The elevator stopped at the sixth floor, the doors opened, and I skipped out swinging my bag of hot water bottles. She leaned out to watch me until I turned and looked pointedly at her. As she removed her hand from the door so it would close, the man behind her grinned and gave me a friendly wave. I had the feeling he knew my bag didn’t hold hot steamy sex toys. I also had the feeling he would not go with the woman to her apartment. I felt a little like a missionary who had saved somebody on the verge of making a big mistake.
For some fool reason, the woman in the elevator had made me think of Briana. Not the dyed red hair, because Briana’s hair was expertly colored and looked natural. Briana didn’t wear thick makeup, either, and I was sure that Briana was always dressed in elegant style. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d had cosmetic surgery, but only because I assumed that women in her world did, not because she looked as if she’d had some work done. When I tapped on Cora’s door, I was still trying to figure out why Briana’s face had popped into my head while I looked at the woman in the elevator.
I heard Cora’s thin voice raised to tell me to come in and forgot about Briana. Cora’s pink and green apartment is lovely. Her granddaughter bought it for her with money she made in ways Cora has never suspected. Cora was outside on the narrow terrace that runs the width of her apartment and affords a spectacular view of the bay. From her rattan peacock chair she could watch the constantly shifting blues, greens, lavenders, and grays of the bay under a clear blue sky. With natural vistas like Cora’s, people in Sarasota don’t need artwork on their walls.
With a weak smile, Cora watched me cross the apartment and step outside to the terrace. She was pale, with violet shadows under her eyes.
Alarmed, I said, “Are you okay?”
She waved a dismissive hand.
“I just did something stupid. Rose Tyler turned a hundred yesterday, and they always throw a big party for people on their hundredth. So I went down there to the ballroom, and nothing would do everybody but that I ate some of the cake. It was carrot cake, and I hate carrot cake. Always have. All that thick sweet stuff makes my teeth hurt. But I ate it anyway, because Rose will only be a hundred once, and I paid for it all night. Oh my, you wouldn’t believe! I won’t even tell you. I’m better now, but my stomach feels like it’s not sure it wants to stay with me. I wouldn’t be surprised if some other people had a problem with it, too. I think they’d let it sit out too long.”
Relieved that she only had an upset stomach, and intending to have a word with the staff about that cake, I held up the Walgreens bag.
“I got your hot water bottles. Stay put, I’ll fix them for you.”
Cora usually has the teakettle on low all the time, but today nothing was going on in her one-person kitchen. I ran water into the kettle, and while it heated I got out tea things. I wasn’t sure how hot the water for a hot water bottle should be, but I figured it shouldn’t be boiling, so I filled the bottles before the kettle sang. I didn’t fill them so much they bulged, just enough so the water made them firm. I poured the rest of the water from the kettle onto tea bags in Cora’s little Brown Betty teapot and put it and two cups and saucers on a tray. With the hot water bottles individually wrapped in clean dish towels and stacked on one end of the tray, I carried the whole business out to Cora on the terrace.
She said, “I’m sorry I don’t have any chocolate bread.”
I was sorry, too. Cora makes sinful chocolate bread in an old bread-making machine her granddaughter bought her. She won’t give her secret, but at some point in the bread-making process, she throws in bittersweet chips of chocolate. When the loaf is baked, it’s dark and dense, and the chocolate chips are still soft and oozing. It’s so good that I can’t eat it without whimpering a little bit.
I said, “I’m just glad your tummy is better.”
That was true, but as I arranged the towel-wrapped hot water bottles on Cora’s tummy and handed her a cup of tea, it occurred to me that the disappointment of no chocolate bread after I’d got used to it was almost as depressing as no sex after I’d got used to it. That’s probably why women with bad sex lives eat a lot of chocolate. If you can’t have one, you turn to the other.
Being deprived of sex and chocolate is the pits.
19
I took one of the peacock chairs and tried to watch Cora without looking like I was watching. Cora gets testy if she thinks people are hovering over her. Her cheeks got a little pinker as she sipped her tea, and her eyes brightened.
I said, “Do you know a woman in the building with big red hair? She wears tight leggings and high heels.”
Cora chuckled. “That would be Miss Taylor. She always comes down hard on the Miss, so all the men will know she’s available. Poor soul, she never has settled into her own skin.”
There it was, the thing that had reminded me of Briana.
“She was in the elevator with me. I sort of played a mean trick on her.”
Cora’s eyes brightened more when I told her how I’d given the impression I was a hooker going to a party of men on the sixth floor.
She said, “Oh my, that’s wonderful. Except now she’ll be hanging around on this floor looking for those men.”
“At least I saved that man in the elevator from her clutches.”
She rolled her eyes. “Men don’t have the sense of fishing worms. Some of the men here follow that woman around like geese chasing somebody spilling seed on the ground. He should have just told her no.”
I thought of Briana again. “I know a woman who reminds me a lot of Miss Taylor. She has something to do with fake merchandise.”
She said, “Everything is fake nowadays. Fake butter, fake cheese, fake crabmeat, fake sugar. We’ve got a new activities director here, and he’s got those colored contacts that are bigger than real eyes. His are bright turquoise. He looks like one of those people in that movie about giant people with a magic tree.”
