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

10

At Tom Hale’s condo, Tom was at the kitchen table working on tax returns. He called hello to me and I yelled back, but I didn’t stay to chat because Tom and I both had work to do. Besides, I thought Tom might be embarrassed to have told me about his personal problems with Frannie, and I knew I was embarrassed to have been so blatant about how I felt about the woman. We both needed a bit of distance for a few days, the same way I needed distance from Laura for a few days.

I seemed to have become the sort of person who knew so much about my friends’ private business that I couldn’t be friendly to them anymore.

My afternoon went fast because two clients had returned home that day, one the human of a Siamese couple, and the other the human of an orange Shorthair. All I had to do was pop in to make sure they had indeed returned as planned, collect a check, and be on my way. Two white Persians, Stella and Marie, were almost as easy. The cats were sisters, so content with each other’s company that they deemed me important only as the human who combed them and put out food for them. While I ran the vacuum to pick up hair they had flung on the carpet, Stella sat on the windowsill looking longingly at the birds around the feeder, and Marie lay on the sofa watching a kitty video of darting fish. When I told them goodbye, they both turned their heads and gave me languid looks of total disinterest.

Mazie was my last call of the day, and I rang the doorbell with dread nibbling the back of my neck. Both Pete and Mazie answered, and the minute I saw Pete’s worried face, I braced myself for whatever bad news he had about Jeffrey. Mazie looked as distressed as Pete, with the corners of her mouth downturned and sad. She looked sharply at me, sighed heavily, then stepped back to let me in.

Pete said, “She was hoping you were somebody else.” He said somebody else in the tone people use when they’re trying to speak in code so a child won’t understand.

I said, “Sorry, Mazie, it’s just me.”

Pete’s saxophone was out of the case and lying on a chair. He held a child’s picture book in his hand, a finger crooked into it to hold his place.

He said, “I’ve been reading to her. She seems to like it.”

He didn’t mention playing the saxophone for her, but I suspected he had been doing that too.

I looked at the book and laughed. It was The Cat in the Hat.

I said, “That was Christy’s favorite story. She loved Dr. Seuss.”

It was amazing how that had just popped out of my mouth, flowing out easily, not choked by sobs or hoarse from a closed throat. I had been doing that a lot lately, mentioning Christy or Todd easily and casually. It was a strange and bittersweet feeling to be able to do that.

Pete said, “Hal called. The boy’s still out from the anesthesia.”

“Maybe that’s normal.”

“I don’t think so. I think he should be awake by now. Hal said the doctors keep coming in to check on him.”

“Well, they would anyway.”

Mazie raised her head and looked back and forth at us, like a spectator at a tennis match. Then she heaved another huge sigh. When a dog sighs a lot, it’s a sure sign of stress. In this case, it was also a sure sign that Mazie knew that neither Pete nor I knew diddly about what was normal for a three-year-old after brain surgery.

I got her leash and jingled it. “Let’s go for a walk, okay?”

Like a dutiful soldier, she hiked with me down the driveway to the sidewalk. We hesitated there, both of us uncertain which way we wanted to go. As if we had held a discussion about it and came to the same decision, we both turned at the same moment and walked toward Laura’s house. As we passed it, we turned our heads and peered through the shielding trees, but we didn’t see any sign of Laura.

I wondered if Laura’s defiance with her husband that morning had been an act. I wondered if she were inside her house needing a friend to talk to. I was her friend, or at least wanted to be, but I couldn’t ring her doorbell and say, “This morning I hid behind some bushes and eavesdropped on you and your husband. Want to talk about it?”

No, the best thing to do was to wait a day or two and ask her to have dinner with me. Then, if she wanted to tell me what was going on with her husband, we could talk.

At the end of the block, Mazie and I stopped to look at a couple of great blue herons standing at the base of a power pole. They were watching a fish hawk atop the pole. The fish hawk was downing a flopping mullet, and the herons were waiting to catch the leftovers.

Mazie made a wuffing sound and sat down with her tail wagging, probably a form of doggie applause for such a sensible display. Nature is neither squeamish nor wasteful. In the animal kingdom, every creature aids and is aided by every other creature. Humans, on the other hand, haven’t evolved yet enough to do that.

When the show was over, Mazie got up and walked back home with me. It seemed to me that the corners of her mouth were raised a bit, not in a smile exactly, but not in the morose look she’d had before. I felt more positive too. It’s good to be reminded of nature’s intelligence. Even when we can’t see it in our own lives, it’s still there.

As Mazie and I went past Laura’s house, I didn’t even look toward it.

I will never know if it would have changed anything if I had gone to her door right then.