The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas

12

When I got home, Michael’s car was in the carport, but I didn’t go inside the house to talk to him. I didn’t trust myself not to blurt out all that had gone on. If I did, I’d create worries for Michael. I chuckled a little bit to myself when I thought what Reba would say about the way Michael worried about me and Paco. With our irresponsible mother, Michael had been protecting me all his life. The poor guy was probably addicted to the chemicals his brain cranked out every time he worried about somebody he loved.

I trudged up the stairs to my apartment, using the remote to raise the electric shutters over my French doors. The sun was directly overhead, but my porch’s roof kept it from being blazing hot. A cardinal couple cooling their feathers on the porch railing watched me open the French doors and go inside. I lowered the shutters over the doors, plunging my apartment back into cavelike dimness. Except for the glass doors, the only light in my apartment comes from a small window over my kitchen sink and a narrow stretch of glass near the ceiling in my bedroom. An AC unit is wedged into an opening cut for it in my bedroom wall.

Shedding clothes like a cat shedding hair, I went straight to the bathroom and stood under a warm shower. Then I pulled on a terrycloth robe and fell into the rumpled bed I’d left that morning at four o’clock. My day had already lasted eight hours, and it had barely started.

I was asleep before I’d got my arms and legs arranged for it. I dreamed I was walking up a narrow mountain trail. On one side of me was a rough mountain wall with granite protrusions I had to duck to keep from hitting. On the other side was nothing, just space. I could see clouds below me, and what looked suspiciously like the moon. I turned a corner, and the trail came to an abrupt end. A red door with shiny gold hinges was set in the mountain face. The door had a golden doorknob. I reached for it, but the door flew open before I touched it, and a narrow red carpet unrolled before me. It marked a passageway to a tall throne at the far end of a cavernous room lit by millions of flickering birthday-cake candles set in little rosebud holders. The candles were pink.

On each side of the carpet were brown frogs in satin livery—white waistcoats and orange pants, and emerald green cummerbunds around their waists. They were frisky frogs, and as I walked forward they leaped and danced like Baryshnikov, clicking their heels together in midair and doffing white satin top hats while they sang in smooth harmony. I could not make out the words to the song because I didn’t speak frog, and my ignorance of the language bothered me. As I got closer to the throne, I could see that a large black frog sat on it. I knew he was a king because he had a gold crown on his head and he was dressed all in white satin—tight pants, fitted vest, white satin cravat knotted at his neck, little white satin ballet slippers on his feet.

I walked to the very end of the carpet and looked up at the king.

He said, “What do you want?”

I said, “Well, sir—”

His bulgy eyes swelled and he yelled, “Do I look like a sir? Don’t be calling me sir, I’m a king!”

So I said, “Forgive me, Your Majesty. I just want to know—”

He said, “You want to know! You want to know! Always you want to know! You always want to know, don’t you?”

I said, “Well, I just—”

“I know,” he said, “you want to know the future. You want to know what’s coming.”

He leaned forward, and his eyes were like big yellow balloons about to pop.

“You know what, sister? You waste all your todays wanting to see tomorrow.”

The other frogs leaped on me, and I shoved at them, struggling to get free.

I woke up kicking and grunting, with my robe twisted around my legs and one of the sleeve edges caught under my body so my arm couldn’t move. My heart was pounding and I was breathing fast and my skin was still puckered from the clammy feel of frog bellies pressed on me.

I sat up and shuddered for a minute, then padded to the kitchen and made a cup of tea in the microwave. I stood at the sink and looked out the window while I drank it. That stupid frog king had made a point, and I’d got it.

Even so, I wondered why Ethan had chosen to meet me that morning. I wondered what he’d been about to ask me when Steven arrived. I felt as if I were on the verge of having to make a huge decision about my personal life, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to make it. I had been a chaste widow for three years, and then I had been in a relationship with Guidry for a brief time. After Guidry moved to New Orleans, the relationship had been strictly via the phone. That wasn’t a situation that could continue forever. The truth was that it was time to either completely sever the relationship with Guidry or change my mind and follow him to New Orleans. And as I had told Ethan, moving to New Orleans wasn’t right for me.

I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to face what had to be faced. People say that denial doesn’t work, but it worked just fine for me. I could deny all over the place.