“Avatar?”
“Just like those people! And he doesn’t seem to ever blink. He had a meeting where he told us all the new things he was planning for us, but I don’t think anybody heard what he said. We were all watching those big turquoise eyes.”
I said, “Maybe it’s not fake if everybody knows it’s fake.”
“It’s pitiful, is what it is. Everybody knows that man’s real eyes aren’t that big or that color, and everybody knows Miss Taylor isn’t a young woman, so it’s downright sad for them to think they’re fooling people.”
Thinking of all the fake people she knew had relaxed her face and removed the pain shadows from her eyes.
She said, “How’s that young man of yours? The one you let go off to New Orleans without you?”
I responded like a springing rat trap. “Cora, Ethan Crane asked me out.”
“Oh my, he’s a nice-looking man. Looks a lot like his grandfather. I always wanted to know his grandfather better. I think he liked me, too, but he was too educated for me.”
I’m always surprised to be reminded that old people are only old on the outside. Inside, they’re the same age they were when they first started life as adults.
I said, “But I’m still involved with Guidry. At least I’m supposed to be. I talked to Guidry this afternoon, and I didn’t tell him Ethan had asked me out. I meant to, but I just couldn’t.”
She turned eagle eyes on me. “Afraid to let one go before you decide if you want the other one?”
My face went hot. “It’s not like that!”
“That’s what it sounds like.”
It sounded like an awful way to treat both men, and I didn’t want to admit that Cora might be right.
She said, “Dixie, if you keep one foot in a boat and another on the dock, you’ll be stuck in one place forever. If you want the first man, then for heaven’s sake get your foot off the dock and go to New Orleans. If you can’t do that, then get your foot out of the boat and stay here.”
“I tell myself that all the time.”
She smiled, th
e zillions of tiny lines in her face glittering in the sunlight. “Looks to me like your head says one thing and your feet say something else. You moon around about how much you miss that young man, but you’re still here.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Things are only as complicated as we decide to make them. Do you want to go out with Ethan?”
I groaned. “Yes.”
“Then it’s simple.”
“I don’t want to hurt Guidry.”
“Has he come to see you since he’s been gone?”
I didn’t answer. She knew he hadn’t.
“You want to know what I think?”
I didn’t, not about this particular topic, but I knew I’d hear it anyway.
“I think he’ll be as relieved to hear you’re going to be seeing other men as you’ll be to tell him. I imagine there are women in New Orleans he’d like to go out with. Women who want to live in that town.”
“What if he starts seeing somebody there and I change my mind and want to go there and he doesn’t want me anymore?”
She shrugged. “You take a risk when you love somebody.”
I groaned again and slid forward in my chair like a frustrated kid.
For several minutes, we sat silently and let the sun seep into our bones. Until I’d said it, I hadn’t realized my secret fear was that I might decide I wanted to be with Guidry and it would be too late. As Cora had said, I wanted to hedge my bets. I wanted to keep Guidry and at the same time explore other possibilities with a man like Ethan. I didn’t need Cora to tell me that besides being dishonest and cowardly and manipulative, that was just plain wrong.
After a while, I sat up straight.
“Do you want to stay out here, or would you like me to help you inside?”
She thought about it, considered it from all angles, and decided to go to bed with her hot water bottles and watch TV. I carried the bags and tea things inside, and while she went to the bathroom and got into a nightgown, I refreshed the hot water in the bags, put a bottle of mineral water on her bedside table, made sure her phone and TV remote were at hand, and helped her get situated against her pillows. In her white cotton nightie, she looked like a little girl.
I hugged her, kissed the top of her wispy hair, and made her promise to call me if her stomach started hurting again.
She said, “You’re a good girl, Dixie. I hope you know that. You know, that may be why some people put on fake ways. Maybe they don’t know they’re good, so they try to make people think they’re somebody else.”
I blinked back sudden tears and hugged her again. Cora believes everybody in the world came good, no matter how they turned out. I don’t know that I agree with her, but I’m glad she thinks I’m good.
Before I left her apartment, I peeked into the hallway to see if Miss Taylor was lurking about. She wasn’t, but she got off the elevator before I got in it. She had changed into clingy black velvet pants and a sequined top.
Surprised to see me, she said, “Leaving so soon?”
I nodded. “Their wives are there, too. I didn’t know there would be wives.”
Her face fell, and she stepped back into the elevator with me. We rode down in heavily perfumed silence. I don’t know what she was thinking, but I was giving silent thanks that she wasn’t anything like my mother. My mother might have deserted me and my brother, but she would never look like Miss Taylor. It was nice to know I hadn’t inherited bad-taste genes.
Downstairs, Miss Taylor turned with an air of resignation toward the activities room where people played cards and chatted before the dinner hour, which, in Sarasota, is five o’clock.
At the concierge desk, I stopped with a phony smile. “Ms. Mathers seems to have a touch of food poisoning from the carrot cake at the birthday party yesterday. I think she’s going to be okay, but I’d appreciate it if you’d pass along a suggestion to your chef to refrigerate those cakes until they’re served. We wouldn’t want a resident to get seriously ill from one of them.”
