Free Someone to Watch Over Me by Helen R. Myers

know,” Katie admitted.
    “Okay,” he said. “If we needed to, we could critique my relationships with women, all the way from grade schoolto the present, if we really needed to. That would take some time.”
    “All day,” Kim said.
    “All week,” Kathie claimed.
    “No,” Katie said. “At least a month.”
    Jax glared at them, more than happy for a good sibling brawl to take his mind off everything else.
    “I just don’t want to do this,” Kathie said, turning her face into his shoulder. She was the most tenderhearted one of them all. And one least likely to give him a hard time about anything.
    He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close. “I know.”
    “And I feel like such a baby.”
    “Yeah,” he teased. “Almost twenty-four, and all grown up. You and Kim probably think you know everything.”
    “I don’t think I know anything anymore,” Kim cried.
    “Me neither,” Kathie said, snuggling closer to him.
    Katie just stood there, stubbornly on her own and fighting back tears, looking worriedly at him and her sisters.
    We’ll figure this out, all of us together, won’t we? her look said.
    He nodded and hoped he wouldn’t make a liar of himself one day soon.
     
    Gwen dropped the flowers off at the funeral home well before the service began. She arranged them herself, then put her palm flat against the polished surface of the casket. She thought about her squandering time and Mrs. Cassidy watching it crawl by in what had to have been agony, wondered if she’d ever understand life and death and everything that fell in between.
    Your son seems very nice, she told Mrs. Cassidy just in case the woman could hear her.
    And Romeo is absolutely adorable.
    Now what?
    I hope you like the flowers. I hope it was okay to bring them.
    She wondered if Mrs. Cassidy had been afraid, if she’d gotten mad at God, too. If she’d felt betrayed by her illness and all the pain and being separated from everyone she loved. She wondered if the woman had any answers now.
    When Gwen got home, she made a tray of vegetables, which she took to the Cassidy house. Gwen suspected it was one of Jax’s sisters who answered the door, giving Gwen a look that she couldn’t quite decipher, but it hadn’t exactly been welcoming. Gwen left as quickly as she’d come, then went outside to her still untidy front yard.
    She was on her knees in the dirt, pulling weeds, later that evening when Jax and Romeo came walking down the street.
    Romeo had a brightly colored scarf tied around his neck, which he seemed to be enduring with much good humor, and Jax was wearing a pair of khaki pants and a wild, Hawaiian-print shirt in turquoise and maroon.
    “Romeo and I are making a run for it,” he said. “We couldn’t take one more person telling us my mother’s in a better place and that we shouldn’t even be sad. If we’d stayed in that house, we’d have screamed at somebody, and my mother wouldn’t have liked that. So we left. We thought you might take pity on us.”
    Romeo whined pitifully, as if to help plead their case, and then reached out and licked Gwen’s hand through the fence.
    “Think we could hide out here for a few minutes?” Jax asked.
    “Sure.” She walked to the front gate and opened it for them.
    Romeo came trotting through, eyeing the pile of weeds she’d pulled and left discarded in the yard for the moment.
    “Romeo?” Jax waited until the dog turned and looked at him. “No.”
    Romeo whined again and sidled up to Gwen, until she found her open palm under his head. He sat down by her side and waited, for her to fuss over him, she supposed.
    Gwen laughed. “He really is a flirt.”
    “Yeah. He got kicked out of police academy for it.”
    “You’ve got to be kidding.”
    “No. He really was. He was in training to be part of the K-9 squad, and he was great, really intelligent, willing to do the work, capable of understanding and remembering a great deal—until a woman walked by. Lost all concentration