Raining Cat Sitters and Dogs

5

Summer on the key is so hot that going outside between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon is somewhat like crawling inside a pizza oven. By August, the only people who don’t illustrate the meaning of “redneck” are shut-ins or nighttime workers who sleep during the day. The only thing that keeps the key from spontaneously combusting in August are the occasional rain showers which, along with sending people running from tongues of lightning, soak the vegetation and cause steam to rise from the ground. August in Florida is God’s way of reminding us who’s in charge.

Maybe we’re just perverse, but the locals love the heat. We use it to keep visitors away. When out-of-state relatives phone to say they’re thinking of coming to see us, we say, “Oh, gosh, you don’t want to come now! Oooowee, you can’t imagine the heat! It’s just absolutely miserable, not to mention the sand fleas and mosquitoes. Wait until October or November when it’s cooler.”

If we’re convincing enough, they’ll stay away. We already have red necks from the sun and white eyes from fear of hurricanes. Add company to entertain, and it’s just too much.

The sky was clear that afternoon, and heat was rising from the ground in visible shimmering waves. Even cats who never left their air-conditioned homes moved more slowly, as if they felt the need to conserve energy. None of my charges had peed on a houseplant or shredded paper into confetti for me to pick up. When I left them, every pet’s tail was raised in approval. To a pet sitter, a raised tail means “Brava! Encore!” I try to be modest about those raised tails, but I’m secretly proud.

On the way to Big Bubba’s house, I saw Hetty and Ben on the sidewalk chatting with a man and his Beagle. I tapped my horn and waved, and Hetty gave me a big grin. Ben looked hard at me as if he were memorizing my car. Service dogs are so smart, he might have been.

At Big Bubba’s house, sounds of gunshots, sirens, and screaming women blared from his TV, and he was pecking the heck out of a silver bell hanging in his cage. I turned off the TV and looked anxiously at him, hoping he wasn’t freaking out from being left alone for so many hours. African Greys react to living behind bars the same way humans do. Leave them in solitary confinement too long and they become self-destructive.

Cocking his head to give me that weird one-eyed stare that birds do, he said, “Did you miss me?”

“Desperately. Did you miss me?”

“Al-waaaaays! Al-waaaaays!”

I swear sometimes Big Bubba truly seems to be carrying on a conversation, not just repeating sounds he’s heard.

I said, “Your mom probably misses you too. She’s in France, you know, eating at four-star restaurants.”

He didn’t answer, but tilted his head to one side as if he was considering how much a woman would miss him while cruising down a river in the south of France and eating at four-star restaurants.

I took him out of his cage and put him on the floor. He waddled around peering behind the furniture like a suspicious hotel detective looking for unregistered guests. To replace the sunflower seed I’d sent off with Deputy Morgan, I filled a clean jar with seed from a big bag in Reba’s pantry. Then I scraped poop off Big Bubba’s perches, disposed of all the seed hulls and knobs of dried fruit on his cage floor, put down fresh newspaper carpet, washed his food and water dishes, and gave him fresh seeds and fruit. I knew he would immediately set to work throwing nuts and apple slices into his water dish to make it yucky, but I gave him clean water anyway because that’s how I like it.

Until he was free of the allergy to red tide, I didn’t want him to do any strenuous exercise, but I made him do about three minutes of wing flapping. That entailed having him sit on my arm while I moved it rapidly up and down, which meant that I did three minutes of wing flapping too. Then I chased him around the house until I was winded and he was squawking in parrot hilarity.

A pet sitter’s life is just one exciting moment after another.

Pet birds need at least twelve hours of dark silent sleep every night, so the last thing I did was tell him good night and drape his cage with a lightweight dark cover. With him tucked in, I went back down the front steps to the Bronco. I looked, but I didn’t see any ghostly faces peering at me through the dark trees. Maybe Jaz had left town. Maybe she wouldn’t show up at Hetty’s the next day. Maybe those scary boys had left town too.