She wore colored contacts, too, but they weren’t oversized. Her eyes rounded in alarm, and her gracious smile was just as phony as mine.
“We haven’t had any other complaints. It must have been something else Ms. Mathers ate.”
“Could have been, but just to be on the safe side, I think it would be a good idea to keep an eye on her—but not so she knows you’re keeping an eye on her.”
This time the smiles we exchanged were genuine. Everybody at the retirement condo knew how much Cora hated being fussed over.
She said, “Somebody will check on her tonight. If she’s not feeling well, we’ll see that she goes to her doctor.”
As I waited for the aged valet to bring my Bronco, I thought about how phoniness is so pervasive that we’ve come to take it for granted. Not just phony political rhetoric but phony smiles and phony conversations by ordinary people in which nobody says what they really think. With digital technology, photographs may have settings or people added or removed, and recordings of speeches or conversations may actually be random words spliced together to create a seamless whole. Most of us wear shoes and watches and jeans and T-shirts with fake labels in them, society matrons carry expensive handbags with fake labels, cigar aficionados puff pricey stogies with Cuban labels that are really from someplace else, and heroic athletic feats may be due to muscles or stamina falsely created by steroids. I wondered if living in a phony world changes the way our brains and cellular structures operate. If we accept phoniness, will we do away with honesty and integrity altogether? Will we make up new selves from day to day, with no obligation to mop up the messes the old selves have made? Most important of all, is it possible to be real in a phony world?
The rules of Cora’s condo forbid tipping the valet, but I always tip anyway because I appreciate not having to lope around on the parking lot for my car. The new valet pocketed the money with a smile, and I drove away smiling back. I’m not sure if either of our smiles was genuine.
Everything in the world had begun to seem fake to me, so it was a huge relief to start making my afternoon pet rounds. If a dog wags its tail at you, he really means it. If a cat purrs at you, that’s not a fake purr. And there’s not a dog or cat in the world who would wonder if a change of eye color might make him more popular, or if dying her hair would bring her more attention. Animals may be the only creatures on earth who are content with being who they are.
I usually start at the south end of the Key and work my way north, but since I was crossing the north bridge onto the Key, I changed my usual routine and called on two cats at the north end. They were sisters, sweet Siamese mixes named Gumdrop and Licorice. Young enough to find their primary entertainment in chasing each other through the house, they didn’t let tile floors dampen their enthusiasm for racing. They slid and skidded a lot going around corners, but they seemed to find that an additional thrill.
When I unlocked their front door and went inside, I could hear the soft thudding noise of a wild galloping chase. The noise stopped when they heard me, and I called to them to set their minds at ease.
“It’s just me, Dixie.”
They came charging to look at me with that Siamese expression of alert intelligence. They followed me to the den, where I pulled a peacock feather from my bag. For a cat, a peacock feather waved over its head is an opportunity to leap into the air and grab a bird of its very own. For a cat sitter, waving a peacock feather over a couple of cats is an opportunity to sit on a hassock and enjoy watching the grace and style with which cats spring into the air. Since I had groomed them during the morning call, I was there solely to play with them and feed them. With all the running they did, they got plenty of exercise on their own, but it’s as good for cats to have new experiences as it is for humans.
The cats were fascinated with the feather, I was fascinated with the cats, and none of us knew Briana had come into the house until she was in the room with us.
20
I felt her before I saw her. A fa
int scent of perfume, perhaps, or just the rearrangement of the air’s molecules by a foreign body. Curiously, I wasn’t surprised. That white convertible I’d seen in traffic had really been following me, then, and a thief who knew how to disengage a specific area of a security system would surely have no trouble creating an electronic signal that would bypass a home’s security pad.
Briana wore an outfit similar to the one she’d worn when we met at the beach pavilion—sheer, wide-legged white linen pants and a matching loose tunic. Not the same outfit, of course, just similar. Briana probably never wore the same clothes twice. Her silky red hair was twisted into a knot on the top of her head. Her hands hung loosely at her sides. She had glittering green stones in her ears, and I knew they were real emeralds. Briana wouldn’t have been caught dead in fake emeralds.
I didn’t even stop waving the peacock feather. The cats gave Briana a questioning look and went back to leaping at their prey.
I said, “When did they release you?”
“This morning. I told you I didn’t kill that woman.”
“But you knew who did.”
She shrugged. “Justice will be done.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t hold you as a material witness.”
“Thanks to you, I have a good lawyer who arranged bail.”
“Why are you here?”
She sat down on the arm of a sofa.
“Dixie, I don’t think you know the danger you’re in. You’re holding something that two groups of people much stronger than you want, and if you have any ideas about selling to the highest bidder, forget it. You’re not dealing with sweet little pussycats, you’re dealing with professionals who will snap you in half and throw your body into the ocean if you oppose them.”
I lowered my right hand holding the feather and let my elbow rest on my knee. My gun was in the right pocket of my cargo shorts, and I wanted to be ready to grab it. The peacock feather was still suspended in the air but not moving. The cats watched it suspiciously.
The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas Page 17
