“Hours and hours and hours,” says Freddy, who wasn’t even there, but had heard the story a couple of times.
Zook wasn’t actually in that bed for hours and hours. Maybe just thirty minutes or so. But it seems like hours and hours every time I think about it. But sometimes it feels like it was just a few minutes. A person’s memory is funny that way—ever notice?
“Well, maybe Zook is a special cat,” says Riya.
“He sure is,” I say.
We say good-bye at Telegraph and 49th, and I’m really not sure if we just had a discussion or some sort of argument. Riya and Kiran and I always have little arguments that blow over without even talking about them again. I guess that’s what makes us such good friends.
Fred and I walk by Bank of the West and check it out. No problems there. We don’t walk past the Villain’s house, because I’ve seen much too much of him lately. There were two more just-going-out-for-coffees this week.
But, drat, here he is anyway! He zooms over to the curb on his motorcycle and turns into the driveway of our apartment building, right in front of us.
Freddy yells, “DYLAN!”
Major, major caps.
“Would you like to help me wash the bike?” the Villain asks. His silver earring glints in the sunlight.
I shake my head no. Then I narrow my eyes, like that cop on TV. “I’ve got to go to work at O’Leary’s now. So does Freddy.”
“Work!” says the Villain, flashing one of his white, toothy smiles. I’m thinking he must spend a fortune on teeth-whiteners. “Do they pay you well?” he asks.
Then Freddy (oh, Freddy!) pipes up. “Yes, they do! We dance and the people on the street give us lots and lots of money.”
The Villain gives me a funny look, but I make a face as if I don’t understand what Freddy’s talking about.
“Let’s go, Freddy,” I say.
“I don’t want to,” says Freddy. “I want to help wash the bike.”
The Villain lifts Freddy and hugs him. My brother, looking like he’s going to faint with happiness, leans against the Villain, and before I can say anything else, they’re gliding down the driveway to get the hose from the back alley. Our special alley. The Villain’s acting as if he lives with us, using our building’s hose. Doesn’t he have his own hose at his own house?
I go to work dancing, and even earn a few dollars from some people strolling by.
I’ve noticed something interesting about dancing: Bobbing up and down shakes up your brain cells, making some of them change places or flip upside down. Well, that’s not what really happens, but it sure feels like it. I get excellent ideas for stories while I’m dancing outside O’Leary’s, and that’s also how I came up with my idea for the Family Straw.
Today, as I dance, I’m thinking I should suggest to Mr. Fry that he ask my mother for tea, not as a husband figure, but as a friend, because she’s so lonely. It wouldn’t hurt for them to get to know each other. They both enjoy mystery novels and movies, and the right mousse could certainly tame his cowlick, if my mom has a problem with that. Mr. Fry is shy and quiet, not loud and funny like my dad. So maybe Mr. Fry isn’t my mother’s type. But I never in a million years thought her type was a cat-shooter like the Villain.
I hope Zook is discharged soon, so the truth about the Villain’s past (and Zook’s) can come out!
return my costume to O’Leary’s and go home. My mom is already busy at the stove. “Freddy’s in the back of the building with—” I start to say.
“I know, sweetie,” she says. “I got a text from Dylan.”
A text from Dylan. How long has the texting been going on? I go into my room and flop down on my bed to do some worrying.
My mom is the fastest, most accurate text-messager in the world. It’s this talent she has, she says, with no known benefit to humanity. Here’s the thing: My dad and mom knew each other for years and years before they got hitched. But if two people are texting all day long, they could get friendly pretty quickly, even if they’re not out together drinking coffee.
The doorbell rings. I hear laughing in the kitchen.
“Dinner, Oona!” calls my mother.
My suspicions are confirmed. She’s invited the Villain to dinner. There he is, plopped down comfortably in the fourth chair, where my father used to sit.
“We have a guest tonight,” says my mother.
She says that to me in a weird, chirpy voice, as if she meant to say, “We have another guest tonight, just like we always do every single Wednesday night!”
