“Thanks, Dad.” I gave him a kiss on the cheek and watched him drift through the crowd until he found Jane and gave her a warm hug. I crisscrossed the room, smiling and greeting friends and acquaintances as I moved. At the bar, I traded in my juice for a glass of water and sipped it slowly, happy to be alone with my thoughts for a moment.
I set my glass on the tray next to the bar and turned to look for Jane. Dad and Uncle Pete had moved on and Jane was standing by herself. None of our friends was nearby, so I walked briskly across the room to keep her company. But just as I reached her side, an older woman approached.
“Jane?” she asked, her voice tentative.
“Yes?”
Glancing at me, she said, “I hope I’m not interrupting. I’m Althea Tannis. I was a friend of Jesse’s. I wanted to express my condolences for your loss.”
“You’re not interrupting,” I said, and stepped back a few inches to give her clear access to Jane. Althea Tannis was a pretty woman somewhere in her fifties or sixties, wearing an attractive black pantsuit with a dark gray silk shirt. The suit was perfectly tailored and showed off her slim figure. Her shoulder-length blond hair was held back by a black velvet headband.
“Hello, Althea.” Jane shook her hand and the woman held on to it.
“Jesse was a wonderful man and I’m so grateful I had the chance to spend time with him before . . .” She sniffled and delicately blew her nose into her lacy white linen handkerchief. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right.” Jane smiled attentively. “Did you know Uncle Jesse from the navy?”
“No, no.” Althea’s eyes were filling with tears and she quickly blinked them away. “Oh gosh, I promised myself I wouldn’t cry, but . . .”
“You won’t cry alone today,” I said.
That brought a brief smile to her face. “No, I probably won’t.”
“Oh, Althea, this is Shannon Hammer.”
We said our hellos.
“Shannon is one of my dearest friends and she was also Jesse’s next-door neighbor,” Jane explained as part of a more formal introduction. “She knew him her whole life.”
Althea shook my hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Shannon, despite the circumstances.”
“He was a sweet guy and a wonderful neighbor,” I said. “I miss him every day.”
“I do, too.”
“Tell me how you knew Uncle Jesse,” Jane prompted her.
“Oh, well, we met a few months ago in a senior aerobics class, believe it or not. We were all hot and sweaty—and I don’t mean that in a particularly glamorous way.” She laughed lightly and we joined her. “But we hit it off. And for the past six months, we’ve been . . . well, I guess you could say we were dating. If anyone our age actually dates anymore.”
“You were dating my uncle?” Jane’s eyes widened and she glanced at me.
Althea smiled at Jane’s reaction. “Yes. I can see he never told you about me. It figures. He really guarded his privacy. But he told me so much about you, Jane. He was so proud of you.” She pressed the white linen to her cheeks where tears were starting to stream down. “I’m sorry to make a scene. I’d better go.”
Jane looked completely stunned, but she recovered quickly. “No. Don’t go. Please. Let’s sit and talk.”
I was pretty darn shocked myself. My father and Uncle Pete had claimed that Jesse had a “hottie” girlfriend he was keeping all to himself, but I’d brushed it off, thinking the girlfriend was yet another one of Jesse’s tall tales.
So this was the hottie?
I followed, studying the woman more closely as Jane led her over to a small circle of lyre-back chairs near a corner table where we could talk more privately. Althea didn’t look that hot—at least, not in the way most men would define the word. But she was lovely and refined and seemed sweet and intelligent and was apparently in mourning for her deceased boyfriend.
Boyfriend. That was about the most bizarre term I’d ever used to describe Jesse. Even more bizarre was that they’d met in an aerobics class. I couldn’t believe it. Jesse? Aerobics? The two words didn’t belong in the same universe. Sure, he stayed in shape, but he was more of a push-ups and calisthenics kind of guy. But that just showed what I knew about my neighbor.
I felt a little invisible and that was probably a good thing as I listened to the woman open up to Jane, explaining that she had rarely had a chance to visit Jesse here in Lighthouse Cove because he usually drove over to see her in her hometown of Blue Point, a quaint village about fifteen miles down the coast.
“He preferred to visit me rather than the other way around, and that was fine with me,” she said. “He was always saying that he liked to keep his private life private. You know, because of all the gossip it would’ve created if I had come to see him. He really hated gossip, but I guess you probably knew that.”