Page 1 of Too Safe

Prologue

“Itwasalonglife, but I played it too safe.”

Those were the final words my best friend—really, my only friend—uttered before she closed her eyes for the final time.

We knew it was coming.

A person doesn’t transition to hospice care at ninety-six years old without having a decent idea of what’s next.

She had been imparting wisdom on me all week, stumbling through the recesses of her mind, sharing anecdotes and advice, then sometimes pausing so long she’d fall asleep mid-sentence.

But then she’d have these moments of clarity.

She’d send a nurse to fetch me, then shoo everyone else away once I was by her side. She’d place her hand in mine, the translucent skin stretched thin over mangled, arthritic knuckles, and give the softest squeeze.

“Never leave the house without rouge.”

“Gentlemen prefer women who drink gin.”

“Always spray your pantyhose to prevent runs.”

Alice was the first client in my chair after I accepted a job at a care facility in Cleveland. A dream job, it was not. The commute was awful, and I was required to be a one-woman operation. But I was desperate, and a full-time job with excellent healthcare benefits wasn’t so easy to come by in the industry.

Plus, it had proven increasingly difficult to build and maintain a clientele without any sort of social media presence. Despite my love of balayage and color melting, I needed clients who didn’t rely on social media, so I resigned myself to a life of shampoo sets and nauseating perms. Once a month, I even hauled in a little tub for pedicure day.

We were fast friends, Alice and me. She was the talker. And oh, did she love to spin a story. Her favorite memories became fable; the timeline of her life and all that she’d seen and done shaken up in a snow globe of confusion because of the dementia.

First dementia. Then cancer.

“We all die eventually,” she’d say with a wily, toothless grin. She forgot to put in her dentures more often than not. “It took two diseases to finally bring me down.”

There was a softness to her the last time she sat in my chair in the makeshift salon wedged between the art therapy room and nutrition services office. Her fire was dimming. The last of the little flakes in her snow globe were finally laying to rest.

That’s when she made me make her a promise. She made me swear on her life, knowing she only had days left to live. The saucy broad.

“Don’t let the fear you carry become so heavy you don’t live.”

She knew so little about me. About who I was outside the beige sponge-painted walls of the facility. About who I used to be. And yet her advice was poignant and spot-on.

“Promise me, sweet girl. I lived ninety-six years, but I didn’t live nearly enough.”

I’d nodded along with her stories a hundred times to appease her, so it should have been easy to shrug her off. But as I met her eyes in the mirror, the desire to live—to stop surviving and to reallylive—pulsed through my veins.

“I promise,” I choked out, fighting back tears.

Solemnly, she added, “And don’t forget: a stitch in time saves nine.”

I ducked, letting my long, dark hair fall like a curtain around me to hide my smile as she slipped back into a monologue about the time she shared a Lucky Strike with Dick Van Dyke. I could repeat that story word for word I’d heard it so many times.

Alice died the next day.

Her estate lawyer called a few weeks later.

She had left me everything—her life savings and a shoebox stuffed to the brim with broaches and colorful costume jewelry.

By the time all her affairs were settled and the lawyer’s office took their cut, I was issued a check for forty-two hundred dollars.

It wouldn’t be much to some. It was everything to me.

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