I don’t believe in angels. Really, I don’t. Sometimes, it’s hard to believe in much of anything. But there I was in the cups and glasses aisle of Goodwill, and I may have met one — an angel, that is.

Angels have a puckish sense of humor, it seems. They like to play against type.

According to the pictures tacked to the walls of my childhood Sunday school, angels are fair-skinned, blue-eyed beings with Hollywood good looks. But in a divine lesson on the futility of stereotyping, my Goodwill angel was in a Chinese or South Seas guise with long, gray cornrows of hair squeezing from beneath a scruffy knitted cap. Her clothes were shabby. Her coat bristled with pet hair. No wings, no halo, no harp. Nothing to give her away.

She said she was an artist. I don’t know how it came up. We were looking at coffee mugs at the time. She was holding a brightly colored Mary Engelbreit mug that sported some inspirational quote. I had just seen one that said “Friends are Forever.” And I was frozen.

Just a few days earlier, my dearest childhood friend had died unexpectedly. Goodwill was to be my distraction — second-hand therapy, as it were — but it was a bad choice considering Jackie and I loved to shop there together. Already I’d imagined her car in the parking lot. I’d spotted her bread-maker (just like the one we found together at a yard sale) on a shelf. The rodeo chaps I’d tried on two days before Halloween still hung on the rack. Jackie took pictures and encouraged me to buy them. Zombie cowboy, she said.

Like the angel, Jackie was an artist. But Jackie’s art was her voice. As far back as fourth grade at Wolfle Elementary, she stunned us all with the beauty and power of her singing. As an adult, Jackie earned her master’s degree in music and taught voice privately and at the college level. She performed in operas and musical theater from the St. Moritz Choral Festival to Seattle’s 5th Avenue. Her soprano was as sharp and seraphic as St. Michael’s sword.

Singing was Jackie’s gift, but her family was her life. And her friends were her second family.

So there I was at Goodwill, overcome by a mug with a message I knew to be a lie. The little woman with the cornrows and cilice continued her thought.“I like to paint clouds,” she said. “You see all kinds of pictures in clouds. Sometimes you see faces, since clouds are close to heaven.”

Having delivered her message, the angel vanished. Well, not really vanished. She put the Engelbreit mug in her shopping cart and shuffled off. It was then I began to suspect her true identity.

I want there to be angels. I want there to be heaven. There should be a heaven for Jackie.

Don’t get me wrong — Jackie was no angel, even though she sang like one. She was never, ever boring. But she was also kind, loving, funny, and my best friend. She wanted to be happy.

Jackie deserved better from life. In death, she deserves heaven. I watch the clouds.

— Contact Wendy Tweten at wendy@wendytweten.com