The truth is, we haven’t had guests for dinner in a long, long time, except for Gramma Dee, of course, and Riya when she’s sleeping over. And never, ever on a school night.
The other strange thing is that my mother has set the kitchen table for a party. Not the kind of party with balloons and party hats, but a fancy dinner party where you use cloth napkins to wipe your mouth. In this case, lacy green-and-white napkins with strawberries hand-stitched around the borders, the ones that used to belong to my mother’s great-aunt Rose. They are kept with old tablecloths and coasters in a special drawer in the kitchen, a drawer that always smells perfumey, like long-ago celebrations. But we never use the napkins at dinner because they’re not permanent press, my mother always says, and who has time to iron in this day and age?
“I’m glad to be here,” says the Villain. “I usually eat alone.”
I am speechless, although I’m the only one who is. Freddy is yakking away about that motorcycle. The Villain is yak-king about it, too: how it took him and his guitar all the way cross-country and back, and how he stopped to sing in bars and cafés and work as a nurse in hospitals along the way. My mother is asking him questions about that trip like he’d been to the moon or something.
“It’s good to be back in Oakland,” says the Villain. “And it’s nice to have a home-cooked meal with all of you. I can’t believe we’ve never met. I’ve lived on Clover Street almost all of my life.”
He takes his napkin and spreads it on his lap. Under normal circumstances, I’d have a good, loud laugh right about now at the expense of this piratey person in old jeans and cowboy boots, a lacy napkin on his lap.
I don’t feel like laughing. The truth is, I feel like throwing up. Especially when my mother brings dinner to the table.
“Please don’t hold this against me,” says my mother in that new, chirpy voice of hers. “I didn’t have the time to cook, so I picked up something from Farmer Joe’s take-out counter called Mediterranean Chicken with Chick, Peas, and Urb Sauce. Doesn’t that sound good?”
“More than sounds good. Man, it looks and smells wonderful,” says the Villain.
“Wonnerful!” says Freddy, chirping like my mother.
CHIRPING is an important word here.
My mother has gone too far. Not only is she pretending she has lots of time to iron fancy napkins, but now she’s pretending she has lots of money to spend on gourmet food that she didn’t even make herself! “If you make it yourself, it’s half the price,” she’s always told us.
And what does she buy at that gourmet counter? Something disgusting! Except for Gramma Dee who doesn’t eat meat (although she does eat smoked fish once in a while), we’re all meat eaters around here, and I do sometimes feel guilty about that. Meat eaters don’t usually think about what they are eating, but you can’t help it when your dish has a title. Chicken with Chick! I squeeze my eyes shut.
“Oona, why are you making faces?” my mother asks.
“I’m not eating that,” I say.
“And why not, may I ask?”
“Do you really expect us to eat a mother hen lying in a sauce with its baby?” I ask. My eyes are still closed. I can’t bear to look.
“What are you talking about?”
There is a pause, and I hear choking sounds coming from my mother. My eyes fly open, and there she is, not choking, but trying her hardest not to laugh. The Villain has his head down, examining a strawberry stitched on his napkin.
“I love garbanzos,” says Freddy, popping one into his mouth with his fingers. Then he starts wolfing down that chicken like he’s in some sort of chicken-eating contest or something. And there are flecks of GREEN on top of the chicken, which he doesn’t even seem to notice.
“Oh, of course. Garbanzos,” I say. “Well, I’ve never eaten urb sauce before.”
“Oona, you know you have!” my mother says. “Since when are you such a picky eater?”
The Villain starts talking about the garden he’s digging in his backyard and all the tomatoes and urbs he’s planting, rosemary and parsley and oregano, and I suddenly realize that they mean “herbs”! Except they’re using a show-offy accent: dropping the “h” and calling them “erbs.”
“You mean ‘herbs,’” I say, wriggling my pointer fingers as I say the word.
