldwin

Author:Cindy Baldwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

25.

Clara was waiting outside Brightleaf when I went for my next lesson, a Wednesday afternoon right after I’d gotten home from school. Her leash was looped around a pole, her paws folded under her chin as she watched the world with her warm-honey eyes.

“Hey, girl,” I said, dropping to a crouch and scratching behind her ears. Clara closed her eyes in appreciation. “Such a pretty doggy. I bet Ray loves you a whole lot.”

Clara opened her eyes again and looked soulfully at me, like she knew what I was thinking. Dr. Hsu had always said that dogs were experts at picking up cues from their humans, and that was why they made such excellent companions for people with blindness or epilepsy or anxiety. Could Clara sense Ray’s pain, the way his arthritis ate at him all the time? Did she worry, just like I did, when he stretched out his fingers or rubbed at his legs or stumbled and almost fell on the polished wood mall floor?

“We gotta take care of him, don’t we, girl?” I murmured, and Clara looked right into my eyes and made a low rumble in her throat like a cat’s purr.

I wandered into the mall, pausing to peer in Queenie’s window. She wasn’t with a customer today—she sat behind a desk, looking over some papers with a pair of little half-moon glasses like Dumbledore’s perched on the end of her nose. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her sitting down before, or quiet like this, except when she was watching Ray. She looked older, but softer, too.

I knocked on the glass, and she looked up and saw me, waving her hand in big strokes to tell me to come on in. The salon was warm and perfumed, with jaunty pop music playing from a speaker somewhere. In the back, one of Queenie’s stylists—a bald white man with black studs in his ears—was chatting with a customer while he gave her highlights.

“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” Queenie said, getting up from her desk and hugging me. She smelled like shampoo and hair spray, and her silky shirt was soft against my cheek. “How you doing, Annie Lee?”

“Good.” For once, it was actually true, too.

“You off to another lesson with Mr. Owens?”

“Yeah.”

“He told me yesterday y’all were coming right along. Said he registered you to enter a competition in December. I wasn’t half proud!” Queenie beamed so big I could tell she was proud—like I was her own daughter, not some stranger she’d met less than half a dozen times.

Was there anyone in the world Queenie didn’t love?

“How’s your mama? It strikes me I don’t even know her name.”

The nervous fluttering started up again in my chest. Talk about Mama was dangerous territory. “Joan Fitzgerald, Miss Queenie, ma’am,” I said, praying that Queenie had never met anybody named Fitzgerald in her life.

As if she could hear the little shake in my voice, Queenie’s gaze sharpened, the brown skin around her eyes crinkling into a suspicious squint.

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