For the next couple of hours, I sat at the desk in my office-closet and took care of the clerical side of a pet-sitting business. When it was time to leave for my afternoon rounds, I got into clean cargo shorts, white tee, and fresh Keds, smoothed on sunscreen, put my hair in a ponytail, and grabbed my big carryall shoulder bag.

Out on my porch, I saw Michael down on his deck adjusting things on his prized outdoor cooker. Michael is big and broad and blond like a Viking warrior. He’s also persnickety about his cooking equipment. Everything in his kitchen was built for professional chefs, and so is his barbecue stuff. Michael loves it all with a tender devotion. If he ever meets George Foreman, they’ll probably spend a couple of days discussing the relative merits of charcoal and wood chips.

I clattered down the steps and went and stood beside him.

He said, “Grilled flank steak for dinner.”

I said, “Um. With scalloped potatoes?”

“You bet.”

Governments who send spies to gather secrets from other governments should send members of the same family. Nobody would be able to break their codes. In our brother-sister speak, Michael had just told me that Paco would not be home for dinner, because Paco doesn’t eat meat and he doesn’t like scalloped potatoes. Which meant that Paco would be at some undercover job that night, which neither Michael nor I would mention.

I told Michael I’d be home at the usual time and zipped off to see to my afternoon pet clients, beginning with Billy Elliot.

Tom and Billy Elliot were in the living room watching an old romantic movie on TV. I apologized for intruding, and they both hurried to assure me they were too macho to care about that girlie romantic stuff and that I was a welcome interruption. Billy Elliot did that by kissing my knees, and Tom by clicking off the movie with a very emphatic thumb, as if I’d caught him watching a porn flick.

Tom sported a lilac-hued knit shirt with a yellow polo pony embroidered on its chest. He had the shoulders-back posture of a man showing off a new purchase.

I said, “Nice shirt. Is that new?”

He beamed. “Guess what it cost!”

When somebody asks you to guess what they paid for an item, it’s like somebody asking how old you think they are. You have to guess more than you really think they paid and less than you really think they look.

I said, “Twenty-five dollars!”

“Two fifty!”

I let my jaw drop. “No!”

“Found it at a consignment shop. They had a whole box of them, brand-new, still had the price tags on them.”

“Ralph Lauren shirts for two fifty!”

He grinned. “Well, they had the Ralph Lauren polo pony on them, but the pony’s tail was a little too bushy and the backside of the embroidery was snarled. And when I take it off tonight, I may have lavender-colored skin from the dye. But what the heck, it was only two fifty.”

I held out my wrist. “My Rolex was only fifty dollars.”

“I’m glad you didn’t go for a diamond bezel. Plain is more tasteful.”

“Yeah, and a diamond bezel would have been an extra five bucks.”

He shook his head in mock sorrow. “All we have to believe in now is reality TV. Everything else is fake.”

“You mean the reality shows where a guy’s lost in the swamp, all alone, scared to death, thrashing around though the trees, while a director, a camera crew, a makeup crew, and a recording crew are filming him?”

Billy Elliot nudged me, and I bent to clip his leash to his collar.

Tom said, “They still haven’t identified the murdered woman in the Trillin house. Wouldn’t there be fingerprints they could check?”

I did not say, They know who she is, they’re just not saying!

Instead, I said, “Not unless she’s been arrested for a crime or fingerprinted for a job. Or if she served in the military.”

“Maybe they know who she is and just aren’t telling.”

“Could be. They wait until they notify the family before they release a homicide victim’s name.”

“Still seems like a long time.”

I stood up straight. “Tom, while Billy and I run, would you find out the exact time the Trillins’ flight will arrive? They left from Parma, Italy, a little after midnight this morning, and I think they’ll arrive in Sarasota around ten o’clock tonight.”

Tom’s round black eyes danced with curiosity, but he nodded without comment, and I led Billy Elliot out his front door.

Billy and I did our racer imitation on the track in the parking lot and went back upstairs. Tom was in the living room watching the same romantic movie he’d been watching when I first arrived. This time he only muted the sound when I came in. As soon as I took off his leash, Billy Elliot trotted to sit on the floor beside Tom’s wheelchair and stare at the TV.

I hung Billy’s leash in the foyer closet and grinned at them. “You guys watch the soaps, too?”

Tom said, “The plane you want is a US Airways flight from Rome to Charlotte, then Charlotte to Sarasota. It’s expected to arrive here at nine fifty-five. That could change, but the weather is good, so it probably won’t be off by much.”

