Search Party by Valerie Trueblood Read Free Book Online

dog with a trusting nature and he was going to go on for years doing his part of the job.

The Llamas

    A NN told her friends she was nowhere. What was ahead? She didn’t love her boyfriend. He accused her of not liking him but he thought the love part could survive that. He didn’t like her, either, even though they maintained a truce over their differing views of the world. Ann’s had always been that where the world was not cruel, it was treacherous, even though many advantages surrounded and secured her, including a job several rungs above his in the same company. His view was that the world didn’t matter if you were having a good time.
    When Casey Clare’s brother died, Ann had to attend the funeral because she was Casey’s boss. She felt the obligation even though Casey had been her assistant for only a few months. Todd, her boyfriend, said the obligations she felt were imaginary half the time and they did nothing but add random pressure to her crowded life. Her friends said the same thing. They didn’t press the point that she often shirked these responsibilities after getting herself into a state about them. But she had said she would go to Casey’s brother’s funeral, and she did.
    As an assistant—Ann had known it within a week of hiring her—Casey was not working out. She could spend half a morning being reassured and primed by Ann to get down to jobs that weren’t all that complicated or taxing. Every day, she presented herself anew with her blunt inquiries into Ann’s affairs, and thena rundown of things seen and done between close of business the day before and the reopening of the office doors.
    Ann had to sit turned away from her computer at an awkward angle, looking up at Casey with an expression of commiseration, gradually picturing how it would be to lean over the in-basket and slap the girl into action. Girl—Casey was thirty-three, two years older than Ann. But her big smiling face and her packed lunch and her blouses a little too tight, as if she had just grown those breasts, made Ann think of an overgrown schoolgirl turned loose in the workplace and fending for herself. Or not entirely for herself: Casey did have a large family, a whole phone book of relatives advising, making demands, dropping in with food, all comically devoted to each other. Not to mention the dozens from her church who prayed at the unconscious brother’s bedside.
    He was in the University Hospital. Every day, Casey urged Ann to visit him, as if the problem Ann had was simply getting up the nerve. Casey said, “Yeah, why not this Sunday? Just stop by, come up to the floor. After you get done with the vigil.” She knew Ann attended the Green Lake peace vigil—not that far from the hospital—any Sunday that she could make it. She had done that since before the beginning of the war in Iraq.
    â€œCome on,” Todd said. “Let’s get out of town.”
    â€œThe vigil is all I do and I have to do it or I’ll go crazy.”
    â€œThat’s crazy,” he said. He didn’t go out of town without her; he didn’t have the focus to plan a trip and get in the car all by himself and stay with it, and she didn’t say it but that was why he wasn’t getting anywhere in his job.
    The peace vigil: that was no problem for Casey. God wasn’t on either side; how could he be? Almost every day, Casey had a question about God for Ann, and not trying to smoke her out as an atheist, either, but simply assuming that the matter of what God would think or do would interest anybody. “I mean, you wonder,” Casey would say. September 11, war, and the accident that had befallen Randy—an angel to all who knew him, a fireman, minding his own business and raising llamas. “You wonderhow these things can happen.” Ann would agree, clicking her nails on the keyboard as she appeared to give thought to the conundrum. Eventually Casey