The Cat Sitter's Nine Lives

22

When I stepped out of the elevator on the sixth floor, Cora was waiting for me down at the end of the hall in front of her apartment door. She held one freckled arm high over her head and waved excitedly. She’s not much taller than five feet, with a little wisp of cottony silver hair that floats on top of her head like an afterthought, and glittery blue eyes that never fail to put me in a good mood. She was wearing a pale pink housedress with a scooping neckline, and white fluffy house shoes with puffballs on the toes.

The way we came to be friends is a long story—her granddaughter was a client—but except for the very negligible genetic factor, she feels more like a sister to me than anything else, and I like to think she feels the same about me. I always stop by Cora’s whenever I feel my batteries need a little recharging, which these days is at least once a week, sometimes more. Plus there was the little matter of Guidry’s letter, and Cora was the best person on earth to give me advice in that department. She may look like a sweet little old lady, but she’s sharp as a tack and doesn’t pussyfoot around.

As I came down the hallway, she was teetering on her toes and grinning from ear to ear, which she always does, but this time I was particularly happy to see it. Just a few weeks before, I’d gotten a call from Vickie, the concierge in the lobby at Cora’s building. She had called to let me know that they’d taken Cora to the hospital for heart palpitations. I was already racing down the stairs when she said Cora was back home and doing fine. At first I considered driving over to Cora’s building and wringing Vickie’s neck for not having called me sooner, but of course it wasn’t her fault. If anyone needed a good neck-wringing it was Cora. If I get so much as a mosquito bite everybody hears about it, but Cora is a card-holding member of the stoic, suffer-in-silence generation.

She told me later she hadn’t called me because she didn’t want anyone to make a fuss or worry about her, which I couldn’t very well argue with since it sounded exactly like something I’d do myself. Even so, I made her promise that in the future, if she didn’t want my wrath raining down on her like a plague of sand fleas, she’d call me right away if anything like that ever happened again.

Most people would think that given the fifty-year difference in our ages we wouldn’t have much in common, but they’d be wrong. I wouldn’t be the relatively sane person standing before you now if it weren’t for her.

She was practically beaming at me. “Oh my goodness, dear, you look pretty as a picture.”

I said, “Ha. You’re just saying that because you know I have goodies for you.”

She held the apartment door open with one skinny arm. “Well, you’re right about that. I’ve got you nicely trained, don’t I? All I have to do is tell you how pretty you are, and you show up with all kinds of treats.”

On the way over I had stopped by the market and grabbed some of Cora’s favorites—chicken noodle soup, a big fat slice of cornbread, and a fruit salad with fresh sliced kiwi, strawberries, and mango, plus other sundry supplies for the week. While Cora shuffled in behind me, I unpacked everything on the kitchen counter and put the soup in the refrigerator.

Cora’s apartment is bright and cheery, with pale pink tile floors and walls a slightly deeper shade of coral. To the left is a small galley kitchen behind a bar with folding louvered doors to close it off, and to the right through an arched doorway is a modest bedroom. The living room has a marble-topped coffee table, with a sofa covered in fern green linen and two pink chintz armchairs that nobody ever sits in. Instead, there’s a little ice cream table with two chairs in front of the sliding glass doors, which open up to a narrow sun porch overlooking the bay and spilling over with potted plants and cooking herbs.

Cora said, “I’m so glad you’re here. There’s hot tea, and I made a little surprise for you.”

The “surprise” was Cora’s world-famous chocolate bread, which I know for a fact she makes every single day whether I show up or not. When I first met her, she only made it about once a week, but demand was so high now with all her friends in the building that she’d been forced to step up production.

The recipe is top secret. All I know is that she makes it in the bread machine her daughter gave her for Christmas one year, and she could probably make it in her sleep. At some point in the middle of the baking process, she opens up the top of the bread machine and pours in a cup of semisweet chocolate chips. The result is a deliciously crusty bread, with chewy rivers of rich, creamy chocolate running through every slice. It’s scrumptious fresh and it’s scrumptious a week later cold from the refrigerator, but Cora serves it the best way possible: Fresh out of the oven, torn off in steaming chunks and slathered with melting butter.

As she laid the tea tray down on the ice cream table, I took one bite and closed my eyes, drifting off into a state of heavenly bliss. I saw a vision of frolicking kittens flying across a star-filled sky, leaving behind a trail of rainbows and unicorns. It was that good.

Cora sat down across from me and said, “Sometimes I wonder if I stopped making that chocolate bread if I’d ever see you again.”

I nodded, my mouth full of buttery chocolate goodness. “You probably wouldn’t. I’d head right over to the Lido Key Bridge and jump right off. I don’t think I could bear a world without your chocolate bread.”

“So, tell me all about that beau of yours.”

“Cora, don’t say ‘beau.’ It makes you sound like an old lady.”

“Well, I am an old lady. What do you want me to say? How is that dude of yours?”

I pulled Guidry’s letter out and plopped it down on the table between us.

“What’s that?”

“It came in the mail earlier this week.”

“Who’s it from?”

“J. P. Guidry.”

She frowned. “Oh, dear. I thought you were looking a little peaked. What’s it say?”

“You said I looked pretty as a picture!”

She flicked her fingers in the air as if she were drying her nails. “Never mind. What’s it say?”

