Let Them Eat Tea

by Coleman Maskell

Chapter 20 - Kat and the Kitten

  "Is that a kitten on the sofa?" Katrina asks Charlie in disbelief. "When did that get here?" Immediately she regrets just blurting out the question. She never knows anymore what might set him off. She turns away and pulls her bathrobe closer around her, retying the belt.

  "Oh, last night," he answers calmly, stretching and yawning. From an eastern window, pale grey light falls slantways across the room through partially open Venetian blinds, making the apartment look like a faded set in an old film. A fluffy kitten lying curled in a ball on the sofa arouses itself, stretches slowly, and yawns. "I brought it home with me," Charlie continues. "Thought it'd make a nice pet. It's little and soft and it makes a great purring sound."

  Someone out in the street turns a key on the noisy starter of an old car. The kitten jerks its head to look, then bolts up the dark cloth column formed by one of the open drapes. It perches on the curtain rod at the top as if hiding itself on a tree branch.

  "Climbs curtains, too, apparently," she observes, and again immediately kicks herself mentally for saying it.

  "It doesn't weigh much. It can't hurt the curtains just yet," he says, reaching up to lift the ball of white fluff down from the window with both hands. To the kitten he says, "No climbing curtains," tapping its nose with his index finger, staring into its eyes as he admonishes it. "No climbing curtains," he repeats. Then he strokes it, and it purrs as he sets it down gently on the floor. It immediately repeats its curtain climbing performance. Again he admonishes it. This time it runs off and hides under a big padded armchair, disappearing from sight. "It's one of Angela's grandchildren, so to speak," he tells Katrina. "One of her cats was pregnant when Angie died, and this is one of the kittens."

  "You have a litter box for it? Or do you take it for walks?" she asks as gently as she can, trying not to sound negative.

  "Uh, I put a little shoe box of cat litter in the kitchen for now," he answers, without taking offense at the question.

  "Not the kitchen," she responds reflexively. "I mean, I think the kitten would be happier with a little more privacy," she immediately rephrases the remark. "Let's put its litter box in the laundry room." So saying, she picks the box up and moves it before he has a chance to contradict the idea. She returns to the kitchen and washes her hands thoroughly with a drop of soap and a lot of warm water. The warmth of the tap water feels comforting and pleasant against the omnipresent late winter cold that seeps through the outside walls of the apartment. Charlie hasn't said anything negative yet this morning, she thinks to herself, despite her own negativity. The kitten does seem to have a calming effect on him.

  She takes a box of oatmeal down from a shelf, and a covered saucepan from a cabinet. After measuring three cups of water into the saucepan, she covers it with a lid and turns the stove burner on high to get the water boiling. "Oatmeal for breakfast?" she offers, hoping the question will distract his attention from the relocation of the cat box.

  "Sure. I'll put on the kettle," Charlie responds. "You want tea or coffee?"

  "Either one," she answers. "Whatever you're having is fine. As long as its decaf."

  Charlie takes a china saucer down from a cabinet and sets it on the counter. From the refrigerator he retrieves the small carton of half and half cream he had stopped for on the way home the night before. He pours about two tablespoonfuls into the saucer, then places the saucer into the microwave. On the microwave clock he punches in 11 seconds and hits start. The microwave hums briefly. He hits the stop button when the countdown reaches 1 second, just before the bell would ring. After touching the liquid with a forefinger to test the temperature, he places the saucer gently on the floor for the kitten, though it hasn't come out from under the chair yet. That done, he turns his attention to the electric kettle. He lifts it. From the weight he judges that the kettle is still half full of water. He plugs it in and flips the switch on.

  A few months ago Katrina would have asked him some question, anything just to start a conversation, just to hear his voice in the room. This morning she accepts the silence and takes it as peace.

  After a minute the kitten comes into the room silently and begins lapping up the liquid from the saucer.

  Katrina hears the water in the saucepan start to boil, and turns down the heat to medium low. She measures oatmeal into the pan and covers it again, then returns the oatmeal box to the cabinet. She adds a teaspoonful of soymilk, a teaspoonful of brown sugar, and half a teaspoon of her personal signature spice mixture that consists mostly of cinnamon with traces of ginger and cardamom. She stirs the oatmeal, still saying nothing to her boyfriend, though she watches him from the corners of her vision. It's an odd sensation, to be with the one you love and yet feel so very alone inside. The inner corners of her eyes start to moisten slightly and she fights back the feeling, suppressing the tears but not fully able to suppress the sorrow.

  Charlie sets the dining room table with bowls, spoons, and cups. Beside each spoon he puts one of the small soft kitchen towels they use as makeshift napkins. He fills a ceramic tea kettle with warm tap water and heats it in the microwave for a few seconds, then removes the heated kettle from the microwave and discards the water. She watches his movements. It's so strange to feel love and sorrow at the same time. He is there in the room with her, and yet not fully there. She takes a deep breath and exhales. Seeing the kitten pad by toward the laundry room, she covers the saucepan before the kitten can start to stir cat litter dust up into the air.

