Buy А Whisker

Elvis regarded breakfast with disdain.

“Oh, c’mon,” I said, leaning my elbows on the countertop. “It’s not that bad.”

He narrowed his eyes at me, and I think he would have raised a skeptical eyebrow if he’d had real eyebrows—he didn’t since he wasn’t the King of Rock and Roll or even a person. He was just a small black cat who thought he was a person and as such should be treated like royalty.

“We could make a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich,” I said. “That was the real Elvis’s favorite.”

The cat meowed sharply, his way of reminding me that as far as he was concerned, he was the real Elvis and peanut butter and banana sandwiches were not his favorite breakfast food.

I looked at the food I’d pulled out of the cupboard: two dry ends of a loaf of bread, a banana that was more brown than it was yellow, and a container of peanut butter, which I knew didn’t actually have so much as a spoonful left inside because I’d eaten it all the previous evening—with a spoon—while watching Jeopardy! with the cat. It wasn’t my idea of a great breakfast either, but there wasn’t anything else to eat in the house.

“I forgot to go to the store,” I said, feeling somewhat compelled to explain myself to the cat, who continued to stare unblinkingly at me from his perch on a stool at the counter.

Elvis knew that it wouldn’t have mattered if I had bought groceries. I couldn’t cook. My mother had tried to teach me. So had my brother and my grandmother. My grandmother’s friend Rose was the most recent person to take on the challenge of teaching me how to cook. We weren’t getting anywhere. Rose kept having to simplify things for me, as she discovered I had very few basic skills.

“How did you pass the Family Living unit in school?” Charlotte, another of Gram’s friends had asked after my last lesson in Rose’s sunny small kitchen. Charlotte had been a school principal, so she knew I’d had to take a basic cooking class in middle school. She’d been eyeing my attempt at meat loaf, which I’d just set onto an oval platter, and which I’d been pretty sure I’d be able to use as a paving stone out in the garden once the backyard dried up.

I’d wiped my hands on my apron and blown a stray piece of hair off my face. “The school decided to give me a pass, after the second fire.”

“Second fire?” Charlotte had said.

“It wasn’t my fault.” I couldn’t help the defensive edge to my voice. “Well, the sprinklers going off wasn’t my fault.”

“Of course it wasn’t, darling girl,” Rose had said, her voice muffled because her head had been in the oven. She had been cleaning remnants of exploded potatoes off the inside.

“They weren’t calibrated properly,” I’d told Charlotte, feeling the color rise in my cheeks.

“I’m sure they weren’t.” The corners of her mouth had twitched and I could tell she had struggled not to smile.

Tired now of waiting for breakfast, Elvis jumped down from the stool, made his way purposefully across the kitchen and stopped in front of the cupboard where I kept his cat food. He put one paw on the door and turned to look at me.

I pushed away from the counter and went over to him. I grabbed a can of Tasty Tenders from the cupboard. “Okay, you can have Tasty Tenders, and I’ll have the peanut butter and banana sandwich.” I reached down to stroke the top of his head.

He licked his lips and pushed his head against my hand.

I got Elvis his breakfast and a bowl of fresh water. He started eating, and I eyed the two dry crusts and brown banana. The cat’s food looked better than mine.

I reached for the peanut butter jar, hoping that maybe there was somehow enough stuck to the bottom to spread on at least one slice of bread, and then there was a knock on my door.

Elvis lifted his head and looked at me. “Mrrr,” he said.

“I heard,” I said, heading for the living room. It wasn’t seven o’clock, but I was pretty sure I knew who it was at the door.

And I was right. Rose was standing there, holding a plate with a bowl upside down like a cover. “Good morning, dear,” she said. She held out the plate. “I’m afraid my eyes were a little bit bigger than my stomach this morning. Would you be a dear and finish this for me? I hate to waste food.” She smiled at me, her gray eyes the picture of guilelessness.

I folded my arms over my chest. “You know, if you don’t tell the truth, your nose is going to grow.”

Rose lifted one hand and smoothed her index finger across the bridge of her nose. “I have my mother’s nose,” she said. “Not to sound vain, but it is perfectly proportioned.” She paused. “And petite.” She offered the plate again.

“You’re spoiling me.”

