Софи Келли - A Midwinter's Tail

“Isn’t he a sweetheart?” Maggie said, giving me a saccharine grin. She was never going to let me forget she’d thought Marcus and I were perfect for each other about ten minutes after we’d met.

“Yes, he is,” I said, making a face at her.

“So you like the kitchen?” Roma asked. “Really?”

“Very much,” I said.

“Me too,” Maggie agreed, running a hand over one of the cabinet doors. “The energy of the entire house has changed.”

She was right. The lonely feeling the old place used to give off was gone.

Roma had made minestrone soup for lunch and there were thick slices of brown bread and a wedge of cheddar cheese. We ate at the kitchen table.

“This is Rebecca’s brown bread, isn’t it?” I said.

Roma nodded. “Yep. She brought it out this morning along with two new shelters for the cats.”

Since the cats were feral, they lived in the old carriage house year-round. Harry Taylor Junior had strengthened and added insulation to one corner of the old building, where hay had once been stored. Rebecca and several other volunteers had made warm sleeping shelters for each cat out of large plastic storage bins with straw for insulation.

“How are Lucy and the others?” I asked. Lucy was the smallest member of the feral cat family, but she was its undisputed leader. We seemed to have a rapport. Maggie liked to call me the Cat Whisperer.

Roma looked out the window toward the carriage house. “I’m going to put the cage out for Smokey.”

“Why?” I asked.

She shifted her gaze to me. “He was moving a lot more slowly yesterday and he didn’t eat very much.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

Smokey was the oldest cat in the colony as far as Roma could tell. The scar above his right eye and the missing tip of his tail made me wonder what his life had been like before Roma had discovered the cats and taken over their care.

She gave me a half smile. “Thanks. There isn’t anything you can do right now. I’ll let you know how he is once I get him down to the clinic.”

Maggie shot me a look of sympathy and I picked up my spoon again. “What about Micah?” I asked.

Micah was a small ginger tabby that had been wandering around Wisteria Hill since early fall.

Roma broke a slice of bread in half and dipped a piece in her bowl. “She shows up to eat about every second day. But it doesn’t matter what I put in the cage; I can’t catch her.”

Maggie’s head was bent over her bowl, but she inclined it in my direction. “You need to use the Cat Whisperer and her sidekick, the Cat Detective,” she said.

Roma laughed. “The Cat Detective?”

Maggie smiled. “Marcus is the one who found Desmond and brought him to the clinic, which is how you ended up discovering the cats up here. That makes him the Cat Detective.”

“Very funny,” I said.

“And Marcus managed to figure out that Micah was a girl cat and not a boy cat, something that had stymied the best veterinary minds in town,” Maggie added teasingly.

When Roma first spotted Micah she’d thought the little cat was male. Later, when Marcus and I encountered him, he quickly saw that “he” was in fact “she.”

Roma squared her shoulders, and her chin jutted out. “I wasn’t wearing glasses,” she said.

“That’s because you don’t need glasses.” I reached for the cheese.

She crinkled her nose at me. “I mean my sunglasses,” she said. “It was a very bright day.”

“Oh, of course,” I said, nodding solemnly.

Roma stuck her tongue out at me and then she laughed.

“Seriously,” I said. “Would you like Marcus and me to try to catch Micah?”

Roma nodded. “Please. I’m not having any luck and I’m worried about where she’s sleeping, especially since it’s been so cold.”

“Okay,” I said, dropping a chunk of cheese into my soup. “Let me know once you have Smokey and then I’ll see if we can get Micah for you.”

After lunch Maggie helped Roma load the dishwasher and I changed into my old jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt.

We covered the hardwood floors with cardboard that Harry Junior had saved for Roma from the recycling bins at the community center. Then Maggie settled in with a brush and a small foam roller to paint around the big bay window. Roma started in on the brushwork on the adjacent wall, and I followed her with the roller. This was the second coat and we wanted it to look good.

Eddie, with some guidance from Oren, had stripped and refinished all the wide oak trim and baseboard in the room. Roma had carefully taped off all the wood before Maggie and I had arrived.

“Eddie did a great job with this trim,” Mags said as she worked her brush along the edge of the big window.

“He has more patience than I do,” Roma said. She was working on a small stepladder above my head, cutting in with her brush where the wall and ceiling met. “Eventually, he wants to do all the woodwork in the house.”

Maggie looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “Eventually?”

“You know what I mean,” Roma said.

“It’s none of our business,” I began.

“But that’s not going to stop you.” Roma looked down from her perch on the ladder and smiled at me.

“No, it’s not,” Maggie agreed, her head turned almost upside down as she worked underneath the window.

“Does that mean you and Eddie have talked about the future?” I asked.

Roma continued to paint along the top of the wall. “We have. Well, sort of. It’s just . . .” She stopped painting and turned to look down at Maggie and me. “You know that Eddie’s been divorced for a long time.”

“Uh-huh,” Maggie said.

I nodded.

“He has a good relationship with his ex, Sydney’s mother.”

Sydney was Eddie’s ten-year-old daughter from his brief marriage to his high school sweetheart.

“He gets to spend a lot of time with Syd in the off-season, but even so, I know he wishes he had more time with her.” Roma sighed softly. “I don’t want him to regret giving up the chance to have more children.”

I opened my mouth to tell Roma that from what I’d seen, what Eddie wanted was a life with her, but she spoke first, inclining her head toward Maggie. “What I really want to know is what’s happening with Maggie’s love life.”

“I don’t have a love life,” Mags said, keeping her gaze focused on the stretch of wall in front of her.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Roma said teasingly, shaking her head. She looked at me again, raising an eyebrow. “The night of the fundraiser I saw Maggie and Brady Chapman this close together.” She held up her thumb and index finger maybe a couple of millimeters apart.

“It’s not what you think,” Maggie said.

I leaned my roller on the edge of the paint tray. “You don’t know what we think,” I said, smiling sweetly.

“Brady had a little grease mark on his tie. I had one of those detergent pens in my purse. All I was doing was cleaning his tie.”

I looked up at Roma. “She was cleaning his tie,” I said.

Roma closed her free hand into a fist and pressed it to her chest. “Awww, isn’t that sweet?”

“I was,” Maggie insisted, still focusing on her painting.

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” I said.

Maggie sat back on her heels and looked over at me. “Brady and I are just friends,” she said, enunciating each word slowly and carefully.

“Marcus and I started out as just friends,” I said.

Above me on the ladder, Roma cleared her throat.

“Sort of,” I amended.

“Eddie and I were just friends at first,” Roma offered.

I remembered how Maggie had squeezed Brady’s hand at the fundraiser, urging him to go to the hospital. “You like him, Mags,” I said.