Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs

4

My morning schedule is practically set in concrete. I get up at 4:00 A.M., splash water on my face, brush my teeth, pull my hair into a ponytail, drag on shorts and a sleeveless T, and jam my feet into clean Keds. By 4:15, I’m out the door, and by 4:20 I’m working my way north calling on all the dog clients. Then I retrace my route and see to all the other pets. I spend about thirty minutes with each pet—there are usually seven or eight, ten at the most—so with traveling time and occasional glitches to slow me down, it’s usually about ten when I’ve fed and groomed and played with the last pet. Then I head to the Village Diner for breakfast. After I’ve convinced my stomach that it isn’t starving to death, I head home for a shower and a nap.

My apartment is above the four-slot carport that I share with my brother and his partner. They live in the two-story frame house where my brother and I grew up with our grandparents. The house and garage apartment are at the end of a twisting lane on the Gulf side of the key, on a hiccup of sandy shore that alternately erodes and rebuilds with shifting currents. That continual shape-shifting makes our property considerably less valuable than most Siesta Key beachfront land and keeps our property taxes in the lower stratospheric reaches.

When my grandparents moved to the key back in the early ’50s, they ordered their frame house from the Sears, Roebuck catalog. The carport was added later, and the apartment wasn’t built until after my brother and I moved in with them. Our father had been killed saving somebody else’s children in a fire, and our mother had run off with another man. I say “run off” because that’s how my grandmother always described her daughter’s desertion. I doubt that she really ran when she left. More likely, she skipped.

I was seven when my father died, and nine when my mother left. My grandfather built the garage apartment when I was about twelve. At the time, he meant it to be guest quarters for visitors from up north. He never dreamed I would end up calling it home.

When I came around the last curve in the drive, I saw Michael and Paco under the carport by Michael’s car. Michael is my brother, two years older than me and my best friend in all the world. A firefighter like our father, Michael is built like a Viking god. He’s strong and steady as one too, and so good-looking that women tend to grow faint when he crosses their line of vision. Too bad for them, because Michael’s heart belongs to Paco, who is an undercover agent with the Special Investigative Bureau of the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department.

As slender and dark as Michael is broad and blond, Paco also gives women hopeless fantasies of turning a gay man straight. His family is Greek-American, but he can pass for just about any nationality, which is a strong asset in his line of work. He’s also a master at disguise, and there have been times when our paths crossed while he was working undercover and I didn’t recognize him. Since I’ve come close to blowing a few drug busts that way, he now gives me a secret hand signal if we meet when he’s in disguise—usually his way of telling me to back the heck off. After thirteen years as my brother-in-love, Paco is almost as dear to me as Michael.

Michael works twenty-four/forty-eight at the firehouse, which means he’s on duty twenty-four hours, then off forty-eight. Paco doesn’t have any set schedule, and Michael and I never question him about where or when he’s working. He wouldn’t tell us if we did, and we’re better off not knowing because we would worry a lot more than we already do.

Michael’s twenty-four-hour duty had ended that morning at eight, and from the looks of the bags of groceries he and Paco were hauling out of his car, he had apparently left the firehouse and hit every supermarket in Sarasota. Michael is the family cook. He’s also the firehouse cook. If it were possible, Michael would be the world’s cook. I don’t think it’s because he loves throwing raw stuff in pots and pans and putting them over heat, I think cooking is merely one step toward his real goal, which is to feed people. With all due respect to the miracles Jesus performed, give Michael a few fish and a little bread, and he’d not only feed multitudes with it, he’d season it and turn it into the best dinner anybody ever ate. Plus he’d give them dessert.

When I pulled my Bronco into its spot, Michael and Paco paused with their arms full of groceries and watched me slide out of the driver’s seat.

I said, “Have I missed a hurricane warning?”

As soon as I said it, I regretted it because it’s not cute to joke about hurricanes in Florida. Especially not in the middle of hurricane season.

Michael said, “I just stocked up on staples. We were running low.”

Behind Michael’s back, Paco rolled his eyes at me because he and I are pretty sure Michael has enough staples to last at least ten years.

I leaned over his car trunk and hoisted out a bushel basket of green beans. “Yeah, I’ve been worried about our green bean supply.”

Paco grinned and headed toward the back door of their house.

Michael said, “I got those at the farmers’ market out on Fruitville. Got some sweet corn too. It’s all organic.” He got a creative light in his eyes just at the thought of what he could do with those green beans and ears of corn.

We all moved across the sandy yard to the house’s wooden deck and into the kitchen, where Ella Fitzgerald was impatiently waiting. She ran first to Michael for a quick cuddle and reassurance that he was going to be home for a long time, and then to Paco to get her ears ruffled. Only then did she deign to wind around my ankles and tell me hello.

Ella is a true calico Persian mix given to me as a kitten by a woman leaving the country. If Ella had never met Michael and Paco, she would have been happy with me, but one look at them and she swooned into their arms the same way most females dream of doing. It probably had as much to do with the smell in their kitchen as their looks. My kitchen smelled like tea bags and bottled water. Michael’s kitchen smelled like love.

While Ella watched from her accustomed stool at the big butcher-block island in the center of the kitchen, I helped put away a few groceries so I wouldn’t look so much like a taker instead of a giver. Then I kissed the top of Ella’s head, promised Michael I wouldn’t be late for dinner, and left them with their organic booty.