I sighed. “I have no idea. I’m afraid to open it.”

She nodded solemnly and took a sip of tea. Cora knows everything there is to know about Guidry. When I had first met him, I was like a hermit crab that never came out of her shell. I’d spent so many years mourning the loss of Todd and Christy that I didn’t know how to feel anything even remotely close to love. Cora had helped me see that it didn’t have to be one or the other. I could hold Todd and Christy in my heart and still let somebody else in at the same time; all I had to do was make a little more room. Cora taught me that the heart is expandable.

She said, “Well? What are you waiting for?”

I said, “What if he’s changed his mind? What if he still wants me to come to New Orleans? What if he’s coming back here?”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh my goodness! All these what-ifs! What if he’s made of cheese?”

“I know it sounds stupid, but…”

“Sweetheart, what are you so afraid of?”

I thought for a moment. “What if Ethan’s not the one?”

“The one? Oh, Dixie, we’ve already been down this road.”

I groaned. “I know, I know, I know.”

“You actually think God hides our ‘One True Love’ somewhere, and then he plops down on earth and says ‘ready, set, go!’ and then we’re supposed to go running willy-nilly all over the planet trying to find him before we die, like a game show?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, phooey. Love isn’t a game of chance. It’s a feat of strength.” She balled her fist up and tapped it on the table for emphasis. “A tour de force! You find a man that you love, and you make him the one.”

I grinned. “Maybe you should get a computer and set up one of those matchmaking sites. You’d probably make a fortune.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Oh, I don’t care for computers.”

“I’m right with ya, sister. As far as I’m concerned they’re totally unnecessary.”

“Oh, no, dear, they’re absolutely necessary. One day they’ll be all that’s left of us.”

I said, “Huh?”

She smiled. “When I was a little girl, in the field behind our house my daddy had an old apple orchard—well, that’s what he called it—it was really only about ten trees or so, but he was extremely proud of it, and we always had a nice crop of fresh apples. Every spring, just when the ground was starting to warm up, he’d take his old Louisville Slugger out there and bang away at all those tree trunks. He’d give each one of ’em at least ten good whacks. I remember asking my mother what in tarnation he was doing out there hitting those trees with a baseball bat, and she said, ‘He’s telling those trees their time is up!’”

She poured us both another cup of tea. “Well, I know what you’re thinking, but my daddy wasn’t crazy. He was just giving those apple trees a good scare. If you bonk the base of an apple tree with a baseball bat, its little apple tree brain thinks the end is nigh, so it puts all its energy into making as many apples as possible—every last one of them chock-full of seeds, filled with every blessed piece of information that old tree can think of. And when it’s dead and gone, somebody can plant one of those seeds and make a whole brand-new tree just exactly like the original. Believe me, there’s nothing a living thing wants more than to keep on living.”

“Cora, what the heck does that have to do with computers?”

“Well a computer is nothing but an apple seed.”

“Huh?”

“It’s the seed of Planet Earth, which is just a big living, breathing organism, if you ask me, and Mother Nature is busy loading it up with all the information in the world, all our books and languages and genetic codes and songs and religions, putting it all on a computer chip that keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And then one day, when the earth is all used up and gone, some alien from outer space will be flying along and find that chip and take it home. All they’ll have to do is figure out the right soil to grow it in, and then there you go—they’ll re-create our whole world.”

She took a sip of her tea and winked at me over the rim of her cup.

I said, “Cora, that is hands down the looniest idea you’ve ever had. You better not go around saying that to too many people or they’ll lock you up in a funny farm.”

Her eyes sparkled. “That’s what they said to Galileo.”

I had to admit, what with global warming and oil drilling and ocean pollution, if the earth is a living thing, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it felt like somebody was beating it to death with a baseball bat, but Cora had already moved on to another subject.

“Sweetheart, there’s something else we need to talk about.”

I got a little nervous. There was a look in her eye that I’d never seen before.

She propped her elbows up on the table and folded her hands together. “Now, I told Kate Spencer that when I’m gone she can have my bread machine.”

I sighed. “Oh, come on. I do not want to talk about this.”

“Well, you’re gonna have to, Dixie. Now, Kate Spencer is a perfectly nice woman, but she can barely boil an egg, and she’s dumb as a box of flip-flops. And the woman’s ten years older than me anyway, so I don’t know where she got it in her fool head that she’ll still be here after I’m gone. So if something should happen, I want you to come straight here first thing. I want you to pack up that bread machine and take it home with you.”

“Cora—”

She held up one hand to stop me. “Now, I don’t want to hear it. You can give it to your brother if you want, but somebody has to make that bread when I’m gone or you’ll go jump off that bridge, and I don’t want that hanging over my head for all eternity. And another thing—I’m gonna hide my bread recipe in a shoebox under the bed. I want you to take that, too, and guard it with your life.”

“Alright already,” I said. “Let’s change the subject.” I slid Guidry’s letter closer to her. “What about this?”

“What about it?”

“Tell me what I should do.”

She looked out at the bay, and her eyes softened. There was a congregation of yachts and sailboats anchored in the middle of the marina, and the water was glittering and gleaming in the sun like a big bowl of emeralds. As she took another sip of tea, a mischievous smile spread across her face, and her cheeks fractured into a million tiny, fine lines.

She said, “You should damn well grow up is what you should do.”