by Joe Derkacht
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Zell, a silhouette against the hall light, beckoned to me from the open doorway. She helped me down the back steps and walked me through the rear of the carport. One hand on my elbow, in her other hand she carried a broom.
“For the spiders,” she said, noticing my furtive glances.
A porch light came on, revealing a pathway of crushed oyster shells. She swept aside cobwebs that only she saw, and took a key from her apron.
“If you remember, I have your key, you have mine,” she explained half-apologetically. “My niece in Florida made you promise to check on me mornings, but I’m usually the one who does the checking.”
She led me into the kitchen and flipped light switches on as we made our way through the house. In the bedroom she sat me down in a beautiful cherrywood rocker. As I watched, she pulled back the covers from the bed and patted the sheets.
“There now,” she said, “I’m sure you’ll feel much better sleeping in your own bed.”
She tugged off my shoes and then helped me out of my shirt. By now I was used to her mothering me. Maybe I’d been used to it for years but simply didn’t remember.
“Anything else, John, dear?”
I looked around, taking in my surroundings, wondering about every picture, every book, every piece of furniture in the room and those in the rooms we’d passed through.
“This is my house?”
“You don’t remember?” She asked.
I shook my head.
She sat on the bed as if stunned. “This isn’t another of your lame jokes?”
Lame jokes?
“Dr. Schiffman told me—” she started, nearly knocking off her glasses in swiping at a tear. “Oh, never mind. You know John, when a person’s brain has been injured as yours has, sometimes it takes a while for things to come back.
“Now don’t look at me like that. I don’t know how long it takes,” she said, sniffling. Steadying herself with a deep breath, she forged on. “You can worry yourself to death over it, or you can just look at it like you have a new house and new furniture, make an adventure of it. Do you think you could do that?”
“Can we go back to your house, now?”
“John! Were you listening to me?”
“But Blackie—he might—”
“Is home in bed, don’t you worry,” she asserted. “And that worthless deputy of his will be parked at the beach turnaround doing heaven knows what. Angie says Blackie complains about him all the time.”
Rising peremptorily, she stepped to the bureau and laid a framed photo down on its face.
“You don’t need to see that tonight,” she said, obviously annoyed. “Why you’d even keep a picture of her is a mystery to me, John.”
Too confused to do or say anything else, I nodded in agreement.
“I’ll be over in the morning to get you before Blackie goes on duty. Your favorite waffles and a pot of strong coffee will be waiting for you. If you still have questions, you can ask me anything you want then. Is that okay?”
“Sure,” I said, sure of nothing but somehow comforted by her air of confidence.
“Believe me,” she said, “Everything will be fine. You’ll see. You just have to believe it yourself.”
I suppose my weak smile sent her on her way. She went out, leaving me to survey my surroundings. A flat round can of Copenhagen sat beside the table lamp and a windup alarm clock on the nightstand. At sight of the Copenhagen, I felt my mouth tingle. My tongue shot immediately forward, as if to explore the space between my lower lip and teeth for something it had been missing. Reaching for the can, I found myself beset by a ball of orange fur that seemed to have fallen directly from the ceiling.
“Drat that cat!” Zell said, breathlessly rushing back into the room. She gripped her broom and lifted it like it was a shillelagh.
Tail held high and purring loudly like the sound of a distant motorboat, the cat arched its back and rubbed up against my chest.
“Oh,” Zell said, watching as I ran my hand over its fur. She lowered her broom.
“My cat?” I asked wonderingly.
“Yours, mine, the neighborhood’s,” she said, in a slightly less disgusted tone.
“His name?” I stuttered more from pain, this time, with the cat testing its claws as it walked back and forth over my legs.
“You always call him Ferd.”
“Ferd?”
“One of the neighbor girls says he looks just like a Ferdinand.”
“Oh.” Naturally I would call him Ferd. It was easier to say and seemed to fit him quite well, especially since the fur around his mouth resembled twin white mustaches. At last, he stopped his pacing and curled into a ball on my lap.
“Ferd,” I said. He arched his head up at me and grinned as if to say he was satisfied with the name, too. I tickled him under his chin.
“I’ll leave you two alone, I guess,” Zell said, smiling thinly. She left for the second time. A few moments later, I heard the back door pulled shut.
I lifted Ferd from my lap to the quilted bedcover, slipped out of my jeans, and crawled between the sheets. The Copenhagen interested me, as did the books I saw crammed into the low, built-in bookshelves around the room and the framed photograph Zell had been careful to set on its face. But I was too exhausted to care much about them or anything else. For the moment, sleep was all that mattered.
I reached out and turned off the lamp. The room’s mini-blinds glowed with the light of the same streetlamp I’d seen for the last several nights from my room at Zell’s. Beside me, Ferd’s contented purr was a low snore.