Hot in Hellcat Canyon

by Julie Anne Long

  “Oh, I never stop using it,” he assured her, on a purr.

  “Honey, if you could see inside mine right now.” She winked, and handed over his room key and reached for the ringing phone at the same time.

  Britt’s summer evening routine was basically her morning routine in reverse: she burst into the house, peeled off her sweaty diner clothes, hopped in the shower, sang at least one song in there, then threw on clean shorts and a tank, eschewing a bra. She paid a quick visit to all her little plant invalids lined up on a baker’s rack—­this week she had a sad tomato plant, an anemic basil, an African violet that had been languishing at the grocery store, and a coleus left out on the curb downtown when someone had moved. She couldn’t help it: When she saw a sad plant, she took pity on it and brought it home, loved it and coached back into health, and then gave it away to anyone she thought could use a little cheering up and probably wouldn’t kill it.

  She pinched a leaf here, squirted some plant food in there. “You’re all doing great,” she praised.

  And then she and Phillip, her cat, strolled out onto her big porch. She skirted a little obstacle course comprising an old wooden chair she’d salvaged and dragged home to scrape and repaint and a thrift-­store ottoman she’d just retufted to get to her big lounge chair. She and Phillip liked to savor the cooling evening air and enjoy the familiar evening sounds—­crickets tuning up, Jet getting in his last barks at what was probably a falling leaf before he got brought inside, and her neighbor Mrs. Morrison’s radio tuned to a religious program. Mrs. Morrison was ninety-­two and as vigorous as someone thirty years younger, apart from her bedtime, which was any minute, and all the impromptu naps she took during the day. She lived alone, which was how she liked it, and was as immovable on the subject as the big old redwood tree in her backyard. But her son and daughter were up on alternating weekends, and Britt kept an eye on her, too.

  And vice versa.

  The topic of the sermon must be juicy tonight. Britt couldn’t hear the substance of it, but the preacher kept landing with impassioned emphasis on the word sin.

  So all Britt heard was, “SIN” . . . mumble mumble . . . “SIN” . . . mumble mumble . . . “SIN!” . . . mumble . . . “SIN . . . SIN!”

  All in all, it sounded more like encouragement than an admonishment.

  These past few months she’d been taking her sketchbook out onto the porch in the evenings, after packing it away for more than two years. She’d stopped drawing altogether, because nearly everything about her old self had stopped for a time. As it turned out, her stubbornly silent muse was no match for Glenn’s mustache. It was just there, fluffy and immense. The friction to her imagination was like a burr under a saddle, until she finally sat down and drew him.

  As a walrus.

  Big and kind and gruff and exquisitely detailed. But a walrus.

  She’d been mildly astonished, but it felt right, even though it wasn’t close to the sort of thing she used to draw. She had a friend whose long straight hair had fallen out after a bout with a brutal illness, and it had grown back curly, startling everyone. But it was lovely. Maybe it was a bit like that: she’d lost or jettisoned nearly all of the things she thought defined her before she’d found her way to Hellcat Canyon. It made sense that they would return as changed as she was, if and when they returned.

  She wasn’t going to sketch tonight, though. Something else seemed to be reasserting herself. It started with an L and ended with an O and had an ibid in between.

  “. . . . SIN!” the radio preacher enthused.

  She took in a long breath and exhaled it, but it didn’t help. Her heart was hammering the way it had when she’d looked up the phone number of a boy she liked in the first grade. Which was absolutely ridiculous, given that her thirtieth birthday had been two years ago.

  Into her browser window she typed: “Tennessee Mc—­”

  “Britt, are you out there, dear?”

  Britt jumped and her hands flew so guiltily from her keyboard she almost smacked her own face. “Yeah, Mrs. Morrison. Everything okay?”

  “I just wanted to tell you there’s a coyote in the neighborhood. I saw him with a cat in his mouth.”

  “Holy shi—­I mean, yikes!”

  “Well, half a cat,” Mrs. Morrison clarified placidly.

