Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof: A Dixie Hemingway Mystery

9

At the diner, Judy was too busy to talk, but she was quick with the coffee. After she poured the first cup she stepped back to let a young Hispanic man carrying a bright-eyed baby boy in a plastic carrier pass, and for a second he and Judy did one of those sidestepping routines in which each offers right-of-way to the other. While that went on, the baby and I smiled at each other and he waggled his bare feet in innocent ecstasy at being cute and lovable. I tapped one of his plump little brown toes with my finger, and he laughed before his father moved forward and took the baby out of my reach. It’s just disgusting what a pushover I am for babies.

Judy hurried away as a middle-aged man and a dewy-eyed young woman—probably office workers taking an early lunch—stopped at the empty booth across the aisle. The girl slid into the booth’s bench seat, and the man hesitated a moment as if he might slide in next to her. Flushing, she quickly put her handbag on the seat, and he sat down across from her. A strand of hair had fallen forward over her face. As if it couldn’t help itself, his hand floated across the space between them and smoothed the errant hair away from her brow. She looked startled, and he jerked his hand back in a shamed spasm. He wore a wedding band. She wore a look that said she might soon change jobs.

By nature’s design, men have the same response to pretty girls that women have to babies. They are compelled to touch them, caress their soft skin, inhale their scent. Lust and tender yearning are two facets of the same diamond.

Judy slid my breakfast in front of me. “Tanisha says hi.”

I looked up and waved a thank-you at Tanisha’s shiny black face smiling at me through the opening to the kitchen. Tanisha is wide as a bus from eating her own cooking, so she took up most of the opening.

As usual, she had done my breakfast exactly the way I like it—two eggs over easy, extra-crispy home fries, and a biscuit. No bacon, because I have a bacon monitor in my head that knows how much bacon I can eat without ending up big as Tanisha. Some days I tell the monitor to mind its own business, but only when I really, really need fried fat to ease my soul.

Judy scooted away and left me to enjoy my breakfast. The man and the girl across the aisle were busy eating now, neither looking at the other or talking. A little bacon might have made them both feel better.

I ate as fast as I could, dropped money on the table, and waved goodbye to Judy and Tanisha. My mind and body were screaming for sleep.

Except for sloshing surf and squawking seabirds, everything was quiet when I got home. The parakeets were having a siesta, and only a few bored shorebirds ambled along the sand. The day seemed to have lasted a week or two, and my Keds made weary shuffling sounds as I dragged myself up the stairs to my apartment.

Ella was waiting for me inside the French doors, which meant that Paco had brought her up before he went off to catch a drug dealer or nab a bank robber or do whatever his job of the day was. I picked her up and kissed her nose, feeling better the instant I heard her start to purr. That’s the neat thing about cats. You can be feeling like yesterday’s cold oatmeal, and the sound of a cat’s purring just because you’re there makes you feel like you might be worth something after all. She blinked cat code for I love you and then twisted out of my arms and leaped to the floor, where she proceeded to hike her back leg in the air and gnaw at the base of her tail.

That’s another neat thing about cats. They don’t waste time in feel-good sentiment when there’s an itch that needs attention.

I stood for a while under warm water and then fell naked into bed and oblivion. I woke up annoyed at myself for going into a funk over things that were, to be honest about it, none of my business. I was a pet sitter, not a surgeon or social worker. That being the case, I needed to keep my mind on my own life and not indulge in the ego trip of taking on other people’s problems.

I told myself that Jeffrey had excellent surgeons and caring parents. I told myself that Laura was an intelligent woman with a family she could call for any support she needed. I told myself that no matter how much I sympathized, I actually couldn’t make any difference in what either of them was going through.

With that determined, I got up and padded naked to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Carrying the tea to my closet-office, I flipped on the CD player to let Patsy Cline’s no-nonsense, no-equivocation, no-shit voice break the silence. That’s what I needed, less of my own morbid thoughts and more of Patsy Cline’s soul. While I whipped through the clerical parts of my business, Ella sat on my desk and tapped her tail in sympathy for Patsy Cline falling to pieces at the sight of an old lover.

