The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas

17

I drove home in a daze. From the moment I’d stepped into the Trillins’ house and found Briana there, everything had been wrong side up, confused, and confusing. The only thing I knew for sure was that I didn’t know anything for sure. Nobody was who they appeared to be. Everybody was dragging around some old shucked-off identity like snakes pulling shed skins that wouldn’t let go. It seemed like life was falling into sync with technological fraud. I felt like a leaf caught in a rushing river, swirled by forces I hadn’t even known existed.

When I was growing up, the landscape of my imagination was bounded on the south by exotic Miami, on the north by businesslike Tampa, and on the east by Orlando’s theme parks. All the other places on the globe came to me as televised footage of native villages flattened by storms or wars or floods. They were as disconnected from me as the craters on the moon.

That was no longer true, not for me and not for anybody else in Florida. On any day, one could hear Bulgarian shoppers at Publix discussing the merits of the tomatoes, Laotians inquiring the age of the fish, or Czech or German or Italian or French or Peruvian shoppers disparaging American yogurt. I liked the idea that we attracted all those bright, world-traveled sophisticates. Unfortunately, we also attracted some of the world’s worst criminals.

Now it looked as if some of them believed I was a personal threat.

Michael’s car was gone from the carport, which meant he was either fishing or buying groceries. Michael buys vegetables and fruit the way women buy shoes. He figures you never can have too many.

Before I got out of the Bronco, I took my .38 out of my pocket. I held it close to my side as I went up the stairs, pressing the remote to raise the shutters with my other hand. The air was hot and leaden. Branches on the trees hung heavily, as if they had absorbed so much moisture from the air they couldn’t hold their heads up. The sun had moved to one o’clock, glazing the edge of the porch with bright light that reflected on the French doors.

Feeling as heavy as the trees, I held the gun ready until I was inside and the shutters had rolled to the floor. Ella wasn’t in my apartment, which told me that Michael would not be gone long. After all that had happened to make me feel especially vulnerable, I liked knowing that he would be home soon.

I tossed my shoulder bag on the living room love seat, lay the gun on my bedside table, and took a shower. Water sluiced away the day’s accumulation of cat hair and dog dander, but it didn’t take away my bone weariness. Neither did a nap. I woke feeling lonely and uneasy. And because my mind is like a Scrabble game, in the next moment it was setting down old thoughts crossed by irrelevant thoughts butting up against tangential thoughts that somehow led to a sharp desire for Guidry like a slicing knife.

Before Guidry went away, I lay many nights thinking about all the reasons why my life would be less complicated without him in it. I counted them off like rosary beads. Then I would think of all the reasons why my body smiled when it was near him. More than likely, Guidry had been across town in his own bed counting the reasons his life would have been simpler without me—but his body must have smiled when I was around, too, because he kept coming back. We had been an odd couple, both of us on constant guard against getting cornered in a relationship but wanting and needing the intimacy and comfort it brings. Like two porcupines, we had kept our sharp quills on full alert but still came together to mate.

I sat up and stared at my bedside phone. Peter’s voice sounded in my head: Do you know now what you must do?

He hadn’t been talking about Guidry, but it was enough of a nudge to make me pick up the phone and dial Guidry’s number.

He answered on the second ring. “Hi, Dixie.” Caller ID has now made it impossible to surprise somebody with a phone call anywhere in the world.

I said, “I miss you.”

A little voice in my head yelled, No! No! You’re supposed to be calling him to say you’re going to go out with Ethan!

Guidry’s chuckle was a deep burr. I told the little voice in my head to shut up.

Guidry said, “Planes fly every day from Sarasota to Louis Armstrong Airport. Takes about four hours. Of course you’d have to miss seeing your pets while you were here.”

There it was, that little cutting edge to his voice when he talked about pets. Guidry didn’t particularly like pets. Ethan, on the other hand, had a dog he loved.

I said, “You’re supposed to say, ‘I miss you too, Dixie,’ not give me flight schedules.”

“I miss you too, Dixie.”

He wasn’t laughing. He really meant it.

I heaved a huge sigh. Judy was right, I was an idiot for letting Guidry leave without me. I was an idiot for not telling him the truth about Ethan. I was an idiot, period.

He said, “Do you ever take a vacation from pet sitting?”

I said, “Sure. You think I’m a robot?”