  “Jesus, Mrs. Morrison!”

  “Britt, honey,” she reproached. Coyote snacks she discussed with equanimity, but the Lord’s name in vain was something else altogether.

  “Sorry. Slipped out. Thanks for the warning. Phillip sleeps inside when he’s not out here with me, so we should be okay.”

  Phillip, her old and enormous, fat orange fluffy cat, was sprawled on a cushion in front of her. He spread his toes happily at the sound of his name.

  Britt dropped a hand down on him and he heaved a contented cat sigh.

  “You should get married, dear. Then you wouldn’t have to give your cat a man’s name.”

  “Good advice, Mrs. Morrison.”

  “I don’t think you have anything to worry about. Your cat is about as big as a deer, anyway.”

  “And at least as fierce.”

  Mrs. Morrison chuckled happily. Britt heard the tinkle of ice cubes in a glass. Mrs. Morrison ended all of her days with a little glass of Dr Pepper and a splash of rum on the rocks. She attributed her longevity to this. Britt thought it might have a little something to do with all her naps, too, but the woman was ninety-­two. She was entitled to a vice or two.

  “You need me to pick up your prescriptions tomorrow, Mrs. Morrison?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind, dear.”

  “No trouble at all.”

  “Well, good night, Britt. You don’t let the bedbugs or anything else bite.”

  “Not if I can help it. Good night. Sweet dreams.”

  “They always are. They’re full of Elwyn.” Elwyn was her husband, dead for ten years, alive in her thoughts and dreams every day. “He carved our initials on the Eternity Oak the day we met, did I tell you that, Britt?”

  She had. Fifty or sixty times. But this was pretty much how they said good night to each other most nights. It was their little ritual.

  Mrs. Morrison tinkled her glass in farewell.

  Britt smiled.

  Then her smile faded. Poor cat. The woods were home to a number of feral felines, she knew. But then free-­range felines had been taking their lives into their own paws for centuries.

  She squared her shoulders, took another bracing breath, and typed “c—­”

  She gave a start again and clapped her hand over her heart when Skype starting beeping and booping.

  She answered the call and the beaming face of her little nephew, nine years old and toothy, filled the screen.

  “Hi, Auntie Britt!”

  “Hi, cookie. What’s shakin’?”

  His head disappeared from the screen and then his pajama-­clad butt appeared. He shook it.

  And then his giggling face reappeared.

  She rolled her eyes. The word butt and anything butt-­related still got a gratifyingly easy laugh from Will.

  “I want to show you what I did with your drawing, Auntie Britt.”

  She’d drawn Will as a monkey with a bright lively face, a dimple, wearing a little hat and a Christmas sweater and sporting a long expressive tail. She’d scanned the drawing and e-­mailed it to him.

  His face vanished from the screen.

  To be replaced with an animated version of her monkey Will hopping up and down.

  Rudimentary animation, but darling.

  She clapped, delighted. “That’s awesome, Will! You did that on your own? You are so darn clever. Good job!”

  His face reappeared, grinning. “Will you send me another drawing, Auntie Britt?”

  “Sure thing, monkey-­butt. I have one of your mama. I made her a sq
uirrel. Doesn’t she seem like a squirrel?”

  “She totally does!”

  She heard her sister’s voice raised in the background.

  “William, it’s your bedtime! What are you still doing on the computer? Oh, hey, is that your aunt? Let me talk to her.”

  Will noisily smooched the screen. “Good night, Auntie Britt!” He disappeared and her sister Laine’s face took his place. She and her nephew had the same sunny smiles and chin dimples.

  “Hey! What’s new, Bippy?” Bippy was what her nephew Will had called Britt until he was about three years old. “Still have a half dozen jobs?”

  “Half a dozen? No wonder you only got four hundred on your math SATs.”

  The curse of siblings: they both knew each other’s SAT scores and dozens of other minute details about each other’s lives that could be whipped out at a moment’s notice, for better or worse.