“Erbs,” says my mother, wriggling her own fingers. “You’re not supposed to pronounce the ‘h.’”
Well, how was I supposed to know that? I’m sure many people go around for years and years thinking the wrong things about words like herbs, words they’ve only read in books and never said out loud until they have a dinner dish with a title. Take the word humiliated, for example. It starts out “hyoo,” not “hum,” like I used to think it was. That’s exactly how I feel. HYOO-miliated, especially because he’s here. And there’s my mother, smiling at the Villain over my head.
“Fresh herbs are easy to grow,” the Villain says. “You could put some in those blue pots you have in the alley out back. Lots of sun there. You’d have yourself a nice kitchen garden. It could look really nice. You kids and I could do it as a project together.”
“That’s a great idea! Isn’t it, Oona?” my mother chirps, as if it had never, ever looked beautiful back there until life got in the way! As if no one had ever suggested planting something in those pots again. For example, me.
“We’d need to do a lot of watering for that,” I say. “We’re trying to conserve.”
“Rosemary doesn’t need much water,” the Villain says.
“Anyway, I don’t have the time for extra projects,” I say.
“I have the time!” says Freddy.
I glower at my brother. My mother starts to say something, but the Villain holds up his hand and she doesn’t. “That’s OK, Oona,” he says. “Maybe another time.”
My mother brings out dessert, store-bought chocolate graham crackers and Gramma Dee’s taffy. We all pop a piece of taffy into our mouths. We chew and chew. The taffy glues my teeth together. I count to seven in my head.
“Hooray!” my mom and Freddy and I shout at the exact same time, when that taffy finally melts. Just like we always do.
The Villain, still chewing, looks perplexed. “Am I missing something?” he asks.
My mom explains the Seven-Second Meltdown Theory, and he tells her his own taffy hasn’t melted yet.
“It only works for family members,” I say coldly.
“I see,” mumbles the Villain, his teeth still stuck together.
“Oh, Oona,” says my mother.
I suddenly feel ashamed. I look down and a couple of tears plop onto my plate, salting those chocolate graham crackers. Nobody sees. The reason I feel ashamed is because I notice something different about my mother, something I noticed as soon as I walked into our apartment today but didn’t want to admit. It’s this: My mother looks happy. Happiness is all over her. Her fingers are happy, holding the fork to her happy mouth. Her elbows on the table are happy. Her shiny orange hair is shooting off happiness sparks, pulled up in a new happy hairstyle. And her eyes; her eyes are happy. I’m sad because I realize her eyes haven’t looked like that for a long time. And it’s the Villain who’s making her feel that way.
All of a sudden my imagination revs up something awful. I start imagining that he and my mother actually do get married. There we all are at the same table, slurping liquid through a gigantic Family Straw. The only one not using the straw is the baby banging a spoon in its high chair, because, of course, if the Villain and my mom got married, they’d have one of those. An adorable baby with skin the color of taffy, a multi-culty baby, a hope-of-the-world baby, whom my mother may love a bit more than Freddy and me for that exact reason.
ometimes a revved-up imagination is useful. I did come up with one great idea last night, even though I realize that it’s a crime:
I will cat-nap Zook from the vet.
I didn’t really have a plan at first. In fact, I wasn’t even thinking about smuggling out. I was thinking about that time Zook was smuggled in. In to the hospital to visit my dad, Zook all covered up by a green-and-white napkin with tiny red strawberries stitched around the edges, one of the special-occasion napkins that belonged to my mother’s great-aunt Rose.
“This picnic for your father is a special occasion,” my mother had said.
My father had lifted up one corner of that napkin, and when he saw Zook inside, he said, “What’s this? A furry taco?” We cracked up at my father’s joke, my mom and I, giggling like goofballs.
Of course, his joke wasn’t that funny. My dad was capable of much more hilarious jokes, believe you me. It’s just that he hadn’t made a joke for a while, and it really felt like old times, good times, again. I guess that’s why I keep thinking about that morning in the hospital over and over.
