Блейз Клемент - Cat Sitter On A Hot Tin Roof

I told myself that Jeffrey had excellent surgeons and caring parents. I told myself that Laura was an intelligent woman with a family she could call for any support she needed. I told myself that no matter how much I sympathized, I actually couldn’t make any difference in what either of them was going through.

With that determined, I got up and padded naked to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Carrying the tea to my closet-office, I flipped on the CD player to let Patsy Cline’s no-nonsense, no-equivocation, no-shit voice break the silence. That’s what I needed, less of my own morbid thoughts and more of Patsy Cline’s soul. While I whipped through the clerical parts of my business, Ella sat on my desk and tapped her tail in sympathy for Patsy Cline falling to pieces at the sight of an old lover.

After we were done with record-keeping and grooving on the heartbreak of love, I hauled out the vacuum cleaner and sucked up all the dust in my apartment. I scrubbed my bathroom shiny too, until I was high on Clorox fumes. All the time I did it, I heard my grandmother’s voice saying, “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” which annoyed the heck out of me because it reminded me that I’ve become as much a cleanliness freak as she was. I swear, all those bromides that mothers and grandmothers repeat must change a person’s DNA.

Nevertheless, I felt in control of my little corner of the world when I’d got my environment clean and neat. I almost swaggered when I put away the vacuum. Then I ambled to the closet-office and pulled on a satin thong. I put on a bra too, because I would see Pete later and I didn’t want to give him shortness of breath.

I still had some time before I had to leave for my afternoon rounds, so I took Ella out to Michael’s deck for a spirited session of chase-the-peacock-feather. Watching a moving peacock feather arouses a cat’s innate hunting instincts, so I buy peacock feathers by the dozen. Both of us were a little winded when I got my grooming kit and put Ella on the plank table. Being a Persian mix, she has medium-long coarse hair with an undercoat that can knot up, so she needs to be groomed every day.

As soon as I put her on the table and got out my brush, a squirrel with an exquisitely buoyant tail scampered to the foot of the old oak at the edge of the deck. He picked up an acorn in his paws, turned a backward somersault and came up still holding the acorn. While Ella and I stared at him in round-eyed admiration, he scampered up the tree trunk and disappeared in the branches.

I said, “My gosh, squirrels must be the clowns of the animal kingdom.”

Ella said, “ Thrrripp !” She didn’t exactly shrug, but she sounded as if she thought it was time to talk about her and not about a squirrel.

Like all cats, Ella likes her throat brushed more than anything in the world, so I started there. Careful not to tilt my slicker brush and bite her skin, I ran it down her throat while Ella stretched her neck and closed her eyes, swooning at the pleasure of it. It took just a few seconds more to move down her chest and under her arms, back to her throat for a couple of soothing strokes, and to the outside of her front legs. Then a quick pass over the top of her head and neck, a cat’s second most favorite grooming spot, a few strokes down both her sides while I ran a protective finger down her spine, and then her bloomers.

For a second, my mind drifted to Jeffrey, but I jerked it away as if it were a dog on a leash going somewhere dangerous and forbidden. Like his parents, I had to believe Jeffrey would come through the surgery with no problems. I had to believe the surgery would completely end his seizures. The alternatives were too terrible to even contemplate.

I finished grooming Ella with a fast flick around her tail and a couple of final strokes down her throat. To distribute natural oils to the tips of her hair and make her coat shiny and smooth, I quickly passed a soft-bristled brush all over her body. All fluffed up, she was a glorious burst of technicolor beauty, and I told her so.

Ella preened contentedly. Deep in her kitty heart, Ella believes she’s the most beautiful creature alive. I like that about cats. They don’t compare themselves with other cats. They don’t talk themselves into feeling dumb or ugly or fat or thin, they just enjoy feeling gorgeous. Too bad humans don’t do that.

I put Ella in Michael’s kitchen, made sure she had fresh water in her bowl, and gave her a goodbye kiss on the nose. Then I went outside, spritzed the table with my handy-dandy water and Clorox mixture, and headed out in the Bronco for my afternoon rounds.

As I drove, I caught myself humming a tune and beating time to it on the steering wheel. The lyrics had been in my head all morning, as if I had a jukebox in my brain and somebody had fed it a lot of coins. Actually, it was just the first line of a song’s lyrics. My grandmother had always maintained that each of us has an invisible Guide who is always with us, and the Guide communicates with us by directing our attention to book titles or billboard signs or song lyrics. I’m not sure I believe the Guide idea, but I have noticed that my mind has a way of knowing things before I’m aware of them, and lots of times I don’t catch on until I hear my own voice singing some song I hadn’t thought of in years. This time it was “You don’t know me.”

Silly thing to hear over and over, but I couldn’t shake it.

10

At Tom Hale’s condo, Tom was at the kitchen table working on tax returns. He called hello to me and I yelled back, but I didn’t stay to chat because Tom and I both had work to do. Besides, I thought Tom might be embarrassed to have told me about his personal problems with Frannie, and I knew I was embarrassed to have been so blatant about how I felt about the woman. We both needed a bit of distance for a few days, the same way I needed distance from Laura for a few days.

I seemed to have become the sort of person who knew so much about my friends’ private business that I couldn’t be friendly to them anymore.

My afternoon went fast because two clients had returned home that day, one the human of a Siamese couple, and the other the human of an orange Shorthair. All I had to do was pop in to make sure they had indeed returned as planned, collect a check, and be on my way. Two white Persians, Stella and Marie, were almost as easy. The cats were sisters, so content with each other’s company that they deemed me important only as the human who combed them and put out food for them. While I ran the vacuum to pick up hair they had flung on the carpet, Stella sat on the windowsill looking longingly at the birds around the feeder, and Marie lay on the sofa watching a kitty video of darting fish. When I told them goodbye, they both turned their heads and gave me languid looks of total disinterest.

Mazie was my last call of the day, and I rang the doorbell with dread nibbling the back of my neck. Both Pete and Mazie answered, and the minute I saw Pete’s worried face, I braced myself for whatever bad news he had about Jeffrey. Mazie looked as distressed as Pete, with the corners of her mouth downturned and sad. She looked sharply at me, sighed heavily, then stepped back to let me in.

Pete said, “She was hoping you were somebody else.” He said somebody else in the tone people use when they’re trying to speak in code so a child won’t understand.

I said, “Sorry, Mazie, it’s just me.”

Pete’s saxophone was out of the case and lying on a chair. He held a child’s picture book in his hand, a finger crooked into it to hold his place.

He said, “I’ve been reading to her. She seems to like it.”

He didn’t mention playing the saxophone for her, but I suspected he had been doing that too.