Блейз Клемент - The Cat Sitter's Cradle

Mrs. Harwick was studying me closely. She had a curious look on her face. “Kenny never mentioned he had a cat. What kind of cat is it?”

“An orange tabby, but unfortunately it passed away a while ago.”

“Oh, no. What was his name?”

“Honey,” Mr. Harwick said, “I think Miss Hemingway probably has better things to do than stand around talking about the pool boy’s cat.”

Before I could answer, there was a loud clumping sound from upstairs. I turned around half expecting to see the chandeliers over the kitchen island shaking.

Mrs. Harwick said, “Oh, that’s our daughter.”

She went out to the front foyer and called up the marble staircase.

“Becca,” Mrs. Harwick called. “Come and meet the cat sitter.”

There was a short pause, and then the clomping sound started again, growing louder and louder until finally a young woman dressed almost entirely in black appeared at the top of the stairs. From the sound of it I had expected her to be a linebacker-sized Amazon, but instead she was a petite wisp of a thing. She wore a short black shawl wrapped around her narrow shoulders, with a faded pink T-shirt and a tight black miniskirt over black tights, and black lace-up army boots with two-inch-thick rubber soles. Her hair was jet black, too. It fell across her forehead, half hiding her face. She looked like every sullen, angry teenager in the world, and I wondered if Christy would have gone through a similar stage had she been given the chance.

“Becca, this is Dixie. She’ll be taking care of Charlotte while we’re away.”

Becca came stomping down the stairs in her boots and shook my hand limply, mumbling something that sounded like “hello.” Her green eyes were framed in magenta eyeliner, and her lashes were thick with black mascara. She had her mother’s thin figure and pale skin, but where Mrs. Harwick was polished and confident, Becca was all sharp angles and angst-ridden. I immediately liked her.

I leaned toward her and said, “Love your boots.”

Becca peered up from behind her curtain of black hair and smiled, but before she could say anything Mr. Harwick handed me the stack of files and said, “Thank you for coming by, Miss Hemingway.”

I nodded. “Well, it’s been a pleasure meeting all of you. If there’s anything else you think of, please feel free to give me a call, twenty-four/seven. I keep my cell phone with me at all times.”

I extended my hand to Mr. Harwick, but he stood still with his arms folded over his chest. “No questions?”

Mrs. Harwick smiled tensely and said, “Roy…”

He shot her a look. “No, I’m just curious. Not a single question? We’ve given you a lot of information here, Dixie. I’m a little surprised you wouldn’t have at least one or two questions for us.”

Becca was standing motionless at the bottom of the staircase looking down at the floor. I know men like Mr. Harwick. I had encountered a lot of them in the police force. He was the kind of man that liked to be in charge, and he liked to be in charge all the time, especially around women. In extending my hand to him, I had basically signaled that our meeting was over, and that had obviously made his testicles shrink up a couple of sizes. Had I been a little bit more on my toes, I would have made up a couple of lame-ass questions just to stroke his ego. He was, after all, a client. But I’d had a long day, and I didn’t feel like playing along.

“Mr. Harwick,” I said, “I’ve been pet sitting for quite a while, and I’m pretty good. I promise you there won’t be anything to worry about. Charlotte and I will have a great time while you’re away. She’s in good hands.”

He frowned slightly. “So not one question.”

With a sweet smile, I said, “Nope. If I had a question I would ask it. Was there something in particular you were thinking of?”

He paused, but his expression didn’t change. “Good for you. And no, I think that about covers it.”

He shook my hand firmly and walked back into the living room with a nod at Mrs. Harwick.

She said, “I’ll see you out.”

We walked to the door in silence. I looked back to wave good-bye to Becca and caught her staring at me in awe. I don’t think she’d ever seen a stranger stand up to her father. I had to admit it was not the most professional thing to do, but when a kid has an asshole for a parent, it sometimes feels really good to point it out to them.

Outside on the winding cobblestone driveway, Mrs. Harwick brightened. “Oh, Dixie, I almost forgot!”

She pulled a notecard out of her pocket and handed it to me. It was written with the most precise, miniature handwriting I’d ever seen.

“It’s the feeding schedule for the fish, and there’s also instructions for checking the water chemistry. I doubt you’ll need to adjust it, but it’s important that you check it at least once a day. Fish are funny creatures, you know. They seem so strong and invincible, but introduce just the slightest chemical imbalance and the next thing you know they’re belly up at the bottom of the tank. When my Reggie died, I thought I’d never get over it.”

“Oh, what kind of fish was Reggie?”

She frowned and looked off in the distance. “That’s funny. Reggie was my first husband. I have no idea why I just said that.”

As I pulled my Bronco out and headed down the driveway to the front gate, Mrs. Harwick watched from the porch. I wasn’t sure if it was the day or the Harwicks’ craziness or both, but my head was swimming and I felt a little more loopy than usual. I waved as I turned south to head home, and Mrs. Harwick waved back and went inside the house. I felt such a rush of sympathy for her, an almost immediate bond. I glanced over at Mr. Harwick’s files stacked neatly on the passenger seat.

If I had known what was good for me, I would have tossed the whole stack right out the window and never set foot in that house again.

6

I drove down Midnight Pass at about twenty miles per hour. Nobody honked or drove right behind me shaking their fists and yelling at me to drive faster. They were all driving slowly, too. It was the time of year when clouds of lovebugs swarm the air, and the more slowly you drive, the more gently the lovebugs splat into your car. The more gently they splat, the easier they are to clean off.

Lovebugs are small black flies with long, narrow wings. They come out of their vegetative hiding places every May and September with an urgent need to copulate. They give the term “hooking up” a meaning even the smallest child can understand. The male attaches to the female, and then they fly around crazily in a cloud of other copulating lovebug couples until they fall dead of exhaustion or smash into a moving vehicle. They leave the windshields smeared with gunk, corrode the paint on the cars, and occasion many a raunchy schoolboy joke. On the other hand, birds like to snack on them, and a lot of car wash businesses would go bankrupt if they disappeared, so we just leave them alone and drive at a snail’s pace a couple of times a year.

Siesta Key is long and narrow, eight miles north to south. On a map, it looks like a fish skeleton, with Midnight Pass Road running down its center like a spine, and smaller lanes like fish bones leading off at regular intervals to the Gulf on the west side and Little Sarasota Bay on the east. The head is at the wider, northern end of the Key, where the main village of shops and restaurants is, and the southern end of the island tapers off like a fishtail. Only about seven thousand people make their home on the Key year-round, but another seventeen thousand or more come here during “season.” People with homes on the bay have boat docks, but there are no docks on the Gulf side, just gentle surf lapping onto a crystal white sandy beach.