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

11

On the way home, Ray Charles was still in my head singing “You don’t know me,” while I beat time on the steering wheel and grinned at the contradiction of a wide-hipped Silverado pickup with a gun rack in the back and a RAPTURE! sticker on the bumper. Florida is an Old Testament state where God walks with us in the cool of the evening. But he tells us not to get too smart, not to eat of the tree of knowledge, or we will die. And all around us, a sibilant sea whispers the soul’s terrifying truth: “If you eat of the tree, you will not die.” It’s no wonder so many of us are gun-toting fundamentalists.

At home, I pulled into the carport just as the sun plunged into the Gulf in a final burst of Technicolor glory. Paco was on the deck with Ella in his arms watching the show, and I trotted over to join them. Only Paco could manage to look slim and fit in slouchy black sweatpants and a floppy white T-shirt. The pants even accentuated the fact that he has the most gorgeous butt in the universe.

Gorgeous butt or not, he looked lonely.

He slung his free arm over my shoulder and we stood taking in the floating sky banners of turquoise and hot pink and orange. We didn’t speak until the colors had finally faded and the sun’s glittering path from horizon to shore disappeared.

As the surf wrote frothy messages on the sand, Paco said, “Have you eaten?”

“No, and I’m starving.”

“Me too.”

We both sighed in unison. Without Michael to feed us, we were like newly hatched chicks without a mother.

Paco said, “There’s some turkey and stuff in the fridge.”

I said, “We could make sandwiches.”

We both perked up. Sandwiches weren’t as good as what Michael would have fed us, but we had solved the dinner problem, and we had each other.

I said, “I’ll be down in ten minutes,” and loped upstairs.

Ten minutes later, I skipped down barefoot and still slightly damp from a speed shower, but decently covered in elastic-waist cotton pants and an oversized T-shirt, a female version of what Paco wore.

In the kitchen, Ella was perched on her stool looking wistfully at the spread on the butcher-block island. Paco had hauled out everything remotely related to sandwich making, and was crouched in front of the refrigerator poking into its innards.

He said, “I can’t find the horseradish mustard.”

“On the door. What kind of beer do you have?”

He held up a dark glass bottle with a long neck. “Some exotic stuff Michael got at the Sarasota Brewing Company. You can have Golden Wheat, Midnight Pass Porter, or Sunset Red.”

“Ooh, cool. I’ll have the porter.”

I got plates and made room for them by shoving aside cutting boards holding sliced turkey and ham, sliced tomatoes and onions. There was a loaf of pumpernickel bread and one of rye, along with jars of mayonnaise, three kinds of mustard, two kinds of pickles, black and green olives, several varieties of relish, both mild and hot salsa, and some things I didn’t recognize. Also chips, both potato and corn. We could have fed half of Siesta Key.

We took seats and fell on the food like happy cannibals, smearing big globs of mayonnaise and mustard on bread and layering on meat and condiments to hoggish heights. Being a lady, I daintily cut my sandwich in half, on the diagonal. Paco just held his carefully so nothing would slip out the bottom. For a few minutes, the only sound was the crunch of crisp pickles and snap of chips.

After a while, I said, “You know the woman I told you about? The one with the sadistic surgeon husband?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, he’s found her. This morning I overheard them talking. He was scary.”

“All the more reason for you to stay out of it. That woman’s situation sounds like a plane crash about to happen.”

“She needs a friend, Paco. That’s all I’m offering.”

“Sounds to me like she needs a good lawyer. Maybe a good shrink.”

“Just because she left her husband doesn’t make her crazy.”

“I’m just saying she needs more help than you can give her.”

I couldn’t argue with that, so we chewed for a few more minutes without talking.

But I’m the one who, when I was five years old and made to sit in a corner in kindergarten because I talked too much, told my mother that if you went too long without talking all your mouth bones would grow together. I don’t have any trouble with silence if I’m alone, but when another person is present, my mouth is still afraid all its bones will fuse if I don’t speak.

I said, “You know those songs or commercials that get stuck in your head?”

“They’re called ear worms. Comes from some German word that sounds like ear worms and means the same thing. Don’t remember what it is.”

“Huh. Well, I’ve got one. I keep hearing Ray Charles singing ‘You don’t know me.’ That’s all. Just ‘You don’t know me’ over and over. It’s making me nuts.”

“Yeah, I hate those things. I hate commercial jingles the most. One time when I was on a stakeout, I kept hearing a voice say, Raid kills bugs dead. All the damn night long, I heard that commercial.”

I drained the last of my porter and set the bottle on the butcher block.

“The little boy who had surgery hasn’t waked up yet. Surgery was at seven this morning. Shouldn’t he be awake by now?”

Paco’s dark eyes studied me. “You said he’s three years old, right?”

My throat worked for a moment in a vain attempt to deny his implicit meaning, but I knew he was right.

I said, “Okay.”

In the shorthand communication that develops between people who love and support one another, he was telling me that I was seeing my three-year-old daughter in Jeffrey, seeing her crushed skull every time I thought of Jeffrey’s brain surgery, feeling the edges of the same cold anguish I’d felt when Christy was killed. He had warned me not to do that anymore, and I had agreed to stop. Those unspoken codes may be the best thing about families.

I helped Paco put away all the leftovers and tidy up the kitchen, then blew kisses at him and Ella and went upstairs to bed. As I fell asleep, Ray Charles was still softly singing in the shadows of my mind.

“You don’t know me,” he said, “You don’t know me.”