I grinned when I said it, meaning “I’m just joking,” but the question had nettled me. The truth is that I haven’t taken a vacation since I started pet sitting. In the beginning, I never took time off because I couldn’t take the chance of all those empty hours with nothing to dam the river of pain and anger. Pet sitting was my escape. I could pour love into my charges and stifle the hatred I felt for the old man who’d killed Todd and Christy when he hit the gas pedal instead of the brake. I could discipline my mind by organizing my pet files and maintaining my pet-sitter insurance and making sure I observed all the professional ethics my pet-sitting organization required. I could wash away the aura of anguish while I showered off cat hair and doggie drool. Work had been my salvation, and I couldn’t let down my guard with a vacation.

After I got reasonably sane, I didn’t take any time off because I didn’t know what I’d do with myself if I did. There was no place I wanted to travel, no adventure I wanted to explore. At least not by myself. I might have liked a cruise in the cold seas around Alaska, but not alone. I might have liked to watch great blue whales, but not alone. I might have liked to go whitewater rafting or mountain climbing or kiss the Blarney Stone, but not alone. And I knew without asking that Guidry wasn’t ready to go off and do any of those things with me. He might be ready later, but not now. Ethan, on the other hand, took annual vacations from his law office.

Guidry said, “What do you know about the murder in Cupcake Trillin’s house?”

“You know about that?”

“Dixie, the entire world knows about that. Besides, Trillin’s from around here, so everybody in New Orleans is especially interested.”

Even to Guidry, I wouldn’t repeat anything I’d just heard at Cupcake’s house. Or tell him what Briana had told me. Or tell him about the men attacking me.

I could ask a question I’d been wondering about, though. “Guidry, do you know where Thibodaux, Louisiana, is?”

“Sure, that’s where Trillin grew up. It’s not far from New Orleans.”

I should have remembered that sports fans know every detail of an athlete’s history.

I said, “Do you remember anything about a sixteen-year-old Thibodaux girl killing a man? She shot him in the head and then disappeared. It would have been while Cupcake was in high school.”

“This is Louisiana, Dixie. That kind of thing is common.”

“Do you know anything about Serbian criminals?”

“Not a damn thing. Why?”

I laughed. “Because I don’t either, and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t the only ignorant one.”

His voice took on a note of worry. “Dixie, you’re not mixed up in something involving European criminals, are you?”

“Are you kidding? The only criminal I know is a cat who stole a slip of paper from a wastebasket. He’s taken it to his lair, and he won’t give it back.”

“His lair? Cats have lairs?”

“Not all cats. Just criminal cats.”

“I do miss you, Dixie.”

“Those planes fly both ways.”

“As soon as I can get away—”

“When might that be?”

“It’s hard to say. There’s so much to set straight here.”

So there we were again, both of us putting something else first but promising to get together as soon as we could. It was the perfect time to say what was true: Neither of us would ever make that flight, because we had other things that took priority over getting together. But I couldn’t say it. I wanted to, I tried to make my mouth form the words, but I flat couldn’t. Some force I couldn’t control wouldn’t let me.

Instead, we murmured some more things, then ended the call. I sat staring at the phone for a moment, more frustrated and confused than ever. I had been a rank coward, merely putting off the inevitable, but Guidry had been an integral part of my coming out of the shell I’d crawled into after my husband and little girl died. He’d forced me to move on, to stop feeling sorry for myself, to let all the old anguish and resentment go and love again. While he’d been doing that, he’d let his own guard down and come to love me. To end what we had created together seemed to trivialize it, and it had not been trivial.

It had been a long dry spell without sex after my husband died, and making love with Guidry had been like adding water to Magic Rocks and watching them explode into glorious colors. I couldn’t bear the thought of going back to a state of desiccation, but I also couldn’t bear the thought of sex with men I didn’t love. I didn’t know if the lust I felt for Ethan might grow into love or remain a purely biological urge.

I got up and made a cup of tea. If I felt lonely and needy, it was my own fault. It occurred to me that I would make a fortune if I invented and patented a do-it-yourself create-a-man kit. It could be a large tablet that lonely women dropped in water. When it hit moisture, it would burst into the shape of a teeny man and then grow before their eyes into the exact man they needed.

I stood at the kitchen sink and drank my tea and grinned while I remembered reading a book in high school called Gorilla, My Love. In the book, a woman had explained to her sisters how a woman needed a lot of different men in her life. A lover man, a money man, a handy man, a smooth-talking, sharp-dressed man to take out in public, and a sweet, sensitive man for quiet evenings. I figured I could design my build-a-man kit with tablets that would create any one of those men. Women could keep the kits on hand and create the right man for any occasion.

The only problem I could see was that there’d have to be some system of disposing of one man when a woman was ready for another. No intelligent woman would create a man too dumb to know he was disposable, but it would be depressing to be with a man who knew his days were numbered.

The whole idea was beginning to seem like real life, so I rinsed out my cup and decided I would never get rich selling do-it-yourself man kits.