  “I was out late with the quarterback the night before the SAT. Scored much higher then. Can I get a high five?”

  They air high-­fived each other on the screen.

  Laine had married the quarterback, who was a good guy, and now she had everything she wanted, which was a nice family and a cozy home.

  Britt had been the hard-­core straight-­A student, a cheerleader, and competitive to a fault, and she’d thrown herself wholeheartedly into everything she did, whether it was the SATs or sneaking into the football stadium over the back fence. She’d very nearly had everything she’d wanted, too.

  It hadn’t quite worked out the same way for her.

  “Nah, I still just have the two jobs, the Misty Cat and Gold Nugget Property Management, but it kind of feels like twenty, so I’ll let you have that one on a technicality. Mrs. Morrison just told me she saw a coyote with a half a cat in its mouth. So I guess that’s new.”

  “Neighborly of her,” her sister said dryly.

  For some reason Britt didn’t want to mention the presence of a movie star in town. Not yet. Not until she’d at least thoroughly Googled him.

  “Hey, Lainie?” Britt ventured.

  “Yeah?”

  She hesitated. “Did you ever watch Blood Brothers?”

  “Daaaaaaamn, Britt, everyone watched that show. That’s kind of a long time ago now, though. Where the heck were you?”

  Laine started her days with TMZ and CNN. She was always in the know.

  “I must have actually been studying when it was on,” she said wonderingly. “But why did you say it like that?”

  “Daaaaaamn? That’s the thing he says.”

  “What ‘thing’? Which ‘he’?”

  Her sister rolled her eyes. “Google it. Read TMZ once in a while. Live a little.”

  “I was just ab . . . all right.”

  And then Laine went quiet.

  Long enough for a little uneasiness to creep into Britt’s light mood.

  “Listen, Britt I have to tell you something.”

  Britt froze. She knew that tone. Her sister only ever cushioned words when it came to one person.

  And just like that, fear was like a little icepick in her gut.

  Even now. After all these years.

  “Jeff’s mom came by. She was looking for you. She had your wedding band. It was with his . . . effects. She thought you might want it.”

  For a millisecond Britt couldn’t speak. His name brought with it an atavistic sweep of fear that froze her like a rabbit before a wolf.

  The fear swept out again. It always did, and faster each time.

  It left her feeling ever-­so-­slightly weaker.

  She wondered if it would ever fully leave her.

  “I don’t want it,” she said instantly and a little too abruptly. “Don’t tell her where I am.”

  She wanted nothing of his. He’d left her with one permanent reminder of her time with him, and a few years ago, right before she arrived in Hellcat Canyon, she’d finally turned it into something she could live with. Something beautiful.

  She would be damned if that old part of her life would touch her here.

  “Sorry. I thought so. I just . . . I just didn’t feel free to make that decision for you. I didn’t tell her anything about you. Was it okay to tell you about this?” Her sister was clearly suffering a little over this.

  “Yeah, of course. I know you had to ask me. Don’t worry about it.”

  Her sister smiled, relieved. “I wish you would come home.”

  “Lainie, I am home.” They did this every call.

  Laine smiled as if she knew better.

  Sheez. Big sisters.

  “Come visit me, Laine. Bring Will. He’d love it. It’s all wild and foresty and he can pretend he’s Robin Hood or a grizzly bear. You’ll think it’s quaint. Mitch can go fishing or whatever.”

  Mitch was Laine’s husband. They lived in a modest but roomy ranch house in suburban Torrance, which was Laine’s idea of heaven. Being surrounded by woods full of things like cat-­snatching coyotes was not.

  “When we can get away I promise we will. Hey, any men on the horizon since the . . . what was he, a cop?”

  “The sheriff.”

  “Oooooh, the sheriff. ”

  “I only went out with him that one time. It felt less like a date than an interrogation. ‘What’s your favorite vegetable?’ ‘Where did you grow up?’ Like he’d Googled how to date before he showed up. He’s hot enough but he’s a little broody.”

  “Yeah, not your type.”