After we were done with record-keeping and grooving on the heartbreak of love, I hauled out the vacuum cleaner and sucked up all the dust in my apartment. I scrubbed my bathroom shiny too, until I was high on Clorox fumes. All the time I did it, I heard my grandmother’s voice saying, “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” which annoyed the heck out of me because it reminded me that I’ve become as much a cleanliness freak as she was. I swear, all those bromides that mothers and grandmothers repeat must change a person’s DNA.

Nevertheless, I felt in control of my little corner of the world when I’d got my environment clean and neat. I almost swaggered when I put away the vacuum. Then I ambled to the closet-office and pulled on a satin thong. I put on a bra too, because I would see Pete later and I didn’t want to give him shortness of breath.

I still had some time before I had to leave for my afternoon rounds, so I took Ella out to Michael’s deck for a spirited session of chase-the-peacock-feather. Watching a moving peacock feather arouses a cat’s innate hunting instincts, so I buy peacock feathers by the dozen. Both of us were a little winded when I got my grooming kit and put Ella on the plank table. Being a Persian mix, she has medium-long coarse hair with an undercoat that can knot up, so she needs to be groomed every day.

As soon as I put her on the table and got out my brush, a squirrel with an exquisitely buoyant tail scampered to the foot of the old oak at the edge of the deck. He picked up an acorn in his paws, turned a backward somersault and came up still holding the acorn. While Ella and I stared at him in round-eyed admiration, he scampered up the tree trunk and disappeared in the branches.

I said, “My gosh, squirrels must be the clowns of the animal kingdom.”

Ella said, “Thrrripp!” She didn’t exactly shrug, but she sounded as if she thought it was time to talk about her and not about a squirrel.

Like all cats, Ella likes her throat brushed more than anything in the world, so I started there. Careful not to tilt my slicker brush and bite her skin, I ran it down her throat while Ella stretched her neck and closed her eyes, swooning at the pleasure of it. It took just a few seconds more to move down her chest and under her arms, back to her throat for a couple of soothing strokes, and to the outside of her front legs. Then a quick pass over the top of her head and neck, a cat’s second most favorite grooming spot, a few strokes down both her sides while I ran a protective finger down her spine, and then her bloomers.

For a second, my mind drifted to Jeffrey, but I jerked it away as if it were a dog on a leash going somewhere dangerous and forbidden. Like his parents, I had to believe Jeffrey would come through the surgery with no problems. I had to believe the surgery would completely end his seizures. The alternatives were too terrible to even contemplate.

I finished grooming Ella with a fast flick around her tail and a couple of final strokes down her throat. To distribute natural oils to the tips of her hair and make her coat shiny and smooth, I quickly passed a soft-bristled brush all over her body. All fluffed up, she was a glorious burst of technicolor beauty, and I told her so.

Ella preened contentedly. Deep in her kitty heart, Ella believes she’s the most beautiful creature alive. I like that about cats. They don’t compare themselves with other cats. They don’t talk themselves into feeling dumb or ugly or fat or thin, they just enjoy feeling gorgeous. Too bad humans don’t do that.

I put Ella in Michael’s kitchen, made sure she had fresh water in her bowl, and gave her a goodbye kiss on the nose. Then I went outside, spritzed the table with my handy-dandy water and Clorox mixture, and headed out in the Bronco for my afternoon rounds.

As I drove, I caught myself humming a tune and beating time to it on the steering wheel. The lyrics had been in my head all morning, as if I had a jukebox in my brain and somebody had fed it a lot of coins. Actually, it was just the first line of a song’s lyrics. My grandmother had always maintained that each of us has an invisible Guide who is always with us, and the Guide communicates with us by directing our attention to book titles or billboard signs or song lyrics. I’m not sure I believe the Guide idea, but I have noticed that my mind has a way of knowing things before I’m aware of them, and lots of times I don’t catch on until I hear my own voice singing some song I hadn’t thought of in years. This time it was “You don’t know me.”

Silly thing to hear over and over, but I couldn’t shake it.