That’s what I told myself. If I’d been able to, I would have thrown a light cover over myself like Big Bubba’s so I wouldn’t have to see reality.

When I got home, the sun was a golden balloon lightly bouncing on the distant horizon, sending a glittering path across the tops of waves to the shore. Michael and Paco stood on the sand watching it, Michael with his arm slung loosely over Paco’s shoulder. I scurried over and stood on his other side so he could hug me too, and we all waited in awed silence while the sun did its daily flirtation with the sea. Like a coy virgin, it hovered just out of reach, seeming at times to pull upward a bit and then dip slightly toward the lusting sea. Behind it, translucent bands of cerise and violet danced with streaks of turquoise and sparkling yellow. Just when it seemed the sun would hold itself aloof forever, it abruptly changed its mind and fell into the sea’s open arms. Within seconds, it was lost in a watery embrace, and all that was left were rainbow sighs of contentment.

Michael gave me and Paco a little squeeze and we all turned and trooped toward the wooden deck. Michael’s prized steel cooker was smoking and all the extra little gizmos for baking and boiling things were occupied with good-smelling somethings.

Next to Paco and me, Michael loves that grill beyond anything else in the world. He can get rhapsodic pointing out its little side extensions on which you can cook something in a pan—boil potatoes, maybe—while the stuff on the rack grills. And the warming oven below the grill seems miraculous to him. He just loves to warm dinner rolls down there and never fails to mention when he does. Men and outdoor cookers are like men and cars, a mysterious love affair women will never understand.

Michael said, “Ten minutes, tops.”

I said, “Gotcha,” and raced up my stairs two at a time, punching the remote to raise the shutters as I went.

If there’s ever a reality TV show that gives prizes for the fastest shower takers, I’ll enter that sucker and win. The trick is to peel off clothes on the way so you’re already naked when you turn on the water. A squirt of liquid soap on a sponge, a slick up one side and down the other, turn around to rinse all areas, and that’s it. Two minutes tops. Then a quick foot dry to keep from sliding on tile, a fast comb through wet hair and a slick of lip gloss—another two minutes—before a gallop to the closet for fresh clothes while towel-patting exposed damp skin. In nanoseconds I was stepping into clean underwear and pulling on cool white baggy pants and a loose top. No shoes, but I took a second to slide a stretchy coral bracelet on my wrist.

I left the shutters up and clattered down the stairs to the deck where the table was already set for three, with a shallow bowl of gazpacho on each plate. Paco was pouring chilled white wine into two glasses and iced tea into a third. The glass of tea meant Paco would be leaving later on some undercover assignment. I didn’t comment on it. He’s safer if we know nothing about his work, but it’s impossible not to know some things.

Paco gave me a quick once-over the way men do and nodded in silent approval. Cats and dogs wave their tails to applaud, men nod and twitch their eyebrows.

From his beloved grill, Michael said, “Good timing, Dixie. Heat’s just right.”

I went over to a redwood chaise where Ella Fitzgerald was surveying the scene. She wore a kitty harness with a long thin leash attached to one of the chaise legs, and she gave me a glum look when I stooped to kiss the top of her head. Paco had bought the harness and leash after Ella had bounded into the woods behind the house and he’d spent several anxious hours looking for her.

Paco said, “The princess is pouting.”

I said, “She’d pout a lot more if a big critter got her in the woods.”

Michael said, “We’ll eat the gazpacho while dinner cooks.”

Like an artist setting paint on a canvas, he laid thick tuna steaks on the grill, then gave us the kind of beatific smile that only a great chef bestows when everything is going exactly the way he planned.

Paco and I didn’t need encouragement. We hurried to slide into our seats and had our spoons ready by the time Michael joined us. Michael’s gazpacho is absolutely the best in the world, with everything fresh from the farmers’ market and all the flavors blending like an orchestral creation. For a few minutes, the only sounds were the clicks of our spoons against the bowls and my soft whimpers of pleasure. There had been a time when I made those same noises when I made love. But that had been a long time ago.

