Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof: A Dixie Hemingway Mystery

by Blaize Clement

  As soon as I put her on the table and got out my brush, a squirrel with an exquisitely buoyant tail scampered to the foot of the old oak at the edge of the deck. He picked up an acorn in his paws, turned a backward somersault and came up still holding the acorn. While Ella and I stared at him in round-eyed admiration, he scampered up the tree trunk and disappeared in the branches.

  I said, “My gosh, squirrels must be the clowns of the animal kingdom.”

  Ella said, “Thrrripp!” She didn’t exactly shrug, but she sounded as if she thought it was time to talk about her and not about a squirrel.

  Like all cats, Ella likes her throat brushed more than anything in the world, so I started there. Careful not to tilt my slicker brush and bite her skin, I ran it down her throat while Ella stretched her neck and closed her eyes, swooning at the pleasure of it. It took just a few seconds more to move down her chest and under her arms, back to her throat for a couple of soothing strokes, and to the outside of her front legs. Then a quick pass over the top of her head and neck, a cat’s second most favorite grooming spot, a few strokes down both her sides while I ran a protective finger down her spine, and then her bloomers.

  For a second, my mind drifted to Jeffrey, but I jerked it away as if it were a dog on a leash going somewhere dangerous and forbidden. Like his parents, I had to believe Jeffrey would come through the surgery with no problems. I had to believe the surgery would completely end his seizures. The alternatives were too terrible to even contemplate.

  I finished grooming Ella with a fast flick around her tail and a couple of final strokes down her throat. To distribute natural oils to the tips of her hair and make her coat shiny and smooth, I quickly passed a soft-bristled brush all over her body. All fluffed up, she was a glorious burst of technicolor beauty, and I told her so.

  Ella preened contentedly. Deep in her kitty heart, Ella believes she’s the most beautiful creature alive. I like that about cats. They don’t compare themselves with other cats. They don’t talk themselves into feeling dumb or ugly or fat or thin, they just enjoy feeling gorgeous. Too bad humans don’t do that.

  I put Ella in Michael’s kitchen, made sure she had fresh water in her bowl, and gave her a goodbye kiss on the nose. Then I went outside, spritzed the table with my handy-dandy water and Clorox mixture, and headed out in the Bronco for my afternoon rounds.

  As I drove, I caught myself humming a tune and beating time to it on the steering wheel. The lyrics had been in my head all morning, as if I had a jukebox in my brain and somebody had fed it a lot of coins. Actually, it was just the first line of a song’s lyrics. My grandmother had always maintained that each of us has an invisible Guide who is always with us, and the Guide communicates with us by directing our attention to book titles or billboard signs or song lyrics. I’m not sure I believe the Guide idea, but I have noticed that my mind has a way of knowing things before I’m aware of them, and lots of times I don’t catch on until I hear my own voice singing some song I hadn’t thought of in years. This time it was “You don’t know me.”

  Silly thing to hear over and over, but I couldn’t shake it.

  10

  At Tom Hale’s condo, Tom was at the kitchen table working on tax returns. He called hello to me and I yelled back, but I didn’t stay to chat because Tom and I both had work to do. Besides, I thought Tom might be embarrassed to have told me about his personal problems with Frannie, and I knew I was embarrassed to have been so blatant about how I felt about the woman. We both needed a bit of distance for a few days, the same way I needed distance from Laura for a few days.

  I seemed to have become the sort of person who knew so much about my friends’ private business that I couldn’t be friendly to them anymore.

  My afternoon went fast because two clients had returned home that day, one the human of a Siamese couple, and the other the human of an orange Shorthair. All I had to do was pop in to make sure they had indeed returned as planned, collect a check, and be on my way. Two white Persians, Stella and Marie, were almost as easy. The cats were sisters, so content with each other’s company that they deemed me important only as the human who combed them and put out food for them. While I ran the vacuum to pick up hair they had flung on the carpet, Stella sat on the windowsill looking longingly at the birds around the feeder, and Marie lay on the sofa watching a kitty video of darting fish. When I told them goodbye, they both turned their heads and gave me languid looks of total disinterest.

