The Cat Sitter's Cradle

15

When my grandparents moved here, the Key was a completely different world. First of all, there weren’t nearly as many houses as there are now, not to mention condos and high-rise apartment buildings and restaurants and shops and chic hotels. It was just a quiet fishing village, and what few houses there were certainly never made it onto the cover of Fancy-Pants Mansion magazine. Secondly, there was no such thing as a “private” beach. Even when Michael and I were kids, we would roam for hours on end exploring every inch of the island, and not once did we ever encounter a NO TRESPASSING sign. Back then most of the island was covered in sea grape and sugarberry trees and live oaks that towered over jungles of saw palmetto, wild olive, and creeping moonflower vines. It felt like our own personal jungle for two.

These days people like to joke that if you look away too long, the jungle starts to creep in and reclaim its stake. That definitely seems to be the case on Windy Way, where the houses peek out from behind a densely woven curtain of tree limbs and vines, and you have to carefully maneuver your car around the occasional island that’s opened up in the middle of the one-lane road, where patches of saw grass have sprouted and overly ambitious cabbage palms are poking their way through.

I pulled into the driveway of a low-slung ranch house with pale gray siding and a lipstick red front door. A huge live oak huddled over the house like a regular at the neighborhood bar, resting its leafy elbows on the peak of the roof. Mrs. Langham was sitting in a beach chair in the open bay of the garage with her feet propped up on an old ice cooler. She was stick-thin with salt-and-pepper hair and bright pink lipstick. Perched on the bridge of her nose was a pair of bifocals attached to a string of white plastic beads around her neck, and she was busily pulling a needle and thread through an embroidery frame—probably an applique for a dress she was working on. As I walked up she laid the embroidery frame down in her lap and slid her glasses off.

“Well, well, look what the cat dragged in!”

I said, “I know, I know. I’ve been meaning to call you forever.”

“Oh, don’t you worry about it. I knew you’d come sniffing around one of these days when you got desperate enough. Come on back. It’s in the sewing room.”

The last time I saw Mrs. Langham was months ago when I had dropped by on a whim. She had been my grandmother’s seamstress, so I’d known her since I was just a little girl. I remembered lying on the floor of the sewing room in this very house, playing with her black poodle while she and my grandmother talked about clothes and men and neighborhood gossip. It turned out she had made a few outfits for my mother, too. Seeing me had reminded her how stylish my mother was, and before I knew it she was measuring me for an evening dress and talking about “low cut” this and “plunging” that. I went along with it because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but when she called to let me know the dress was finished, I chickened out.

When I was nine, and my mother ran away to start a new life or hide from her old one—I’ve never been quite sure which—she left nearly all her things behind, including most of her clothes. We still have a trunk of them in the attic. I used to sneak up every once in a while and go through them, remembering how pretty she was, what she smelled like, how she looked in a particular hat or dress—a dress more than likely made in this very sewing room. So when Mrs. Langham had called to tell me the dress was ready, it set off some strange emotional reaction in me, and I just didn’t want to go back. Plus, the thought of wearing some sexy getup made me feel like I had a fur ball stuck in the back of my throat. I’m nothing like my mother. I’m a T-shirt and shorts kind of girl. Always have been, always will be.

Mrs Langham didn’t give up easily, though. She called several times over the next couple of months, and each time I made up another excuse to postpone a fitting. Finally, after a couple of unreturned messages, she just stopped calling.

I followed Mrs. Langham through the house to the guest bedroom, which had been converted to a sewing room with worktables and sewing machines in the middle, a full-length mirror on one wall, and a pegboard with hundreds of spools of colored thread on the opposite wall. Mrs. Langham swung open the doors of a huge armoire in the corner and pulled out a dress with a dramatic flourish. It was about the most hideous shade of purple I’d ever laid eyes on.

I tried my best to sound happy. “Oh wow! It’s purple!”

“No, no, no. It’s rose. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Just give it a chance. You have the same coloring as your mother. I promise you, this shade was perfect for her, and it’s perfect for you. It will look stunning with that beautiful blond hair of yours.”

I stood there speechless, racking my brain for some excuse to make a quick escape.

“Come on, Dixie,” she said, holding the dress out. “Trust an old lady.”

Reluctantly, I stepped out of my clothes and slid the dress down over my head. There was a dressmaker’s form on a stand in the middle of the room. Mrs. Langham wheeled it aside, and I stepped in front of the mirror. When I looked up, I nearly gasped out loud.

She was right. It was a good color on me. In fact, it was beautiful. It wrapped over both shoulders, crossing in the front to form a plunging neckline, but not in a vulgar way, and then gathered in very close at the waist and dropped down just above the knee.

“Oh,” I said. “I look good.”

Mrs. Langham perched her glasses on the tip of her nose and looked me up and down like a rancher appraising a prize steer at market.

“No, my dear. You look hot.”