Блейз Клемент - The Cat Sitter’s Pajamas

She had a tape measure hanging around her neck, and her pepper-and-salt hair looked as if she’d forgotten to comb it that morning. When she looked up and saw me, she laughed.

“Oh, Dixie! I thought you were somebody else.”

“Mrs. Langham, you really shouldn’t leave your door unlocked like that.”

She laughed. “Been doing it all my life. I’m too old to change now. What can I do for you?”

“Nothing, really. I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop in.”

“Your mother used to do that. Of course, she always had something in mind she wanted me to make for her.”

“You knew my mother?”

She looked exasperated. “I haven’t always been this old, Dixie. She and I are about the same age, actually. Now she was a woman who knew how to dress.”

She cast a dismissive look at my rumpled shorts and tee, as if to say that anybody in her right mind could see that I was not a woman who knew how to dress.

I said, “I remember. I was only nine when she left, but I remember how she dressed.”

I didn’t admit that I sometimes stole into the attic of Michael’s house and lifted out musty-smelling clothes our mother had left in an old trunk. Her clothes were the only things she’d left behind for Michael and me.

Mrs. Langham said, “I made a lot of her clothes. She would see something in a magazine and bring me a picture, and I’d make it. We were both so young then, we had the nerve to tackle anything. Most of it turned out okay.”

“You stole designs?”

She frowned. “I copied designs.”

I reached out and twirled a spool of hot pink thread on its peg on the wallboard. “I guess I don’t know the difference between stealing and copying.”

Like a teacher explaining a simple idea to a dull student, she said, “Here’s how it works: A designer has an idea for a dress or a blouse or a skirt or something. It’s not a better idea than you or I could come up with, but models show it in those big fashion shows where reporters and wealthy women in dark glasses go, and everybody goes nuts over the length of the skirts or the way the jackets have shoulder pads or the way they don’t. Movie stars and wealthy women buy those clothes and pay thousands of dollars for a blouse or a pair of slacks. Counterfeiters rush out and copy the designs, put the designer’s label in them, and sell a blouse or a pair of slacks for hundreds of dollars. Garment manufacturers copy the designs in different fabrics or colors and send them out to department stores, and a blouse or a pair of slacks will cost maybe fifty dollars. Dressmakers like me copy the designs in the same fabric and color as the original, and a pair of slacks or a blouse will set a woman back the cost of the fabric and whatever the dressmaker charged to make it. That’s the difference.”

“But counterfeiters can go to jail.”

“Counterfeiters put a designer’s label in their stuff. They claim it’s the original goods. Dressmakers don’t claim it’s anything but a copy. That’s the only difference.”

“So it’s the difference between an honest copy and a dishonest copy.”

“Exactly. And if you ask me, the people who get stung by a counterfeit copy sort of ask for it. It’s all about ego. They think having a big designer’s label in their shirt makes them more important. You see people going around wearing scarves with designer’s names on them, or carrying handbags with the designer’s label on the outside. What’s that about, for God’s sake? If I’m going to put a name on something I wear, it’ll be my own name.”

She put her elbows on her sewing machine and leaned her chin on her folded hands. “Dixie, why don’t you let me make you something nice to wear? You’ve got your mother’s figure, but you hide it under all that droopy stuff.”

I felt my whole body blush. “I’m a pet sitter. I have to wear this droopy stuff.”

“I’m talking about when you go out. I’d like to see you in something wrapped in front, fitted close at the waist, with a deep cleavage. A dark rose color, I think.”

My mind immediately went to shoes with ridiculously tall heels in which I stood beside Ethan at a nice restaurant where the tables were covered in starched white linen. Ethan’s fingertips were on the small of my back. My dark rose, tightly wrapped back that was behind my deep-cleavaged front.

I said, “I don’t go out much.”

As if continuing a different conversation, she said, “How is your mother, anyway?”

While I was still registering the fact that it had been Ethan’s fingertips on my back and not Guidry’s, I said, “I haven’t seen my mother since she came to my grandfather’s funeral. She left right afterward, and we never heard from her again.”

I didn’t add that we’d never heard from her before Granddad’s funeral, either, or that she’d left as soon as she’d learned that all my grandfather’s assets, including the beachfront property, had been left solely to Michael and me.

“So you don’t know where she is?”

“Not a clue.”

“That’s too bad.”

I shrugged.

“Dixie, your mother wasn’t a bad person. She just wanted more than the life she had here.”

I thought of Briana saying, I would have followed the devil himself to get out of that little town.

I said, “She had two kids here.”

“She knew your grandparents would take care of you. It wasn’t like she put you out on the street.”

And suddenly I was a child, walking down a long hallway where my mother’s collection of hats covered an entire wall. The hats had hung on pegs the way some people display masks picked up in exotic locales. There hadn’t been anything exotic about my mother’s hats, and she’d bought most of them in Sarasota, but they formed a pleasing mosaic of colors and shapes on the wall. Every morning, Mom would come out of her bedroom still in her nightgown and walk back and forth in front of the wall of hats until she’d found the one that fit her mood for the day. Then she’d clap it on her head and disappear to dress in something that did justice to the hat she’d chosen.

When she left us, she didn’t take her hats, so for a long time my brother and I had expected her to come home. We couldn’t imagine how she’d manage to know how to feel without a hat on her head to direct her. It took me a long time to understand that she’d known all along how she felt. The hats had merely given her a daily role to play so nobody else would guess who she really was.

Mrs. Langham got up and came toward me with a tape measure in her hands. “Stand still, let me get your measurements.”

She was a pro. Before I had time to tell her I didn’t really want her to make me a dress with plunging cleavage, she had measured me.

“I’ll get the fabric and notions. Stop by next week and we’ll do a fitting.”

I wanted to tell her I had plenty of notions of my own, but I had a feeling she meant notions of a different kind.

I left her smiling to herself as if she knew some funny secret. As I drove away, I felt a sudden and totally unexpected stab of longing for my mother.

The rest of the afternoon went smoothly. No pet had peed on a rug or knocked over a potted plant. Every tail was raised in satisfaction when I left. After my last call, I went to the Trillin house to see how much progress the crime-scene cleaners had made.

I parked in the driveway behind their blue and white hazmat van. The front door was open, and I could hear the sound of a vacuum inside. I stuck my head in the front door and saw a man in a blue jumpsuit backing toward the door. He was pulling a vacuum hose that seemed to be sucking up moisture from the floor.

I waved my arms and yelled over the noise, and he turned his head to look over his shoulder. He wore a surgical mask. He turned off the machine and turned to face me, but he didn’t remove his mask. With his hazmat gloves and boots, he looked like an extra on a movie about an invasion of aliens from outer space.