“Thanks, Tom. I appreciate it.”

He flapped his hand at me and went back to watching the movie. As I closed the door behind me, I heard movie music swelling to a tear-jerking ending. I was sorry I had ruined the movie for Tom and Billy but glad I had the exact information about the Trillins’ flight. I wanted to talk to Cupcake before the law did. If nothing else, I could warn him that his secret about knowing Briana was going to be exposed.

My next stop was at a house where six cats lived. They were all rescues, and each of them had the grateful eyes that rescues always have. Their humans were two sisters who had a pact that if one wanted to bring another cat home, the other would stop her—by force if necessary. The sisters had gone to visit their ailing mother in Georgia, so for a few days the cats would have to make do with just me as a giver of goodies. With all the running and chasing they did, they gave one another plenty of exercise.

Leaving there, I realized I was on the same street where my grandmother’s seamstress lived. I had taken a few things to Mrs. Langham myself—mostly pants or jeans to be shortened—and I knew she also designed and made women’s clothes. On a sudden impulse, I swung into her driveway.

When I rang the doorbell, I heard her yell, “Come in!”

Hesitantly, I turned the knob and pushed the door open. “Mrs. Langham?”

“Come on in, I’m in the sewing room!”

I followed the sound of her voice and found her in a bedroom converted to sewing room, with a full-length mirror, a dressmaker’s form on a stand, an ironing board set up with a steaming iron at the ready, and a pegboard with about a million spools of thread in every imaginable color on the wall. Mrs. Langham herself sat behind a sewing machine on which she was furiously sewing a narrow hem on a full skirt.

She had a tape measure hanging around her neck, and her pepper-and-salt hair looked as if she’d forgotten to comb it that morning. When she looked up and saw me, she laughed.

“Oh, Dixie! I thought you were somebody else.”

“Mrs. Langham, you really shouldn’t leave your door unlocked like that.”

She laughed. “Been doing it all my life. I’m too old to change now. What can I do for you?”

“Nothing, really. I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop in.”

“Your mother used to do that. Of course, she always had something in mind she wanted me to make for her.”

“You knew my mother?”

She looked exasperated. “I haven’t always been this old, Dixie. She and I are about the same age, actually. Now she was a woman who knew how to dress.”

She cast a dismissive look at my rumpled shorts and tee, as if to say that anybody in her right mind could see that I was not a woman who knew how to dress.

I said, “I remember. I was only nine when she left, but I remember how she dressed.”

I didn’t admit that I sometimes stole into the attic of Michael’s house and lifted out musty-smelling clothes our mother had left in an old trunk. Her clothes were the only things she’d left behind for Michael and me.

Mrs. Langham said, “I made a lot of her clothes. She would see something in a magazine and bring me a picture, and I’d make it. We were both so young then, we had the nerve to tackle anything. Most of it turned out okay.”

“You stole designs?”

She frowned. “I copied designs.”

I reached out and twirled a spool of hot pink thread on its peg on the wallboard. “I guess I don’t know the difference between stealing and copying.”

Like a teacher explaining a simple idea to a dull student, she said, “Here’s how it works: A designer has an idea for a dress or a blouse or a skirt or something. It’s not a better idea than you or I could come up with, but models show it in those big fashion shows where reporters and wealthy women in dark glasses go, and everybody goes nuts over the length of the skirts or the way the jackets have shoulder pads or the way they don’t. Movie stars and wealthy women buy those clothes and pay thousands of dollars for a blouse or a pair of slacks. Counterfeiters rush out and copy the designs, put the designer’s label in them, and sell a blouse or a pair of slacks for hundreds of dollars. Garment manufacturers copy the designs in different fabrics or colors and send them out to department stores, and a blouse or a pair of slacks will cost maybe fifty dollars. Dressmakers like me copy the designs in the same fabric and color as the original, and a pair of slacks or a blouse will set a woman back the cost of the fabric and whatever the dressmaker charged to make it. That’s the difference.”

“But counterfeiters can go to jail.”

“Counterfeiters put a designer’s label in their stuff. They claim it’s the original goods. Dressmakers don’t claim it’s anything but a copy. That’s the only difference.”

“So it’s the difference between an honest copy and a dishonest copy.”