  “Nope.” She didn’t say he’d probably started interrogating her because Britt hadn’t really been holding up her end of the conversation. She’d kind of forgotten how to date, too.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll get back up on that horse. There are bound to be other guys!”

  Laine was an optimist.

  A few other guys had asked Britt out, Truck Donegal included, but even Laine wouldn’t have faulted her for turning them down. And most of them were no match for her invisible force field.

  “The longer you wait though, the harder it’ll be to get up on that horse.” It wouldn’t be Laine if she didn’t feel compelled to throw in some unwanted advice.

  This wasn’t something Britt didn’t already know.

  “It’s not Noah’s Ark around here, Laine. We don’t all have to go around two by two, you know.”

  “Of course not,” Laine humored. “You’ll probably be perfectly happy never having sex again.”

  “If I never wanted to have sex again, I could just get married again and live in the burbs.”

  “Oh, BURN!” Lainie was delighted.

  Which made Britt laugh.

  “So what do you do for fun, Bippy? You used to be so good at that. Remember when we sneaked into the football stadium over the back fence, and you totally tore your new pants, and Mom threw a fit?”

  “I was just thinking about that! I was grounded for a month and I had to give up all my allowance for weeks to pay for them. Worth it, though.”

  Funny to think that she used to look at fences and the tops of cheerleading pyramids and hot guys and think, I can’t wait to conquer that! As if there had never been any question. But then, she supposed it was down to naïveté. It was easy to be fearless until you learned what real fear and real pain felt like.

  “You ever socialize with anyone out there besides Mrs. Morrison and your cat, Bip?”

  “Kinda busy. You know, with my twenty-­ish jobs.”

  The real reason was that she’d feel like a liar if she dodged questions about herself, and someone was bound to ask if she got close to them. Everyone in Hellcat Canyon kind of seemed to take her, and like her, at face value. She didn’t think anyone had even noticed she might be a bit guarded.

  But sometimes feeling ashamed felt like an additional job she had to do, and took up emotional real estate she would otherw
ise have given over to having or being a friend. She didn’t know how to articulate this to Laine, who would only worry.

  Mostly Britt was pretty content with the way things were these days. She could probably coast along the way she was forever.

  Laine wasn’t about to abandon the topic. “I’m just worried that if you only ever socialize with a nine-­year-­old, a ninety-­two-­year-­old, and me, you’re going to forget how to communicate with regular adults, not to mention men. Not every guy wants to talk about butts.”

  “Are you saying you’re not an adult, Laine?”

  “What I mean is an adult who hasn’t known you since you couldn’t pronounce your ‘f’s. How’s that puzzy cat of yours?”

  When Britt was about three, she’d resourcefully substituted in “p”s for “f”s in all words until she got a handle on the “f”s.

  “He’s fine. And fat.” She had perfect control of them now.

  “Give him a scratch for me.”

  “I will. Lainie, I talk to people at the diner every day. Speaking of which, I have to get some sleep now, or I might drop plates tomorrow.”

  “Can’t have that! Okay sweets, love you. Alley-­oop!”

  “Love you, too. Alley-­oop!”

  The thing she used to say to Britt just before she was tossed up to the top of the cheerleading pyramid. Britt had always wanted to be on top, risk be damned. The view from there, she claimed, was better.

  And the screen went blank.

  Britt stood up abruptly. She realized her lungs were moving shallowly. “Jeff.” Just the sound of that name could get residual panic circulating in her bloodstream.

  She deliberately took deep, long, greedy gulps of warm night air, and tipped her head back to luxuriate in the scenery—­yep, trees, stars, mountains, dirt, Hellcat Canyon. Home. Far, far away from Southern California, where she had once been happy and where everything had gone shockingly to pieces.

  “Oop!” She gave a start. She’d just remembered it was garbage collection tomorrow.

  She opened the latch on Mrs. Morrison’s gate and dragged her trash can and recyling bins out to the side of the road, and then she dragged her own bins out, and the physical exertion made her feel a little better.