Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In A Leopard Spot

The food was hot, heavy, and delicious.

“I’m amazed that tourists eat up this old-style Polish stuff,” Matt commented after sampling the beets and dumplings.

“Ethnic is in. Speaking Polish actually comes in handy here. Too bad you and your cousins never learned anything but silly phrases.”

“We wanted to be mistaken for a more upscale group than the Poles,” Matt said. “The Irish.”

“Those Irish! They’ve got Chicago in their back pockets, that’s for sure, but they had a rougher time than the Poles a couple generations earlier. I imagine you worked with a lot of Irish priests.”

“That I did,” Matt said in a faint brogue, “and nuns too.”

“Now, that’s another thing! The nuns are literally dying out. Sometimes I don’t recognize this world.”

“And sometimes,” Matt reminded her gently, “we should be glad we don’t.”

She winced slightly as she nodded. They would never discuss her disastrous marriage with Cliff Effinger. Unlike the mixed feelings Matt still had about his childhood house, his feelings toward Effinger had evaporated after his successful search for the man. He had been like a devil who could be exorcized.

A house, though, being inanimate—being transcendent, as places always are—was an anonymous witness to the past with all its pain and survival. It was a shell you left behind as you moved on, and with it a record of how you’d grown.

He’d ask Krys, privately, to take some photos of the place.

Their plates were already cleared away when his mother looked up, beaming.

“Just in time for dessert! Krys!” She half stood to wave.

Matt felt a foreign pang, astounded to recognize it as a flutter of jealousy, a usually alien emotion.

Krys, his just-twenty cousin, came charging across the restaurant, booted to the knee, skirted to mid-thigh, her bare knees windburned in between, her spiky punk haircut grown out to shoulder-brushing Botticelli Venus tendrils, and her cheeks flushed with cold and probably a post-class beer or two.

Trailing her was loping young guy with hair half-shaved and half-moussed, wearing weathered jeans, a battered black leather jacket and a plaid flannel shirt so out it was in.

“Sit down,” his mother half ordered, half invited, like the hostess she was. “Doesn’t Matt look good?” So much for him looking tired.

“Yeah.” Krys flashed him a nod of intense recognition. “This is Zeke. He’s a sculpture major.”

“What do you sculpt, Zeke?” his mother asked politely. “I’ve been doing some clay models and it’s really fun.”

“Body parts. Out of rusted automobile pieces. It’s a statement.”

“You mean…auto body parts?” She was trying to comprehend.

“Naw. Body parts. Like hands. Hips. Boobs.”

Matt’s mother glanced quickly at Krys. Whose body parts, she wanted to ask, but knew better not to.

Probably his girlfriend’s, Mother , Matt wanted to answer the unspoken speculation. It’s a stage .

Krys was rearranging her silverware after shrugging out of a heavy wool jacket. “Your mother’s been taking some adult-ed art classes, and she’s really good.”

“I’m not surprised,” Matt said.

“Are you taking the drawing-from-life class, Mira?” Krys asked.

“Not this semester,” his mother answered blushing at the idea of sketching nude models. “I don’t have time with the new job.”

Zeke looked up at Matt from the menus a waiter had delivered to all four of them. “Krys says you used to be a priest. Like a Catholic priest. You sure don’t look like it.”

Matt detected a smidge of antagonism. “Sorry about that. Maybe I should get some bifocals or something.”

“No, man. I mean, wasn’t it heavy telling people what to do?”

“Priests don’t tell anyone what to do. They just try to ask more pointed questions about life, God, the universe and all that than we ordinarily do.”

Krys hissed her impatience. “Cruise for calories, Zeke. They have some wild desserts here. Matt wasn’t that kind of know-it-all priest, anyway.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

“I just do.” Her eyes fell to the menu. “I’m going to have the plum dumplings. Anyone want to share?”

Zeke made a discreet retching sound. His mother raised her eyebrows, then frowned across the room. “One of my best customers just came in. I’d better seat him personally. Matt, order me a sherbet, please.”

Stingers and sherbet? His mother was evolving all right.

Matt watched her rise and head for a steel-gray-haired man in a cashmere camel-hair coat.

Zeke announced, “I gotta split for the little boys’s room,” then lurched up and off.

“Have we been…deserted?,” Matt asked Krys.

She looked at him, blinked, then laughed. “‘Deserted’? Did you say it! Zeke can be such a dork, but he’s all right, really.”

“Glad to hear it, but I didn’t need to know it.”

“Not interested in my boyfriends? I’m crushed.”

“You don’t look crushable.”

In fact, Krys looked just like his mother. Like a new woman since Christmas. Only she was a new young woman.

He watched his mother guide her charge to a table for one against the wall. Was she flirting with the old geezer?

“She’s doing fine,” Krys said suddenly. “Took to the new job like Cinderella to a glass slipper. Mira was like some new kid at school, all awkward and apologizing, but I’ve got her thinking like a Chicago girl now.”

“I bet you have.” Matt put his attention where she wanted it: on her. “You seem a lot happier than at Christmas. Can I credit the avant-garde Zeke?”

“Oh, he’s okay, really. Underneath it all. Young guys aren’t worth much these days, but they’re all I have at my age.”

“They grow out of it.”

“That’s why I put in the time. Besides, I need an ally against my family, and you’re not here.”

“I was only here for a couple of days before.”

“Seemed longer.” She smiled at him, fairly tremulously for a Chicago girl. He glimpsed the pressured teenager from Christmas ready to commit crushes with an older cousin she’d never seen before. She’d been unhappy about her family not allowing her to go to art school in California, but settling for art school in Chicago had done her good, despite Zeke, and in Matt’s absence, she’d taken his mother under her wing.

They were good for each other, the older and younger woman. Matt suddenly understood that spasm of jealousy. Krys was having the kind of almost-adult relationship with his mother that he never would have. Or maybe he would someday, thanks to Krys. So get over it.

“You’ve done so much for my mother, Krys. Thanks.”

“Oh, she needed some prodding to get out of the old ruts. And it’s not for charity. She backs me up with my folks about art school.”

“And about Zeke?”

“No. Nobody would back me up about Zeke.”

“Then I will.”

“You that eager to get rid of me?”

“I don’t think I ever had you.”

“Oh, yes, you did.” She tossed her tangled locks. “But I was an impressionable kid then. Thanks for being nice to me, though.”

“Not hard. So do you think…Mira will go for the life drawing class?”

“Maybe. In a couple of years. She’s got quite a flair for color and line. You should see if you’ve inherited an artistic streak.”

“Not me.”

She glanced at his jacket. “Maybe the girlfriend who picked out your jacket is the artist.”

“Maybe.”

Krys’s fingers flicked across his sleeve. “Nice. She is still your girlfriend?”

“Friend.”

“Still?”

“Still.” He felt the hesitation flicker over his face. Dare he be friends with anyone, any woman, with Kitty O’Connor hovering in the wings? And was he right to feel safe here? What about Temple back in Vegas? Kitty the Cutter might be angry he’d slipped her leash. She might decide to teach him a lesson, and no one was nearer at hand for that than Temple….