Roger shook his head. “Not here. We have rules about it, right, Miss Minnie?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Bookmobile rule number one is No Crying.” I visualized an imaginary list of rules and saw that the second rule was No Cats. Well, at least we weren’t violating rule number one. “The books don’t like to hear crying,” I added.
The kid’s eyes went wide. “They . . . don’t?”
Roger nodded seriously. “They don’t like crying a single bit, so you see why we have a rule against it.”
Sniffing, the kid patted Eddie’s head. “Okay.” Sniff. “Will the bookmobile kitty be here next time?”
Roger looked at me. So did the kid and the mom. “Count on it,” I said.
A few minutes later, Eddie was back in his carrier, and Roger and I were buckling our seat belts.
“Now where?” Roger asked.
I glanced over at him. “You were really good with that kid. Do you and Denise have children?” It seemed odd that I didn’t know, but conversations with Denise tended to focus on whatever her current project might be.
“Two,” Roger said. “Girl and a boy. Both are grown and gone. One lives in Texas; the other’s in Arizona.”
I started us rolling forward, heading back north in the direction of Chilson. “Not fans of the snow?”
“More like they’re fans of getting jobs,” he said, smiling. “But, yeah, neither one seems interested in moving back. They come up in the summer; we visit them at Christmas. It works out.”
We headed to the next stop, chatting idly about topics from Thanksgiving (he and Denise were eating with her extended family, while my parents were headed to my brother’s in Florida, and I was staying with Aunt Frances and an assortment of guests) to the chances of the Detroit Lions making it to the Superbowl (slim to none, we agreed) and the annoyance of political signs cluttering up the roadsides a week and a half after the November election.
“Just look at that.” He pointed through the windshield.
I glanced at the busy cluster of signs that included people running for a variety of offices, from seats in the US Congress to the state legislature, local townships, and even one for the Chilson City Council. VOTE FOR ALLISON KORTHASE, it proclaimed with a professional design in red, white, and blue. Why there was a Chilson sign all the way down here, I wasn’t sure, but it must have worked, because I remembered that she’d won the seat.
“It’s as bad as seeing Christmas advertisements after Christmas,” I said.
“Take another foot of snow to cover up those buggers,” he said morosely. “Bet most of them are still there come spring.”
I laughed, but he was probably right. “Lunch stop coming up. I usually pull in at that township park, but I’m sure it’s not plowed. There’s that gas station over on the county highway. I was thinking about stopping there. We can use the facilities, and you could grab something to eat.”
“You don’t have to stop for me,” Roger said. “I’m fine.”
For the zillionth time that day, I wondered how this laid-back, easygoing, no-cares-whatsoever man had stayed married to the high-frequency, pay-attention-to-my-problems-because-they’re-more-important-than-yours Denise for so many years. But, as my mother had once told me, every marriage is a mystery.
“Well,” I said, “I could use a break, and we have a little time.”
I’d cut each stop short by a few minutes, just in case of slippery conditions on the way to the next one, but the roads were fine. One car, a dark blue multi-bumper-stickered SUV kind of thing, had even passed us a few miles back.
Roger shrugged. “Works for me. I can grab a sandwich, if they don’t look too scary.”
“Eddie?” I peered into the cat carrier. “Is there anything you want?”
He opened his mouth to say “Mrr,” but no noise came out.
“Nothing, you say?” I asked. “I had no idea you could be so accommodating. You’re okay, pal, no matter what Aunt Frances says about you.”
“Mrr.”
Roger laughed. “It really does seem like he knows what you’re saying.”
It was frightening, actually, how Eddie and I could carry on conversations. Almost all of my brain knew there was no way a cat could understand human speech, but I had a few brain cells, tucked somewhere in a back corner, that were convinced Eddie understood everything I said, and even some of the things I didn’t say.
We pulled into the gas station—with two wide entrances, it was my favorite kind of place—and came to a stop in a vast parking lot behind the building. I went in first, while Roger stayed on the bookmobile.
In short order, I returned, laden with a bottle of water and a PowerBar, because I would have felt guilty about using the restroom without purchasing something. I clambered up the steps and said, “It’s colder over here. Wind’s up, too.”
“Told you,” Roger said. “Chilson’s the banana belt. Warmer near the lake and all that, just like they say.”
The weather folks said it was cooler near Lake Michigan in the summer, when that great mass of water acted as a big refrigerator, but in the winter the big lake kept the lakeshore warmer than the rest of the state. Not always by very much, but every degree counts, especially in January.
Roger gave the side of Eddie’s face a scratch, stood, and zipped up his coat. “I’ll just be a minute.” He took two steps, then stopped, muttering, “Almost forgot.”
I started to turn, assuming he was talking to me, but he was moving again and out the door. “Talking to himself,” I told Eddie, nodding. “They say that can be the first step toward insanity. Of course, they say the real danger is when you answer yourself.”
“Mrr.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, I don’t know who they are, either. Sounds like a bunch of hooey, doesn’t it?”
Eddie rubbed his face up against the door of the cat carrier. The wire caught on his kitty lips, pulling them back to reveal sharp, pointed teeth and pinkish gums.
“Not a good look, bud,” I said. “You’re cute and adorable in many ways, but your gums are just not attractive.” I thought about that. “Then again, probably no one’s are. Maybe a periodontist would have an opinion on good-looking gums, but I bet everyone else would just as soon—”
Bang!
Eddie and I both jumped as the echo of a rifle shot bounced back and forth across the hills.
We blinked at each other; then I remembered. “It’s the first day of hunting season,” I said, nodding authoritatively. Of course, it was technically the first day of the Michigan’s two-week-long deer rifle season, but nobody called it that. It was Opening Day, spelled with capital letters, and if you didn’t know what that meant, you were either from the depths of a large city or from another solar system. There were other deer seasons—bow season, black-powder season, and who knew what else—but rifle season saw the most action.
All day long, Roger and I had seen trucks and SUVs parked in odd places; on the sides of roads, a short ways down narrow dirt trails, and in parking lots of long-abandoned homes. Hunters. Some of them, no doubt, were looking for that elusive trophy buck with a huge rack of antlers, but for the most part, hunters—male and female—were trying to fill their family’s freezers with venison.
I’d grown up in the Detroit area, where the only thing I’d learned about hunting and fishing was that it was something my family wasn’t ever likely to do. “A lot easier to buy meat and fish at the store,” my mother had said more than once.
My city-bred father was more likely to sprout feathers than he was to venture into a boat (the poor man couldn’t even watch Titanic without getting seasick), and he had so little sense of direction that he could get lost in a large wooded park. Basic survival arts weren’t something my older brother and I had ever been taught.
“Not that it’s likely I’ll need to build a fire out here,” I said to Eddie. “All I need to know, I learned from Jack London, which is to stay out of the wilderness if you don’t know what you’re doing.” I smirked, but I didn’t think Eddie got the joke.