Paco said, “Gazpacho is what, Spanish?”

Michael did a facial shrug with his eyebrows. “I guess. Or Portugal. Someplace like that.”

Paco said, “Did you ever think how different cultures get connected through food? We’re having gazpacho, somebody in France is eating nachos right now, some Russian is eating pizza. That’s pretty cool.”

Michael said, “Sauerbraten with potato pancakes. Some red cabbage.” He had obviously lost track of the idea and was imagining menus.

Paco said, “I’ve always had a fantasy of going to Greece and meeting distant relatives. We’d sit and talk and they’d feed me roast lamb and stuffed grape leaves and kibbe, and I’d come home feeling as if my boundaries had been extended.”

I said, “I don’t think kibbe is Greek. It’s Lebanese.”

Michael said, “You hungry for lamb? Why didn’t you say so? I’ll make you some.”

Paco grinned. “No, doofus, that’s not what I meant. I’m just talking about how food connects us to thousands of relatives we’ve never met. They’re all over the world, but we eat the same food they eat. You have relatives in Norway, probably in England too, or God knows where, and I probably have Cypriot cousins. If one of my Greek ancestors married an Irish woman and moved to Russia, I may have Greek-Irish-Russian relatives. Heck, we’re probably all related to one another in some way.”

We all fell silent at the enormity of the idea. My gosh, everybody in the world could be distant relatives of one another. Boy, talk about a family tree!

When the gazpacho was all gone, Paco gathered the bowls while Michael checked the tuna steaks and peered at the stuff on the grill’s side cookers. I didn’t do diddly, just sat there like royalty and let two gorgeous men wait on me.

The tuna was cooked to perfection, and the side stuff turned out to be some of the corn and green beans Michael had got that morning. There was also mango-and-papaya salsa for the tuna. All in all, a dinner fit for royalty.

We chatted idly while we ate, but nothing important. Michael said the latest news report said the red tide had drifted away from us, so the fumes weren’t a problem anymore. I said Big Bubba would be happy about that because he preferred his outdoor cage. Paco asked who Big Bubba was, so I told him about Reba being in France eating at four-star restaurants. We all agreed that four-star or not, she probably wasn’t getting food as good as what we were eating.

They didn’t ask me if I’d had any scary encounters with strangers, and they probably didn’t even wonder if I had. I mean, why would they? I didn’t ask Paco why he’d been home all day, or when he would be on duty again, but I did wonder. Loving people means you let them have certain secrets they don’t share with you.

After dinner, Michael and I cleared the table while Paco took a little plate of tuna to Ella. She was still sulking, so he had to sweet-talk her until she condescended to hop from the chaise to the deck floor and eat his peace offering. Michael and I grinned at each other because Paco deals with the dregs of humanity without showing a shred of sympathy, but guilt at cramping Ella’s style with a leash had reduced him to pleading with her to eat twenty-dollar-a-pound tuna.

In the kitchen, I loaded the dishwasher and helped Michael stow left overs in the refrigerator. Then I hugged him good night and headed for bed, with a detour to tell Paco and Ella good night. Paco had stretched out on the chaise and Ella was sitting on his chest purring at him, so I guess she’d forgiven him for trying to keep her safe.

Upstairs, I lowered the storm shutters, checked phone messages, brushed my teeth, and shed my clothes. By nine o’clock, I was in bed with a book. By ten o’clock, I’d turned out the lights and was asleep. When you get up at four A.M., bedtime comes early.

In my sleep, I heard the subdued purring sound of Paco’s Harley, and knew that he was headed for some undercover job.

It was after one when I woke to the sound of somebody banging on the hurricane shutters and screaming my name. I shot out of bed in a momentary panic. It took a few seconds to get my bearings and recognize the voice hysterically shouting my name.