I didn’t tell them about the young men coming in Big Bubba’s house looking for a girl named Jaz, or say anything about Hetty Soames hiring Jaz to help her with the new puppy she was raising. For one thing, I was too tired to go into it. For another, Michael tended to get downright paranoid at the first hint of me being involved in anything out of the ordinary. Not that I blamed him, since I’d got tangled up in some fairly bizarre situations in the last year. None of them had been my fault, but Michael thought I was entirely too willing to stick my nose into places it had no business being stuck. That had never been true, of course, and wasn’t true now, but I knew Michael wouldn’t see it that way.

It was strictly to spare him unnecessary worry that I kept quiet about everything that had happened that morning. I thought it was very thoughtful of me.

A long covered porch runs the length of my apartment, with two ceiling fans to stir the air, and a hammock slung in one corner for daydreaming. There’s a glass-topped ice cream table and two chairs next to the porch railing where I can have a snack and look out at waves curling onto the beach. Accordion-pleated metal hurricane shutters cover french doors and double as security bars. As I climbed the stairs, I punched the remote that raises the shutters, and yawned while the shutters folded themselves into the overhead soffit.

Pushing through the french doors, I stepped into my minuscule living room where my grandmother’s green flower-patterned love seat keeps company with a matching club chair. A one-person eating bar separates the living room from a narrow galley kitchen, and a window above the sink looks out at trees behind the apartment. To the left of the living room, my bedroom is barely big enough for a single bed and a slim chest of drawers that hold photographs of Todd and Christy. An air-conditioning unit is set high on the wall under narrow rectangles of glass to let in light.

I flipped the switch to start the AC and headed down the short hallway to my cramped bathroom, pausing at an alcove in the hall to shed my Keds and cat-hairy clothes and toss them in the stacked washer/dryer. I hate wearing sweaty shoes, so I buy Keds the way Michael buys organic produce. I always have several dry pairs waiting, some damp just-washed pairs on a rack above the washer, and some in the washer.

Mexican tile was cool under my bare feet as I padded into the bathroom and turned on the shower. As soon as the fine spray of warm water hit me, I went into a blissful zonked-out state. I must have had a previous lifetime when water was scarce, because every time I’m in a warm shower all my pores start singing hymns of thanksgiving. After air, I think water is God’s best gift to us.

When I was squeaky clean, I slicked back my wet hair, pulled on a terry cloth robe, and fell onto my night-rumpled bed to sleep for a couple of hours. I woke up dry mouthed and a little chilled from sleeping under the AC, so I padded barefoot to the kitchen and made myself a cup of tea. Carrying it in one hand, I flipped on the CD player on the way to my office-closet and let its sly little robot shuffle through a stack of music and surprise me. Smart robot that it is, it selected Billie Holiday’s voice to wrap around me while I took care of the business part of pet sitting.

My office-closet is the only expansive feature of my apartment. I don’t know why my grandfather made it so big, but it’s a good thing he did. It’s square, with two entries. One wall has shelves for my shorts and Ts and the other wall has a desk where I take care of pet-sitting business. A floor-to-ceiling mirror on the wall between the two entry doors magnifies the light and makes the room look even bigger than it is. My meager collection of dresses and skirts hang on the back wall. I don’t dress up much.

My answering machine had a few calls to return, mostly regular clients letting me know when they would need me to take care of their pets, and I made quick work of calling them. Then I got out my big record-keeping book that I always have with me when I make client calls and transferred notes to individual client cards. I take my pet-sitting duties as seriously as I took being a deputy. In some ways, they require the same skills. You have to be smart enough to tell the difference between a situation that requires force and one that requires diplomacy, you have to be quick to respond to unexpected situations, and you have to be patient if somebody upchucks on you.

My clients like the fact that I’ve been a law enforcement officer. Knowing that I can use a gun or disarm a criminal makes them feel more confident about letting me come in their houses while they’re gone. I don’t know how they feel about my crazy time after Todd and Christy were killed. If they know about it, they’re all kind enough not to mention it.

When I finished with my record keeping, I got dressed and took a banana out to the porch and ate it while I looked at distant sailboats on the Gulf and thought about how glad I was that I wasn’t in one. The thing about water and me is that I love having it fall on me in a warm shower and I love looking out at the Gulf’s waves and frothy surf, but I’m not crazy about getting in the Gulf. Not in the flesh or in a boat. The Gulf is too big and powerful for me to control, and that makes me uneasy. Not that I’m a control freak or anything. But if I were given a choice between shooting off into outer space or diving to the bottom of an ocean, I’d take space. At least you can see where you’re going in space, and it’s damn dark at the bottom of the ocean. Besides that, freakish critters live down there, pale things that never see the sun and have weird mouths shaped like flowers. I figure space aliens are similar to us, but sea creatures are bound to be slimy and cold.

Having reminded myself of my deep respect for but aversion to deep water, I went back inside and got my backpack and car keys. It was time to make my afternoon rounds.

Later, I would look back on that afternoon and marvel at how innocent I’d been. While I dithered about scary deep-sea creatures I would never meet, scarier beings were on land and headed my way.