Anyway, today I’m dancing at O’Leary’s while planning and remembering all of this. The song playing on Mario’s boom box is “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” sung by Marvin Gaye. I like that song, and all of a sudden, it has personal meaning for me, like some sort of sign that my cat-napping plan is a good one. My mother says that the best songs have personal meaning for you. In this song, a guy is complaining because someone tells him that his love prefers someone else, someone she used to love before.
Don’tcha know that I heard it through the grapevine,
Not much longer would you be mine!
I start imagining the Villain singing those words. The Villain sounds like Marvin Gaye when he sings, in my mother’s opinion. But it won’t be the grapevine telling my mom the truth about the Villain. And it won’t be me taking away her happiness. It will be Zook himself. Actually, the Villain himself, confessing all when confronted with Zook in my arms.
THE VILLAIN (reeling backward in total shock): Why—why—it’s my old cat, Mud!
ME: Yes, it’s him all right, you cat-shooter, you!
THE VILLAIN (beginning to tremble and sweat): How—how do you know all that?
ME: I have my ways! I know everything!
MY MOM (forehead wrinkled with confusion): I don’t understand! How could he be your old cat? Why are you trembling and sweating? Oona, what do you mean by “cat-shooter”? And our cat’s name is Zook!
ME (looking at the Villain and narrowing my eyes): Go ahead. ’Fess up!
I’m not sure if the Villain will confess everything or not. Time will tell. But his behavior will alert my mother to his real character. She’ll know something is fishy. They’ll part ways, and then I’ll tell her all the terrible details. She’ll probably thank me.
And now that I think of it, cat-napping Zook won’t be a crime because the stolen goods belong to me in the first place. I have a plan, too. I’ll remove the screen I just happened to notice in the window over Zook’s cage. Then I’ll tell a big blue whopper. I’ll say that when Zook smelled his beloved owner walking by, he jumped up, clawed through the screen, and leaped out the window. Just like Miraculo/Jewel did in my story for Fred! My dad always said that art imitates life. This will be life imitating art. Well, actually, a blue whopper imitating my story, a green whopper.
Except now I just realized I’ll have to come up with another plan. There’s probably an alarm on that window.
I begin to wonder if all crimes start this
way. For instance, bank robberies. Maybe the bank robbers aren’t bad guys to begin with, just people who can’t get good jobs. They start imagining an easy way to get money to buy food for their families or gifts for their younger brothers and sisters, and before you know it, they’ve worked out a plan. In their minds, the plan is foolproof and no one will get hurt, and as soon as things get better in their lives, maybe they’d even give some of the money back.
I mention my theory about bank robbers to Mario while Freddy and I are having our Daily Slice at O’Leary’s. Fred’s also wolfing down a big plate of zook.
Mario pinches his nose a few times with one hand, a sign that he’s thinking about the topic at hand. Mario is another one of my father figures, but I chose him myself. Mario is very wise. Not only as a pizza businessman, but in lots of other ways. He never had a chance to go to college, but he is an autodidact, he told me. An autodidact is a person who has taught himself most of what he knows, and Mario knows a lot, believe you me. I would like to be an autodidact, too—shorten my hours at school, learn whatever I like, whenever and from whomever I like. Kind of like a school furlough. Of course, my mother disapproves.
“People do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do when they’re desperate,” Mario says about those imaginary bank robbers. “That’s why we call them desperadoes. They are doing something rebellious for a very good, understandable reason.”
That’s so Mario! Wise and kind at the same time.
Desperado is a good word.
Meanwhile, Freddy keeps jumping up to look out the front door of the store every time he thinks he hears a motorcycle pulling up.
“Freddy, sit down and eat!” I say.
Mario gives me a quick, sharp look, and I know he’s wondering why I’m snapping at my brother. I never, ever snap at Freddy that way, but I can’t help it today.
The Five Lives of Our Cat Zook Page 6