  Mazie was my last call of the day, and I rang the doorbell with dread nibbling the back of my neck. Both Pete and Mazie answered, and the minute I saw Pete’s worried face, I braced myself for whatever bad news he had about Jeffrey. Mazie looked as distressed as Pete, with the corners of her mouth downturned and sad. She looked sharply at me, sighed heavily, then stepped back to let me in.

  Pete said, “She was hoping you were somebody else.” He said somebody else in the tone people use when they’re trying to speak in code so a child won’t understand.

  I said, “Sorry, Mazie, it’s just me.”

  Pete’s saxophone was out of the case and lying on a chair. He held a child’s picture book in his hand, a finger crooked into it to hold his place.

  He said, “I’ve been reading to her. She seems to like it.”

  He didn’t mention playing the saxophone for her, but I suspected he had been doing that too.

  I looked at the book and laughed. It was The Cat in the Hat.

  I said, “That was Christy’s favorite story. She loved Dr. Seuss.”

  It was amazing how that had just popped out of my mouth, flowing out easily, not choked by sobs or hoarse from a closed throat. I had been doing that a lot lately, mentioning Christy or Todd easily and casually. It was a strange and bittersweet feeling to be able to do that.

  Pete said, “Hal called. The boy’s still out from the anesthesia.”

  “Maybe that’s normal.”

  “I don’t think so. I think he should be awake by now. Hal said the doctors keep coming in to check on him.”

  “Well, they would anyway.”

  Mazie raised her head and looked back and forth at us, like a spectator at a tennis match. Then she heaved another huge sigh. When a dog sighs a lot, it’s a sure sign of stress. In this case, it was also a sure sign that Mazie knew that neither Pete nor I knew diddly about what was normal for a three-year-old after brain surgery.

  I got her leash and jingled it. “Let’s go for a walk, okay?”

  Like a dutiful soldier, she hiked with me down the driveway to the sidewalk. We hesitated there, both of us uncertain which way we wanted to go. As if we had held a discussion about it and came to the same decision, we both turned at the same moment and walked toward Laura’s house. As we passed it, we turned our heads and peered through the shielding trees, but we didn’t see any sign of Laura.

  I wondered if Laura’s defiance with her husband that morning had been an act. I wondered if she were inside her house needing a friend to talk to. I was her friend, or at least wanted to be, but I couldn’t ring her doorbell and say, “This morning I hid behind some bushes and eavesdropped on you and your husband. Want to talk about it?”

  No, the best thing to do was to wait a day or two and ask her to have dinner with me. Then, if she wanted to tell me what was going on with her husband, we could talk.

  At the end of the block, Mazie and I stopped to look at a couple of great blue herons standing at the base of a power pole. They were watching a fish hawk atop the pole. The fish hawk was downing a flopping mullet, and the herons were waiting to catch the leftovers.

  Mazie made a wuffing sound and sat down with her tail wagging, probably a form of doggie applause for such a sensible display. Nature is neither squeamish nor wasteful. In the animal kingdom, every creature aids and is aided by every other creature. Humans, on the other hand, haven’t evolved yet enough to do that.

  When the show was over, Mazie got up and walked back home with me. It seemed to me that the corners of her mouth were
raised a bit, not in a smile exactly, but not in the morose look she’d had before. I felt more positive too. It’s good to be reminded of nature’s intelligence. Even when we can’t see it in our own lives, it’s still there.

  As Mazie and I went past Laura’s house, I didn’t even look toward it.

  I will never know if it would have changed anything if I had gone to her door right then.

  11

  On the way home, Ray Charles was still in my head singing “You don’t know me,” while I beat time on the steering wheel and grinned at the contradiction of a wide-hipped Silverado pickup with a gun rack in the back and a RAPTURE! sticker on the bumper. Florida is an Old Testament state where God walks with us in the cool of the evening. But he tells us not to get too smart, not to eat of the tree of knowledge, or we will die. And all around us, a sibilant sea whispers the soul’s terrifying truth: “If you eat of the tree, you will not die.” It’s no wonder so many of us are gun-toting fundamentalists.

