Блейз Клемент - Raining Cat Sitters And Dogs

I took a sip of tea and tried to think which thing to tell. Like which disaster had precedence.

I said, “I met a teenaged girl a few days ago. Her name is Jasmine, but she’s called Jaz. She’s a cute girl, smart, likes pets. She’s from L.A., and she saw some gang members shoot a boy. A whole street full of people saw it, but she’s the only one willing to testify because everybody else is scared of the gang. The government has put her in witness protection to keep her safe until the trial. They moved her here and stuck her in a little apartment at a resort hotel on Siesta Key. She had an officer assigned to her, and he checked on her a couple of times a day, but she was lonely and called some old friends in L.A. Word got out where she was, and the gang came here looking for her. She’s disappeared now, and the marshal who’s been keeping an eye on her thinks they’ve killed her.”

Sadness clouded Cora’s eyes. “Does her family know?”

“There isn’t a family. Her parents abandoned her when she was little, and her grandmother raised her. The grandmother died a few months ago and Jaz was put in a foster home. Poor kid never had much of a chance.”

“That’s not true. She had a grandmother. She must have done a good job too, to raise a girl so brave and honest.”

I blinked at Cora. Until that moment, I hadn’t seen Jaz as anything except a girl in trouble. But Cora was right. Jaz was incredibly brave to be willing to testify against a gang. None of the other witnesses had her courage. None of them had her honesty.

I tore off a bite of chocolate bread from my chunk and popped it in my mouth. It was almost as good as when it was piping hot.

I said, “I wish she hadn’t been so honest about telling people where she was.”

Cora said, “I blame the hospitals.”

I tore off another bite and wondered if Cora’s mind was going soft.

She said, “Used to be when babies were born, the hospital put them all in one room with a glass wall so people could look at them. They’d be all lined up in their little plastic bins, pink blankets around the girls and blue around the boys. Sometimes they put little stocking caps on their heads to match. They had strict viewing times, you couldn’t just go see them any old time, so it was a special thing to get to look at them. Sometimes when things were so hard for me and I didn’t know if I was going to make it, I’d go to the hospital and look at those babies. They were so new they still had God’s fingerprints on them, and looking at them would make me remember that we all come perfect.”

I said, “Those guys who killed a boy just for fun may have been perfect when they were born, but they’re bad now.”

Cora said, “That’s because people don’t ever get to see a whole roomful of new babies anymore, so they don’t understand that no baby is born bad. People turn their backs on babies, let them go hungry and sick, and then when the babies grow up to be killers and thieves, they say, ‘See there? I told you they were bad.’ ”

She raised her teacup and fixed me with her piercing old eyes. “That girl you’re talking about could have turned out bad just like those boys, but she had a grandmother who loved her. That’s why she’s honest and brave. That’s why my granddaughter was honest and brave too, because that’s how I raised her.”

I knew for a fact that Cora’s granddaughter had not been honest. But it was true she’d been brave, and that was probably because Cora had raised her.

I said, “My grandmother raised me too.”

“See? Grandmothers do it best.”

I opened my mouth to say that Jaz could get killed no matter how honest and brave she was, then remembered what had happened to Cora’s granddaughter and closed it. Cora was right about Jaz. None of the other witnesses had been honest enough to speak up.

The other side of complete honesty, of course, is that it’s a mark of immaturity. If you’re hiding from bad people who want to kill you, and the bad people ask bystanders where you are, you hope the bystanders will be mature enough to lie. If they’re small children or immature adults, they’ll point to your hiding place.

Jaz had the courage to agree to give honest testimony in court about the murder she’d seen. But immaturity had made her tell the truth to somebody about where she was, and now she had been found and possibly killed.

As if she were testing my own level of maturity, Cora said, “What’s going on with you and that nice detective you’re in love with?”

I swallowed a sip of tea wrong and for a moment sounded like a drowning person. “I’m not in love with him!”

She gave me one of those serene smiles unique to wise old women, the kind that makes their eyes almost disappear into fine wrinkles but still allows the flare in their eyes to pin you down like a laser beam.

She said, “I don’t know why you keep saying that. It’s plain as day you’re in love with him.”

My heart had started thumping like I’d been caught at something illicit. I said, “I don’t want to be in love with him. I don’t want to be in love with any man.”

“None of us do, hon, but it usually don’t make any difference what we want. We fall in love anyway.”

I always forget that Cora was once a young woman. But of course she was, and of course there had been men in her life.

She smoothed butter on a bit of chocolate bread, then used the bread like a lecturer holding a pointer. “Just make sure you’re not thinking you’re in love when it’s really pity you feel. Women do that all the time. Loving is the easiest thing in the world for a woman. A woman could go out and flag down ten men on the highway and there’d be two or three in the bunch she could love. Soon as a woman gets to know a man, finds out how he had a bad time in school, or had an old man that was mean to him, she falls in love. Especially if he’s good-looking and smiles at her and talks halfway smart. But half the time it’s not love, it’s pity. Women always want to make up to a man for all the bad things the world has done to him, and they think that’s love. Next thing you know they’re marrying him, and that’s like bringing home a dog that foams at the mouth just because you feel sorry for it. I don’t care how much you think you can fix him, the wrong man will turn on you quick as a mad dog.”

I said, “I don’t feel sorry for Guidry.”

“Well, that’s good. But you’ve got to be sure that other stuff is right too. You know, the part in bed. People don’t like to talk about it, but women need a lot more lovemaking than men do. Men talk about it more, but women want to do it more. And if you’re with a man that don’t like to do it much, or isn’t any good at doing it, you’ll get fat and cranky. Don’t get mixed up with a cold man.”

Oddly, I felt myself blushing. Not that talk about sex embarrassed me, but it made me remember what sex had been like with Todd. He had showed me a survey one time in which people who’d been happily married twenty, thirty, sixty years had sheepishly admitted to fantastic sex. They felt a bit freakish about it because they knew the lust part of love was supposed to die and be replaced with warm companionship, but their mutual lusts had never died. Todd had said, “I guess that means we’ll still be chasing each other around when we’re a hundred.”

I thought about Judy saying that if I ever went to bed with Guidry, I’d probably kill him. But what if I was a firecracker ready to explode and Guidry turned out to have no sizzle?

Cora was watching me with an expectant look, so I must have been lost in thought longer than I realized.

I said, “If I ever fall in love again, I want it to bloom slowly, not explode like Fourth of July fireworks.” I liked the sound of that. I thought it sounded wise and mature.