The Last Handful of Clover - Book 1: The Hereafter

1.36 Safeway

June 6, 1:27 pm

Standing in the produce aisle, Michelle saw that her hand was shaking.

It was an odd sensation, considering that at the moment she didn't feel especially stressed or tired. She stood there for several seconds, a bag of broccoli in one hand, the other spread wide in front of her face, quivering like a leaf.

Maybe Pil was right. He'd warned her she was taking on too much of what he called the "emotional burden" of Keith's grief—not to mention her own—and that she needed to pull back and take care of herself. He'd almost begged her to get some rest before it all caught up to her, even volunteering to step in and spend time with Keith.

But there was no way that she could do that. For anybody else, perhaps. But not for Keith.

Ever since high school she had felt that it was her job, and hers alone, to keep her best friend safe. She had always been Keith's confessor and counselor, and she was still protective of that role to a point that defied all good sense. Even in school, whether it had been something minor like not getting the role he wanted in the school play, or something more serious such as the boy who had broken his heart, Michelle was always standing by with her arms open.

Keith teased her about it often, even calling her "Grace Adler," after the old sitcom character. She hated that comparison and pointed out to Keith that she was not some pathetic "fag hag," clinging to and still in love with her gay best friend. She was a happily married woman with a life of her own.

But the comparison wasn't totally wrong.

Michelle wasn't in denial. She knew very well that she was in love with Keith, at least a little, and had been ever since they were teenagers. It was kind of cliche, she knew, to be the straight girl in love with her gay best friend. But unlike Grace Adler, Michelle had always been fiercely independent, and no slave to her heart. Keith's coming out, when he was fifteen and she was sixteen, put everything she was feeling into perspective. She quickly adjusted to the idea that the big wedding with Keith that she'd been planning was no longer in their future. She had accepted that, and quickly come to think of him as something between a boyfriend and a brother, but with the protective instinct of a mama bear wrapping the whole thing together. And that's how it had been for nearly twenty years.

But it didn't mean that she stopped being in love with him. If anything, she loved him more now than she did then. She loved him, and she knew she would do pretty much anything to keep him safe.

She shook her hand for a few seconds, hoping that would stop the trembling, took a deep breath, and continued her shopping. Looking at her watch, she knew she had to hurry if she was going to get this stuff into Keith's fridge, before they all headed to the funeral home.

Ten minutes later, as she was stuffing the groceries into the back of her big yellow SUV, her phone rang. She immediately recognized the number as Carla Grayson, the Detective in charge of Richard's case.

They'd first met Grayson the night of Richard's murder, when the two of them were still covered in Richard's blood, and nothing seemed real. They were sitting on the back bumper of an ambulance, trembling under a shared silver blanket, while the cops swarmed all over the neighborhood, and the paramedics kept checking them for signs of shock. It was then that this kindly, matronly woman walked out of the shadows. She silently sank to her knees in front of the pair and took both their hands in hers. She didn't speak for a long time. She just knelt there and held their hands, and Michelle could see the woman had tears in her eyes as well.

Long before Michelle knew that Carla Grayson was a Detective, she thought of her as a guardian angel.

She had interviewed them that night, sitting on the bumper of the ambulance, and then accompanied them home. She'd called in the psychologist, but by that point neither she nor Keith wanted to talk to anybody but Grayson. They'd had their more formal interviews the next morning, and the Detective had called several times in the days that followed, always leaving Michelle with the feeling that she really just wanted to make sure she and Keith were both doing okay. Michelle thought she'd never met a person with such natural empathy as Carla Grayson.