  At home, I pulled into the carport just as the sun plunged into the Gulf in a final burst of Technicolor glory. Paco was on the deck with Ella in his arms watching the show, and I trotted over to join them. Only Paco could manage to look slim and fit in slouchy black sweatpants and a floppy white T-shirt. The pants even accentuated the fact that he has the most gorgeous butt in the universe.

  Gorgeous butt or not, he looked lonely.

  He slung his free arm over my shoulder and we stood taking in the floating sky banners of turquoise and hot pink and orange. We didn’t speak until the colors had finally faded and the sun’s glittering path from horizon to shore disappeared.

  As the surf wrote frothy messages on the sand, Paco said, “Have you eaten?”

  “No, and I’m starving.”

  “Me too.”

  We both sighed in unison. Without Michael to feed us, we were like newly hatched chicks without a mother.

  Paco said, “There’s some turkey and stuff in the fridge.”

  I said, “We could make sandwiches.”

  We both perked up. Sandwiches weren’t as good as what Michael would have fed us, but we had solved the dinner problem, and we had each other.

  I said, “I’ll be down in ten minutes,” and loped upstairs.

  Ten minutes later, I skipped down barefoot and still slightly damp from a speed shower, but decently covered in elastic-waist cotton pants and an oversized T-shirt, a female version of what Paco wore.

  In the kitchen, Ella was perched on her stool looking wistfully at the spread on the butcher-block island. Paco had hauled out everything remotely related to sandwich making, and was crouched in front of the refrigerator poking into its innards.

  He said, “I can’t find the horseradish mustard.”

  “On the door. What kind of beer do you have?”

  He held up a dark glass bottle with a long neck. “Some exotic stuff Michael got at the Sarasota Brewing Company. You can have Golden Wheat, Midnight Pass Porter, or Sunset Red.”

  “Ooh, cool. I’ll have the porter.”

  I got plates and made room for them by shoving aside cutting boards holding sliced turkey and ham, sliced tomatoes and onions. There was a loaf of pumpernickel bread and one of rye, along with jars of mayonnaise, three kinds of mustard, two kinds of pickles, black and green olives, several varieties of relish, both mild and hot salsa, and some things I didn’t recognize. Also chips, both potato and corn. We could have fed half of Siesta Key.

  We took seats and fell on the food like happy cannibals, smearing big globs of mayonnaise and mustard on bread and layering on meat and condiments to hoggish heights. Being a lady, I daintily cut my sandwich in half, on the diagonal. Paco just held his carefully so nothing would slip out the bottom. For a few minutes, the only sound was the crunch of crisp pickles and snap of chips.

  After a while, I said, “You know the woman I told you about? The one with the sadistic surgeon husband?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, he’s found her. This morning I overheard them talking. He was scary.”

  “All the more reason for you to stay out of it. That woman’s situation sounds like a plane crash about to happen.”

  “She needs a friend, Paco. That’s all I’m offering.”

  “Sounds to me like she needs a good lawyer. Maybe a good shrink.”

  “Just because she left her husband doesn’t make her crazy.”

  “I’m just saying she needs more help than you can give her.”

  I couldn’t argue with that, so we chewed for a few more minutes without talking.

  But I’m the one who, when I was five years old and made to sit in a corner in kindergarten because I talked too much, told my mother that if you went too long without talking all your mouth bones would grow together. I don’t have any trouble with silence if I’m alone, but when another person is present, my mouth is still afraid all its bones will fuse if I don’t speak.

  I said, “You know those songs or commercials that get stuck in your head?”

  “They’re called ear worms. Comes from some German word that sounds like ear worms and means the same thing. Don’t remember what it is.”

  “Huh. Well, I’ve got one. I keep hearing Ray Charles singing ‘You don’t know me.’ That’s all. Just ‘You don’t know me’ over and over. It’s making me nuts.”

  “Yeah, I hate those things. I hate commercial jingles the most. One time when I was on a stakeout, I kept hearing a voice say, Raid kills bugs dead. All the damn night long, I heard that commercial.”