  After the tiny cat comes padding softly back into the room, after the dust seems to have settled, she washes the stirring spoon carefully with dish soap and warm tap water, again enjoying the warmth on her hands.

  "We're fastidious today, aren't we?" Charlie asks, noticing what she does with the spoon.

  "Oh, well, it's an excuse to warm my hands," she responds, thinking more quickly than before, careful to avoid any suggestion that Charlie's new pet is in any way a factor. "You know. I like the warm water. It's so cold these mornings."

  "Well, winter can't last forever," he answers, coming close to her and stroking her back. "It'll be over pretty soon."

  "Yes, pretty soon," she agrees. "This certainly can't last forever, like this."

  Charlie takes down a box of herbal tea bags and places two of them into the preheated teapot. He adds boiling water from the kettle, filling the teapot, and replaces the teapot lid.

  Katrina picks up the saucepan. The oatmeal is done. She spoons it evenly into the two bowls on the dining room table. The kitten mews and rubs itself against her pajama-clad leg. She resists the urge to push it away. "Charlie, do you think you should give the kitten some more milk?" she calls out to him.

  He comes in from the kitchen with the teapot and sets it on a coaster on the table. "Sure," he says. "That's a good idea. Come on, Kitty. Back in here." He goes back to the kitchen and prepares a second saucer of half and half cream, which the kitten begins lapping up. "I'm glad you're taking to the kitten," he says to Katrina, coming back into the dining room and taking his seat at the table. "I was afraid you might not like it."

  She utters a small nervous laugh as she goes back into the kitchen to return the empty saucepan. "Don't worry about that," she answers, returning to join him at the table, closing the door to the kitchen behind her. "We'll see how it goes," she adds, sitting down and adjusting her chair. "The kitten seems to like it here so far." He's acting so normal that she feels tempted to start up a real conversation, to ask how things went for him last night, but in the end she isn't willing to take a chance on upsetting him.

  "This oatmeal is good," he compliments her cooking.

  She takes a bite herself, nods, and smiles at him. "It's the cinnamon," she says. "Is the tea ready yet?"

  Charlie starts to pour tea into the two cups.

  They hear her cell phone start to ring on the living room coffee table.

  "I'll just get that to shu
t it up," she says with a little nervous laugh, going into the other room. She answers the cell phone. The call is from her uncle Zeph in St. Lucy. She walks closer to the window, as if to pick up a weak signal better. There she stands quietly for two or three minutes while Zeph tells her everything about the lab results, the delivery Doug is bringing, and what they still need.

  She is standing as far away from the dining room as she can in the small living room, hoping Charlie can't hear. He looks at her inquiringly from the dining room table nonetheless. She smiles at him hesitantly and holds up an index finger in the wait-a-minute gesture. To the telephone she says, "I don't know, let me check," which puzzles Zeph on the other end of the call.

  She smiles again at Charlie and retreats to the bathroom, as far from the dining room as she can get in the small apartment. She closes the door and makes rattling-around sounds in the medicine cabinet, as if looking for something.

  "Zeph?" she says in her quietest non-whispering voice. "I'm sorry about that. Charlie's here. I'm still at the apartment. We were just having breakfast. Yes, it's late, but, you know, it's winter here, and it's the weekend. Listen, would poop samples do? Because I could send you a poop sample by post today. It isn't an actual cat that belonged to Angela, but apparently one of those cats was pregnant, and this is one of its kittens. Would that work?"

  "It might," she hears her uncle say on the other end of the phone. "If it's infected, and if the infection is far enough along, then yes, the poop would be exactly the right source. The parasite reproduces only inside the intestines of cats. That's the only way it can propagate. That's why cats are the critical part of its life cycle. It's also why it's so important to keep the cat box away from food. You are doing that, aren't you?"

  "Oh yeah. I didn't need to be told that one. Good to be reminded, I guess, but yeah, the litter box is in the laundry room. That's next to the kitchen, so it isn't perfect, but it's out of the kitchen."

  "I guess there's no good place for it in a small apartment," he concedes, "but be careful. I told you Doug is bringing vaccine samples? You need to take the vaccine. If you get infected yourself, there'll be nobody left to try to cure Charlie, and nobody there for you. So if it's the same problem we've been looking at here, taking the vaccine should make you immune to it. Now, that still isn't a guarantee that you're safe, because what you have up there might not be the same strain of the parasite as we're seeing down here. So even with the vaccine you still need to be careful. But take the vaccine. Sugar cubes, same method of delivery Salk used to distribute Polio vaccine in the nineteen fifties."

  "I'll take it, Zeph," she answers him, "as soon as it gets here. Listen, what you said about me being alone. You don't need to worry about that. There is somebody else here for me. I'm not alone. There's a nurse named Nina. She's a friend of Shelley's. You remember Shelley? Well, Nina and Shelley helped me get the samples I already sent you. Actually, Nina was one of the nurses at the hospital when Angela died. Her family lives here in Madison. So she's around a lot on weekends. Let me give you her phone number, in case anything does happen to me."

