Lisa Scottoline - Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog - The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman

By the end of the conversation, you know what I was thinking. Mick Jagger is a false idol, and I need a home theater.

All I have is a home, and while I used to think that was enough, I was wrong.

My new home theater was already taking shape in my mind, fully-loaded. It included all of the above, plus some custom touches that Francesca and I came up with. Cupholders in the recliners. A popcorn machine. We stopped short of the mannequin inside the fake ticket window, because that would be creepy.

We even thought of signs we could hang on the walls: There’s no place like home theater. Bless this home theater. Home, sweet, home theater.

Then we started walking around our house, figuring out which room we could destroy, I mean, convert.

We considered the family room, but it had too many pesky windows, and even if we put up shades, we could never get the room dark enough. There was just too much sunlight streaming in, ruining everything. Plus views of evergreen trees and holly bushes we’d have to obliterate.

We considered the basement, but I nixed that idea. My basement is dark enough, but it’s cold and damp. Spiders live there, and the occasional mouse.

All my mice are occasional.

If they weren’t, that would be a problem I’d have to do something about and the kind of thing you’d never admit to in print. I know they’re occasional because I put occasional traps down and find dead mice, but only on occasion. Also I think of them as field mice, which are a normal and natural part of country life, and not mere rodents, which are disgusting. And I do live in a rural area, if you don’t count the Corporate Center. So all I have, really, are occasional field mice.

Either way, the basement home theater isn’t happening.

Unless the movie is Willard.

We went to the dining room and looked it over. I have a symbolic dining room and consider myself lucky. In my broke days, I always dreamed of having a house with a dining room I didn’t use. It’s not as if my dining room is too fancy to use, because nothing in my house is too fancy. It’s that I’ve run out of bookshelves, so books cover all the surfaces in the dining room, including the table and chairs. While some people have a pile of books to be read, the so-called TBR pile, I have a dining roomful of books to be read, or a TBR dining room. The books present an obstacle to a home theater, but I can’t bring myself to replace Thoreau with Transformers III.

So the dining room is out.

We ran out of rooms and looked around for a place to build an addition for the home theater, but by then we both knew we were pipe dreaming. There was no place for an addition, and it would cost a fortune. We resigned ourselves to the fact that our home would forever lack a home theater.

But we hold out hope that those friends of hers will ask us over.

Charity begins at home theater.

So I have two kittens, Mimi and Vivi. They’re eight months old and although they look a lot alike, their personalities couldn’t be more different.

This is A Tale of Two Kitties.

Mimi is an adorable black-and-white kitten who looks like Figaro from Disney’s Pinocchio, with white paws like cartoon gloves and a matching stripe down the center of her face. She has golden eyes set close together, and her nose is jet black. She loves to be petted, eats whatever is put in front of her, and wakes me up by dancing on my face.

She also has a repertoire of great noises, including a gratifying purr and a questioning chirp that sounds like, Mrrrp? And when she chirps, she curls her black tail into a question mark. Genius.

If Mimi catches a mouse, she brings it to me alive, so that I can scoop the poor thing into a tumbler and set it free. Obviously, she doesn’t have the heart to kill anything.

In fact, Mimi is so affectionate that the other day, my daughter came hurrying into the kitchen to say that she had been petting the kitten, who had actually drooled with happiness. I didn’t believe it, so Francesca returned Mimi to her lap and scratched the kitten’s head. In a few minutes, Mimi drifted into a feline fugue state and started dripping.

It was cuter than it sounds.

Our other kitten, Vivi, is also adorable. She looks remarkably like Mimi, but is gray where Mimi is black. An upside-down V on Vivi’s forehead reminds me of a demented Harry Potter, and her eyes are the green of martini olives. She has a perfect slate nose and delicate ears.

But beauty is only fur deep.

If Mimi is Gallant, Vivi is Ted Bundy.

Last week, Vivi killed three mice, two moles, and a large dove. She also killed three more snakes in addition to the one she exterminated when she was only two months old. And yesterday she came home with fresh blood on her fur.

I think she buried the body.

Unlike sunny Mimi, Vivi has a dark side. It’s like a Patty Duke episode, but one of the Patty Dukes is homicidal.

They say that serial killers start with killing animals. So what do animal serial killers start with? It’s a good question.

Vivi knows the answer.

When she’s not killing things, Vivi spends her day ignoring me. Whenever I try to pet her, she runs away. She hates to be picked up. She never purrs. Not only doesn’t she love me, she doesn’t like me. In fact, she doesn’t even recognize me. Every time I come home, she cocks her head as if to say, Have we met?

But that’s not my point.

My point is, why did one kitten turn out so good, and the other not-so-good? I am the mother of an only child, so I have no experience with raising two of anything. I treated the kittens exactly the same, yet they turned out completely different.

Where did I go wrong?

I can’t figure it out. I love both kittens equally. I haven’t shown any favoritism. Yet Mimi adores me, and Vivi wishes me dead.

And you, too.

Bribes don’t work. I offer them Flaked Chicken & Tuna Feast, plus all manner of fish-shaped oily treats, to the same result. Mimi gobbles them up, but Vivi turns away. I even bought them both the same toy bird on a string, which Mimi happily batted, cute as an illustration in a children’s book. But Vivi only watched from the sidelines. If the bird was dead, the fun was over.

I even got them catnip, which Mimi rolled around in, purring. Vivi merely left the room. She has outgrown gateway drugs. As we speak, she’s probably out dealing.

Things got worse when Vivi came home with a cut on her ear, from a brawl outside with God-knows-what. A hawk, or maybe a dragon. So I took her to the vet, and he told me I had to give her an antibiotic with a medicine dropper.

Are you kidding, doc?

Vivi won’t let me hold her, much less stick something in her mouth. So I put on a down coat and leather gloves to dose her, and still she raged like Charlize Theron in Monster.

One way or the other, the fact that Vivi turned out so bad will get blamed on me. People always blame the mother, and it’s not fair. Look at Mrs. Spears, Britney’s mother. Sure, she raised Britney, but her other daughter turned out… oh, wait. Okay, never mind. Maybe Mrs. Spears gave them too much wet food?

Nevertheless, I have to admit that I still love Vivi. I keep hoping I can turn her around. Gain her trust. Win her love. Maybe I’ve been too much of a friend, and not enough of a parent.