  I drained the last of my porter and set the bottle on the butcher block.

  “The little boy who had surgery hasn’t waked up yet. Surgery was at seven this morning. Shouldn’t he be awake by now?”

  Paco’s dark eyes studied me. “You said he’s three years old, right?”

  My throat worked for a moment in a vain attempt to deny his implicit meaning, but I knew he was right.

  I said, “Okay.”

  In the shorthand communication that develops between people who love and support one another, he was telling me that I was seeing my three-year-old daughter in Jeffrey, seeing her crushed skull every time I thought of Jeffrey’s brain surgery, feeling the edges of the same cold anguish I’d felt when Christy was killed. He had warned me not to do that anymore, and I had agreed to stop. Those unspoken codes may be the best thing about families.

  I helped Paco put away all the leftovers and tidy up the kitchen, then blew kisses at him and Ella and went upstairs to bed. As I fell asleep, Ray Charles was still softly singing in the shadows of my mind.

  “You don’t know me,” he said, “You don’t know me.”

  12

  By a quarter to five next morning, I was dressed and on my porch, trying to shake the feeling that the day would be a bad one. I was glad that Michael would come home at eight o’clock and would be home for the next forty-eight hours. I’ve felt safer all my life when Michael was nearby, and I guess I always will.

  The sky was clear and milky, moon and stars withdrawn into its haze. Subdued bird twittering and gentle surf made morning music, the sea’s breath was cool and smelled of salt and kelp, a new day’s forgiveness dispensed with open hand.

  There was absolutely no reason for a ton of weight to ride on my chest.

  The next few hours flowed with the same smoothness. No unpleasant surprises. Nothing out of the ordinary. At the Sea Breeze, Billy Elliot and I galloped around the oval parking lot until he was satisfied and grinning, and I was gasping for air. After Billy Elliot, I walked a sedate pug and then a pregnant collie mix. When the dogs were all walked and fed and brushed, I saw to the cats on my list. At each house, I fed them, groomed them, and spent about fifteen minutes playing with them. Sometimes we played with a cat’s own toys, and sometimes with one of mine.

  Dogs don’t much care what games you play with them, they’re just tickled that you’re playing with them at all. You can roll old ratty foam balls around for dogs, or even throw them a cat’s toy,
and they’ll think you’re the coolest playmate they’ve ever had.

  Cats, on the other hand, are as fickle about their toys as they are about their food. Wave a peacock feather at a cat one day, and he’ll jump for it with ecstatic excitement. Wave the same feather the next day, and the cat will sit with a disdainful sneer on his face and look at you as if you have insulted him, his mother, and all his ancestors back to Egypt.

  At Mazie’s house, I heard saxophone music as I went up the walk to the front door. Pete answered the doorbell with the sax in his hand, all the lines in his face curving upward.

  “The boy’s doing fine. Hal called early this morning, said he came out of the anesthetic late last night. He was groggy and confused for a while, but now he’s alert. Hal said they’d be moving him to Sub-ICU sometime this morning.”

  My knees went weak with relief. “Did Hal say what the doctors think about the seizures?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to keep him. Poor guy, he sounded exhausted. He just wanted to tell me Jeffrey was out of ICU and to make sure Mazie was okay.”

  At the sound of her name, Mazie raised her head, then lowered it with a sigh and stretched her chin against her forepaws.

  Pete said, “I’m worried about her, but I told Hal she was okay. I didn’t want him to worry too.”

  I knelt beside Mazie and stroked her head. “Jeffrey will be home soon, Mazie, and he’s going to be fine.”

  I hoped with all my heart that I was telling her the truth—that Jeffrey would come home soon and never have another seizure.

  Neither of us enjoyed our walk, and when we came back and turned into her driveway, something at the edge of my vision streaked across the street and into the trees and foliage. I turned my head, but whatever it was had disappeared. I had only caught a quick flash of movement, but I’d got the impression of a small brown animal with a long tail. Somewhat like a lemur, except lemurs live on a different continent. Actually, it had seemed like a small brown cat. To be even more specific, it had seemed like Leo on the lam.