  Zeph takes down the phone number. "Give me Shelley's number too, just in case," he asks. He takes down that number too. "So," he inquires on a chance, "if they did an autopsy when Angela died, we'd love to have a sample of brain tissue, if your friend Nina can get it."

  "No autopsy," Katrina reports disappointingly. "Sorry."

  "Maybe a leftover blood sample," he suggests, guessing what might still be left sitting around someplace. "Anything she could get might be helpful. At least ask her."

  "I'll ask her," the girl says, agreeing to try.

  "Give her the vaccine too," Zeph adds as an afterthought. "Shelley as well. We're sending you a few extra doses in the sugar jar, so you should have enough."

  "Okay. So you really need one of the actual cats?" the girl continues. "I may as well send you the poop sample, though, right, because that might be good enough?"

  "Yes and yes," Zeph agrees. "If the poop tests positive for the same parasite, we might not need the cat, but it would be good to have. I'll have to check with Baldwin. But if the microbe you're seeing up there is a different strain than we have down here, then we definitely want to get hold of an infected cat. Meanwhile send the excrement sample, by all means. Overnight mail, if you can."

  "Okay. I'll get that to you as soon as I can. If Charlie goes out today, I can come back to the apartment and scoop up a sample. Yes, I'll wear plastic gloves. And I'll seal it up really well. And I'll disguise the packaging somehow. Maybe put it inside a Thermos jar. How should I send it? Do you think Fed Ex, or UPS, USPS, or what? What's fastest to St. Lucy?"

  "I don't know. You'll have to call around," he tells her. "As far as packaging, the Thermos jar isn't really necessary, unless you're doing it to throw the sniffer dogs off track."

  "They don't use sniffer dogs much anymore," she volunteers a news update. "Cost cutting, courtesy of the TEA movement, combined with the civil liberty issue -- The Liberty in Liber-TEA. Say what you will about the LiberTEA party, the cutbacks in Customs and general surveillance are all to the good."

  "Yeah, those airport searches were pretty abysmal," he agrees with his niece's observation. The body searches would have been far more offensive to her. At the time, she had been a young teenage girl, delicate, sensitive, and easily embarrassed. Just the thought of her having to go through that makes the hair stand up on the back of his neck. He shakes his head, as if shaking off the image. "I'm glad the party got rid of those, all right," he says. After a pause he adds, "Like they say, even a broken clock is still right twice a day." He pauses introspectively again, considering the problem of shipping the excrement sample. "You know," he finally says, "sniffer dogs wouldn't be trained to sniff out cat poo anyway. They'd be trained for specific problematic substances, not innovative new ones. And even if Customs agents were to find the poop samples somehow, they wouldn't know what they'd found. It probably isn't even illegal."

  "That gives me another idea," she says, perking up with a little low dose enthusiasm. "I could pack it in a candy box, or a cookie tin. It'd look like a prank. If anybody does happen to find it, they'll probably just think I'm angry at you for something. It's a standard revenge prank, sending poop wrapped as a confectionary item. Ridiculous, but standard.

  At the other end of the phone, Zeph laughs. "Cookie tin," he says. "Chocolate coconut. Poop rolled in cat litter will look suggestive of chocolate rolled in coconut." He laughs softly a little more, shaking his head. "It's a good idea."

  "Okay. Well, I gotta go," she winds up the conversation. "Charlie's going to start wondering what I'm up to. Love you, Uncle Zeph."

  "I love you too, little girl. Take care."

  With that the call ends. She feels energized. Light at the end of the tunnel, and it isn't an oncoming train. The lonely desperate feeling disappears, as far removed from her consciousness as last night's dreams. She slips the phone into her bathrobe pocket and retraces her steps through the living room, almost bouncing back to the breakfast table.

  "What was that about?" Charlie asks.

  "Oh, just girl stuff," she answers cheerily. "It was Nina. She wanted to know what brand of something I'm using. For somebody else she's helping. It's nothing really. Just girl stuff."

  "Hunh. So, are you off to the library again today?" he inquires.

  "Yeah, the library. Research. I've got that paper due, you know. Yourself?" she asks in return. "What do you have planned for today?"

  "I'll be going into campus too. Maybe I'll run into you. You want to meet up for lunch?"

  "I don't know. Call me, okay? No, text me, because I'll be in the library. Oh, I might have to run some errands too. Nina asked me to pick something up for her. Just text me, okay?" She realizes she feels elated at the prospect of progress on her situation, and she isn't going to let Charlie ge
t in the way.

  He nods, oblivious. "So, what should we name the cat?" he poses a question. "Katrina's already taken, obviously, as a name. I was thinking maybe Kitty."

  "Hope," she suggests.