Блейз Клемент - Cat Sitter On A Hot Tin Roof

“Huh. Well, I’ve got one. I keep hearing Ray Charles singing ‘You don’t know me.’ That’s all. Just ‘You don’t know me’ over and over. It’s making me nuts.”

“Yeah, I hate those things. I hate commercial jingles the most. One time when I was on a stakeout, I kept hearing a voice say, Raid kills bugs dead. All the damn night long, I heard that commercial.”

I drained the last of my porter and set the bottle on the butcher block.

“The little boy who had surgery hasn’t waked up yet. Surgery was at seven this morning. Shouldn’t he be awake by now?”

Paco’s dark eyes studied me. “You said he’s three years old, right?”

My throat worked for a moment in a vain attempt to deny his implicit meaning, but I knew he was right.

I said, “Okay.”

In the shorthand communication that develops between people who love and support one another, he was telling me that I was seeing my three-year-old daughter in Jeffrey, seeing her crushed skull every time I thought of Jeffrey’s brain surgery, feeling the edges of the same cold anguish I’d felt when Christy was killed. He had warned me not to do that anymore, and I had agreed to stop. Those unspoken codes may be the best thing about families.

I helped Paco put away all the leftovers and tidy up the kitchen, then blew kisses at him and Ella and went upstairs to bed. As I fell asleep, Ray Charles was still softly singing in the shadows of my mind.

“You don’t know me,” he said, “You don’t know me.”

12

By a quarter to five next morning, I was dressed and on my porch, trying to shake the feeling that the day would be a bad one. I was glad that Michael would come home at eight o’clock and would be home for the next forty-eight hours. I’ve felt safer all my life when Michael was nearby, and I guess I always will.

The sky was clear and milky, moon and stars withdrawn into its haze. Subdued bird twittering and gentle surf made morning music, the sea’s breath was cool and smelled of salt and kelp, a new day’s forgiveness dispensed with open hand.

There was absolutely no reason for a ton of weight to ride on my chest.

The next few hours flowed with the same smoothness. No unpleasant surprises. Nothing out of the ordinary. At the Sea Breeze, Billy Elliot and I galloped around the oval parking lot until he was satisfied and grinning, and I was gasping for air. After Billy Elliot, I walked a sedate pug and then a pregnant collie mix. When the dogs were all walked and fed and brushed, I saw to the cats on my list. At each house, I fed them, groomed them, and spent about fifteen minutes playing with them. Sometimes we played with a cat’s own toys, and sometimes with one of mine.

Dogs don’t much care what games you play with them, they’re just tickled that you’re playing with them at all. You can roll old ratty foam balls around for dogs, or even throw them a cat’s toy, and they’ll think you’re the coolest playmate they’ve ever had.

Cats, on the other hand, are as fickle about their toys as they are about their food. Wave a peacock feather at a cat one day, and he’ll jump for it with ecstatic excitement. Wave the same feather the next day, and the cat will sit with a disdainful sneer on his face and look at you as if you have insulted him, his mother, and all his ancestors back to Egypt.

At Mazie’s house, I heard saxophone music as I went up the walk to the front door. Pete answered the doorbell with the sax in his hand, all the lines in his face curving upward.

“The boy’s doing fine. Hal called early this morning, said he came out of the anesthetic late last night. He was groggy and confused for a while, but now he’s alert. Hal said they’d be moving him to Sub-ICU sometime this morning.”

My knees went weak with relief. “Did Hal say what the doctors think about the seizures?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to keep him. Poor guy, he sounded exhausted. He just wanted to tell me Jeffrey was out of ICU and to make sure Mazie was okay.”

At the sound of her name, Mazie raised her head, then lowered it with a sigh and stretched her chin against her forepaws.

Pete said, “I’m worried about her, but I told Hal she was okay. I didn’t want him to worry too.”

I knelt beside Mazie and stroked her head. “Jeffrey will be home soon, Mazie, and he’s going to be fine.”

I hoped with all my heart that I was telling her the truth—that Jeffrey would come home soon and never have another seizure.

Neither of us enjoyed our walk, and when we came back and turned into her driveway, something at the edge of my vision streaked across the street and into the trees and foliage. I turned my head, but whatever it was had disappeared. I had only caught a quick flash of movement, but I’d got the impression of a small brown animal with a long tail. Somewhat like a lemur, except lemurs live on a different continent. Actually, it had seemed like a small brown cat. To be even more specific, it had seemed like Leo on the lam.

I led a reluctant Mazie down the sidewalk closer to Laura’s house. I didn’t see any signs of life, but that didn’t mean Laura wasn’t home. She could be inside reading the morning paper and Leo could have run out when she went outside to get it. She could be in the shower, not realizing that Leo was loose. Or she could be on the jogging trail, completely unaware that Leo had slipped out when she opened the door.

Mazie pulled on the leash, wanting to go home. I hesitated a moment, torn between wanting to let Laura know her cat was outside, and knowing Mazie was right. I was on her time, not Leo’s. Besides, I wasn’t even sure I had seen Leo. It could have been some other dark cat with a long tail.

Telling myself Leo would eventually come home—if it had been Leo—I led Mazie back to her house. Pete was waiting outside the front door like an anxious father.

I handed Mazie’s leash off to him and said, “I think I saw Laura Halston’s cat while Mazie and I were walking. He runs out every time he sees an open door.”

“Why?”

“I guess he’s a nature cat. Doesn’t like living inside.”

“That’s how I’d be if I were a cat. I’d join the circus again, be on the move all the time.”

“Are there circus cats?”

“Well, sure, lions and tigers. A few people have got domestic cats to do some tricks, jump through hoops, that kind of thing, but cats don’t have a strong desire to please people like good circus animals have. Cats are liable to get bored in the middle of an act and just flat quit.”

“I think I’ll go next door and tell Laura, just in case it was Leo. He might have gone out when Laura opened the door to go running.”

“She ran real early this morning. I took Mazie outside to pee, and I saw her run across the street to the jogging trail.”

“I’m not even sure it was Leo.”

“A bobcat, maybe. People see bobcats in their yards all the time. Bobcats and panthers were here first, poor things.”

I didn’t think it had been a bobcat I’d seen. I was almost positive it had been Leo.

I left the Bronco in Mazie’s driveway and walked to Laura’s house, peering all around as I went in case Leo had returned to his own yard. As soon as I started up Laura’s walk, I saw that her front door was ajar. When I got closer, I saw Leo in the corner of the small porch. He was gnawing on one of his paws as if something was stuck between his toes. I wasn’t surprised that he’d come home. Cats have an unerring sense of direction, and they usually return soon enough when they’ve run away.

Cats are also skittish, and Leo might streak away if I approached him. I knelt on the walk and talked softly to him.