Carole douglas - Cat on a Hyacinth Hunt

"Past Our Lady of Guadalupe and then north?" Matt asked as they drove deeper into the Hispanic neighborhood. He guessed that she didn't have to live here on her salary, but that she was making a statement.

"Now how will you get home?"

"I'll call a cab."

"Way out here? At night. Get real. This is 'hood, amigo. Anglo drivers don't come."

He didn't answer, realizing she was probably right.

"So I'm stuck with you. What a night! I have to let Max Kinsella go, and I'm stuck with you."

Matt said nothing, but she spoke up at last and began directing him. Her voice was deeper, like when she sang, and he suspected she was much drunker than she would ever show.

He recognized the driveway when he turned into it as instructed.

Molina leaned forward to pull the garage door opener from the console box, and he eased the car into the dark, clutter-crowded garage as gently as if he were cruising the Vampire into a mechanic's bay.

"Nice landing." She was sounding sleepy.

By the time they had turned on a yellow brick road of lights from the garage into the small squarish kitchen, someone was stirring down the hall past the living room with its lumbering nighttime shapes.

The same Latina woman Matt had seen at the house before came down the passage like an angry locomotive. "So late. You said only midnight."

"Work, Yolanda. A daring chase into the desert. Desperados apprehended on the seething sands. A woman levitated from a coffin."

Molina laughed softly when the front door closed behind her.

"You'll have to stay here, I suppose. Don't worry about the evil eye from Yolanda. I've never had a man stay over."

"A cab--"

"Will not come. Not at this hour." Molina looked around with slightly swaying deliberation.

"I guess the living room couch it is. There's a half-bath off the garage. Remember there's a preteen girl in the household and undress accordingly. We get up at seven A.M. Need anything?"

"I guess . . . not."

Matt stood and stared at the alien living room after Molina went down the hall on tiptoes.

How had he gotten himself into this? By being a good Samaritan, he supposed, and accompanying Molina on her girl's night out. Her otherwise solitary girl's night out.

Matt shook his head and sought out the half-bath. He couldn't be sorry.

**************

Matt decided that nothing indecent could be read into taking off his shoes, so he did just that. He piled the sofa pillows on one end and punched them into the semblance of one wide bedroom pillow. Steps down the hall made him freeze like a cat burglar Molina's woozy theatrics cut no ice with this woman. "Mariah, she been sleeping since ten.

Like a good girl." Pointed. A glance at Matt. "I must go home now and leave you alone." Hint. "If you need me tomorrow, do not call until after noon." Bigger hint.

Molina laughed softly when the front door closed behind her.

"You'll have to stay here, I suppose. Don't worry about the evil eye from Yolanda. I've never had a man stay over."

"A cab--"

"Will not come. Not at this hour." Molina looked around with slightly swaying deliberation.

"I guess the living room couch it is. There's a half-bath off the garage. Remember there's a preteen girl in the household and undress accordingly. We get up at seven A.M. Need anything?"

"I guess . . . not."

Matt stood and stared at the alien living room after Molina went down the hall on tiptoes.

How had he gotten himself into this? By being a good Samaritan, he supposed, and accompanying Molina on her girl's night out. Her otherwise solitary girl's night out.

Matt shook his head and sought out the half-bath. He couldn't be sorry.

Matt decided that nothing indecent could be read into taking off his shoes, so he did just that. He piled the sofa pillows on one end and punched them into the semblance of one wide bedroom pillow. Steps down the hall made him freeze like a cat burglar.

Molina was laboriously tiptoeing back down it, her arms piled with pillows and blankets.

"Shhh." Her caution now was as elaborate as it had not been in the parking lot. "What was I thinking of? Bad hostess. Water's in the kitchen faucet. Good night."

Matt arranged hi? impromptu bedlinens, smiling. A night in the convent this was not. And for all the wrong reasons.

*****************

At about six in the morning, Alvin and Theodore of singing Chipmunks fame came squirreling across the waffle-cotton blanket covering Matt's legs.

"Ow!" he shouted before he could stop himself.

He opened his eyes to the milky pool of dawn leaking around the edges of the drawn miniblinds and two striped squirrels barrel racing from one end of the living room to the other, using his epidermis as springboard.

"Ow," he said more softly, sitting up to massage his abraded legs.

He only saw the girl in the ankle-length Beauty and the Beast T-shirt when the careening cats returned from a second foray over his flesh and circled her ankles for recess.

"You're the guy from the church," she said.

For a moment his heart raced in panic. Even out of the mouths of babes...

"You were with the red-haired lady."

"Right. At the blessing of the animals."

"You had the biggest black cat that I ever saw."

"Midnight Louie. And ... you and your mother adopted these two guys."

Matt attempted to smile benignly on the striped flying demons. They were having none of it and caromed off the top of the Naugahyde recliner all the better to spring at him.

"Girls," Mariah corrected. At her prepubescent age, gender was becoming destiny.

"Girls. Have . . . they been fixed yet? I mean, had their claws removed?"

"They're too young."

He nodded. Everything here was too young, except Molina.

Mariah stepped closer. "You've been here before."

"Once."

"How come?"

"I had something to discuss with your mother."

"My mother's always working."

"She has a tough job."

"I guess." She stepped closer, tilted her head.

Matt didn't see much Molina in her. Mariah's eyes were black-brown, her hair darker than her mother's and her features fuller, rounder. He wondered suddenly what kind of love this was, for a child who might or might not resemble you, or who resembled most her other parent, who might or might not be loved. Or hated. He suddenly recalled his handsome soldier father, his face a mystery in the flickering light of the saint's candles, his staid (now) mother swept away by one night's impulse.

Crazy. It was all crazy, how these children came here, how they were treated when they did arrive. Mariah Molina was unshaped clay in an art department tray. She was, what, eleven, twelve? On the brink of awful girlhood when her ears would have to be pierced and her music would have to be turned up to maximum and when who she was would depend all too much on how other kids saw her, or how she could make them see her.

Matt suddenly viewed the terrible obligations of being a parent and quailed to his soul.

"It's okay." Mariah came closer. "The cats won't hurt you. They're kinda nuts. Like little kids, you know. Antsy."

"I guess." He smiled at her serious, adult attempt at reassurance. And a little child shall lead them. "I'm not used to waking up in strange places, with strange cats."

"Oh, they aren't strange." She sat down on an easy chair and stroked the young cats as they zoomed past. "Tabitha was a witch in a different life, and she runs away all the time because she's afraid someone will catch her and cut off her tail." She related this primal anxiety with the calmness of a school shrink. "Catarina is the sensitive one and wants to be a wire-walker, but she has to go to school first. Do you like them?"

"I think they're wonderful," he said sincerely. Wonderful and terrible in the history she had invented for them.