When her mother died, Alana took a leave of absence from her position with the company where she’d been a loyal and valuable asset for more than 25 years and packed up her dog, Howard, and what personal belongings she felt she could not replace easily, into her Jeep Cherokee, which until that day she’d considered ridiculously large for a single woman who rarely ventured much beyond the neighborhood Safeway.

            After 20 minutes, though, she was forced to pull into a Walmart parking lot to rearrange the small mountain, the entire load having shifted when she was changing the radio station and took a curve in the road too sharply.

            So, maybe her mother was right after all and having a big-ass SUV like a Cherokee might come in handy. If she’d bought something smaller, like the Prius she’d wanted, both she and Howard would probably be statistics in some actuary’s spreadsheet as a result of the Great Avalanche. She knew. It was the position she’d taken leave from.

            She pulled out the Walmart parking lot, satisfied she’d organized the Mount Luggage sufficiently, but furious that once again her mother had been right.

            Couldn’t she be right just once?

            Alana sighed and wished for the hundredth time that day for the serenity to accept the things she could not change.

Like her mother.

            It wasn’t that she didn’t love her mother, and it wasn’t that she wasn’t grieving her loss, which she most certainly was. It was that, well, they’d never really connected. All her life, she’d wished for a different relationship with her mother. Something warm and embracing and accepting.

            Yeah, accepting. That was it.

            And it wasn’t that her mother, the flamboyant painter and lover of all things exotic, didn’t approve of Alana, so much as she didn’t know what to think of the daughter who she regarded sadly as, well, rather dull.

            And not that that wasn’t true, either, Alana thought. She was dull. Always had been.

            Like the pool parties. All of her mother’s friends whooping it up and drinking and having fun, when Alana needed them to leave so she could swim her laps.

            Which she still did every day. No matter what. Even in the 30-foot pool in her condo’s common area. One mile. 176 laps.

            Why? Why couldn’t her mother just have loved her for who she was, instead of wishing she’d been someone else?

            Alana arrived at her mother’s house well after dark and unloaded her Jeep Cherokee and fed Howard and let him out the back door, then changed into her swimsuit and walked out the patio door and past the Olympic-sized pool her mother had installed when Alana was on her high school swim team and took the path to the beach and eased herself into the near frozen lake and swam off into the darkness.

            Ten days later, Howard, sadly, was euthanized in the local animal shelter.