“No, I’m not,” she retorted. “Spoiling implies that your character has been somehow weakened, and that’s not at all true.”

I shook my head and took the plate from her. It was still warm. I could smell cinnamon and maybe cheese.

There was no point in ever arguing with Rose. It was like arguing with an alligator. There was no way it was going to end well.

“Come in,” I said, heading back to the kitchen with my food. I set the plate on the counter and lifted the bowl. Underneath, I found a mound of fluffy scrambled eggs, tomatoes that had been fried with onions and some herbs I couldn’t identify, and a bran muffin studded with raisins. Rose was a big believer in a daily dose of fiber.

It all looked even better than it smelled, and it smelled wonderful.

Rose was leaning forward, talking to Elvis. She was small but mighty, barely five feet tall in her sensible shoes, with her white hair in an equally sensible short cut.

I bent down and kissed the top of her head as I moved around her to get a knife and fork. “I love you,” I said. “Thank you.”

“I love you too, dear,” she said, “and thank you for helping me out.”

Okay, so we were going to continue with the fiction that Rose had cooked too much food for breakfast. “Could I get you a cup of . . .” I looked around the kitchen. I was out of coffee and tea. And milk. “Water?” I finished.

“No, thank you,” Rose said. “I already had my tea.”

I speared some egg and a little of the tomatoes and onions with my fork. “Ummm, that’s good,” I said, putting a hand to my face because I was talking around a mouthful of food. Elvis was at my feet, looking expectantly up at me. I picked up a tiny bit of the scrambled egg with my fingers and offered it to him.

He took it, ate and then cocked his head at Rose and meowed softly.

“You’re very welcome,” she said.

“Why don’t my eggs taste like this?” I asked, reaching for the muffin. Scrambled eggs were one of the few things I could make more or less successfully.

“I don’t know.” Rose looked around my kitchen. Aside from the two crusts of bread, the empty peanut butter jar, and the mushy banana on the counter, it was clean and neat. Since I rarely cooked, it never got messy. “How do you cook your eggs?”

I shrugged and broke the muffin in half. “In a bowl in the microwave.”

She gave her head a dismissive shake. “You need a cast-iron skillet if you want to make decent eggs.” She smiled at me. “Alfred and I will take you shopping this weekend.”

I nodded, glad that my mouth was full so I didn’t have to commit to a shopping trip with Rose and her gentleman friend, Alfred Peterson.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like Mr. P. I did. When Rose had been evicted from Legacy Place, the seniors’ building she derisively referred to as “Shady Pines,” I’d let her move in to the small apartment at the back of my old Victorian. Mr. P. had generously made a beautiful cat tower for Elvis as a thank-you to me. He was kind and smart, and he adored Rose. I didn’t even mind—that much—that Alfred had the sort of computer-hacking skills that were usually seen in a George Clooney movie and that he was usually using them over my Wi-Fi.

It was just that I knew if I went shopping with the two of them, I was apt to come home with one of every kitchen gadget that could be found in North Harbor, Maine. Rose had made it her mission in life to teach me to cook, no matter how impossible I was starting to think that was. And Mr. P. had already—gently, because he was unfailingly polite—expressed his dismay over the fact that I didn’t have a French press in my kitchen.

Rose smiled at me again. “Enjoy your breakfast,” she said. “I need to go clean up my kitchen.”

“Do you want to drive to Second Chance with me?” I asked. “Or Mac and I can come and get you when we’re ready to head out to Edison Hall’s place.”

Rose worked part-time for me at my store, Second Chance. Second Chance was a repurpose shop. It was part antiques store and part thrift shop. We sold furniture, dishes, quilts—many things repurposed from their original use, like the teacups we’d turned into planters and the tub chair that in its previous life had actually been a bathtub.

Our stock came from a lot of different places: flea markets, yard sales, people looking to downsize. I bought fairly regularly from a couple of trash pickers. Several times in the past year that the store had been open, we’d been hired to go through and handle the sale of the contents of someone’s home—usually someone who was going from a house to an apartment. This time we were going to clean out the property of Edison Hall.

Calling the old man a pack rat was putting it nicely. Rose and Mac were going with me to get started on the house, along with Elvis because I’d heard rustling in several of the rooms in the old house, and I was certain it hadn’t been the wind in the eaves.