“Exactly. And if you ask me, the people who get stung by a counterfeit copy sort of ask for it. It’s all about ego. They think having a big designer’s label in their shirt makes them more important. You see people going around wearing scarves with designer’s names on them, or carrying handbags with the designer’s label on the outside. What’s that about, for God’s sake? If I’m going to put a name on something I wear, it’ll be my own name.”

She put her elbows on her sewing machine and leaned her chin on her folded hands. “Dixie, why don’t you let me make you something nice to wear? You’ve got your mother’s figure, but you hide it under all that droopy stuff.”

I felt my whole body blush. “I’m a pet sitter. I have to wear this droopy stuff.”

“I’m talking about when you go out. I’d like to see you in something wrapped in front, fitted close at the waist, with a deep cleavage. A dark rose color, I think.”

My mind immediately went to shoes with ridiculously tall heels in which I stood beside Ethan at a nice restaurant where the tables were covered in starched white linen. Ethan’s fingertips were on the small of my back. My dark rose, tightly wrapped back that was behind my deep-cleavaged front.

I said, “I don’t go out much.”

As if continuing a different conversation, she said, “How is your mother, anyway?”

While I was still registering the fact that it had been Ethan’s fingertips on my back and not Guidry’s, I said, “I haven’t seen my mother since she came to my grandfather’s funeral. She left right afterward, and we never heard from her again.”

I didn’t add that we’d never heard from her before Granddad’s funeral, either, or that she’d left as soon as she’d learned that all my grandfather’s assets, including the beachfront property, had been left solely to Michael and me.

“So you don’t know where she is?”

“Not a clue.”

“That’s too bad.”

I shrugged.

“Dixie, your mother wasn’t a bad person. She just wanted more than the life she had here.”

I thought of Briana saying, I would have followed the devil himself to get out of that little town.

I said, “She had two kids here.”

“She knew your grandparents would take care of you. It wasn’t like she put you out on the street.”

And suddenly I was a child, walking down a long hallway where my mother’s collection of hats covered an entire wall. The hats had hung on pegs the way some people display masks picked up in exotic locales. There hadn’t been anything exotic about my mother’s hats, and she’d bought most of them in Sarasota, but they formed a pleasing mosaic of colors and shapes on the wall. Every morning, Mom would come out of her bedroom still in her nightgown and walk back and forth in front of the wall of hats until she’d found the one that fit her mood for the day. Then she’d clap it on her head and disappear to dress in something that did justice to the hat she’d chosen.

When she left us, she didn’t take her hats, so for a long time my brother and I had expected her to come home. We couldn’t imagine how she’d manage to know how to feel without a hat on her head to direct her. It took me a long time to understand that she’d known all along how she felt. The hats had merely given her a daily role to play so nobody else would guess who she really was.

Mrs. Langham got up and came toward me with a tape measure in her hands. “Stand still, let me get your measurements.”

She was a pro. Before I had time to tell her I didn’t really want her to make me a dress with plunging cleavage, she had measured me.

“I’ll get the fabric and notions. Stop by next week and we’ll do a fitting.”

I wanted to tell her I had plenty of notions of my own, but I had a feeling she meant notions of a different kind.

I left her smiling to herself as if she knew some funny secret. As I drove away, I felt a sudden and totally unexpected stab of longing for my mother.

The rest of the afternoon went smoothly. No pet had peed on a rug or knocked over a potted plant. Every tail was raised in satisfaction when I left. After my last call, I went to the Trillin house to see how much progress the crime-scene cleaners had made.

I parked in the driveway behind their blue and white hazmat van. The front door was open, and I could hear the sound of a vacuum inside. I stuck my head in the front door and saw a man in a blue jumpsuit backing toward the door. He was pulling a vacuum hose that seemed to be sucking up moisture from the floor.

I waved my arms and yelled over the noise, and he turned his head to look over his shoulder. He wore a surgical mask. He turned off the machine and turned to face me, but he didn’t remove his mask. With his hazmat gloves and boots, he looked like an extra on a movie about an invasion of aliens from outer space.

Through his mask, he said, “You can’t come in here.”

“I know. I just wanted to know what you’d had to do about the tile.”

He hooked the mask with a finger and pulled it below his chin.

“Most of the fluids were in a rug, so the crime-scene techs must have got here fast and removed the body. The rug looks like an expensive Oriental, but I imagine it’s a total loss. We didn’t have to replace the tile.”

“So when can the owners come home?”

“Cupcake Trillin lives here, doesn’t he? I saw the photographs.”

I smiled. “I just take care of the cats.”

He nodded understanding. “They can come back tomorrow morning.”

He pulled his mask up and turned his machine back on, and I hustled back to the Bronco and headed home.

The sun was already below the horizon when I drove down my shelled lane, the lane that curves to the place I’ve called home since I was nine years old. Except for the years I was away making a life as a deputy and a wife and a mother … But I try not to think about those years. The memory is too sweet.

I smelled smoke from the grill when I got out of the Bronco. The western sky was flushed with coral and pink light, and the air under the trees moved with a touch of coolness.

Michael opened his kitchen door and yelled, “Heat’s almost ready!”

He meant that he had been sticking his hand over the grill to test its intensity and that he was beginning to be able to hold it still for a second or two without getting third degree burns. People who cook over open flames are masochists.

I hollered, “I’ll be down in ten minutes!”

I really would be, too. I’m the world’s fastest shower taker. Turn water on, get under it, squirt bath gel on a sponge, rub on body, stand a second, turn, stand another second, turn water off. That’s it. And I can air-dry while I dash to the office-closet for clean clothes. No wasted time rubbing with a towel, no sirree. Just jump into clean cotton, shove my feet into flip-flops, run a brush through my hair and a tube of lip gloss over my mouth, and I’m ready. Not ready for Massachusetts or New York or Idaho, maybe, but ready for Florida.

Downstairs, Michael stood with a tray of marinated meat, gazing with adoration at his hot grill. Ella Fitzgerald sat on a chaise gazing at Michael with adoration. She wore her cotton harness attached to a leash attached to the leg of the chaise. Ella has an adventurous streak, and after Paco spent hours searching the woods for her, he decreed that she would henceforth be tethered when she was outside.

The deck table was set with thick pottery plates and black-handled flatware. Salad waited in a big wooden bowl for me to toss with vinaigrette Michael had made. A chilled bottle of wine was already open, ready for me to pour into two stemmed glasses. Along with going inside and getting the scalloped potatoes from the oven, those were my jobs. Michael’s job was to stand by the grill and watch the meat so he could catch the exact moment when it was at the perfect stage of medium rare. It was our brother-sister routine perfected over many years.

Michael laid the meat on the oiled grill, and we both smiled at the sizzling sound it made. I knew Michael thought of our grandfather every time he heard that sound, same as I did. Our granddad had loved to grill as much as Michael does. He was the one who’d taught Michael to count the seconds he could hold his hand over the heat, and to slap the meat on when he could count to ten without yelping in pain.

I tossed the salad, poured wine, and scurried into the kitchen to get the pan of potatoes from the oven. Michael studied the meat, turned it once, pushed on it with a thumb to see how much it resisted. That’s another test our grandfather taught him. When he thought it pushed back about like an athlete’s thigh muscle would, he transferred it to a wooden board waiting by the grill and covered it loosely with foil.

He left it there and took his chair at the table. “We’ll let it sit awhile before I slice it.”

He always says that. For all his adult life, Michael has grilled flank steak and then said, “We’ll let it sit awhile before I slice it.” He says that because that’s what our grandfather always said, and every time he says it and we wait for the steak’s juices to settle in, we feel as if our grandfather is there with us. Maybe he is.

When Michael judged that enough time had passed, he went back to the grill and put Ella’s portion on a plate and set it on the floor—cats shouldn’t have anything with onion in it, so he hadn’t marinated it. She had already hopped to the deck floor with twitching whiskers, and attacked her chunk of beef with all the ferocity of a wild feline leaping on a small rodent in the woods. Cats love to pretend like that.

Michael picked up one of his knives that he keeps so sharp that I don’t like to even get close to them. He sliced the steak very thin and on the diagonal because it’s more tender that way. He piled several slices on our plates and moistened them with some of the marinade he’d heated on the grill. I added a scoop of scalloped potatoes from the casserole dish.

I had stopped thinking about Briana and the murder. I had stopped thinking about Guidry and Ethan. I had stopped thinking completely and simply let myself be.

Some moments are so perfect you wish you could freeze them forever. Right then, sitting under a pink-flushed sky and preparing to share a delicious meal with my big brother and Ella, was one of those moments.