He ignored me and kept scratching.
“Even if you did escape, where would you go? The backseat?” I started the car. “And even if you got out of the car, there’s nothing over there but the parking lot for the Protection Association. Are you going to volunteer to do their valet parking?”
Eddie flopped down with a loud thud.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “That was funny.”
He turned his head, ignoring me in a very obvious way.
I laughed. “Love you, too, pal.”
* * *
“What is your cat doing?” Aunt Frances asked.
Before I answered, I swallowed the bite I’d been chewing. My mother would be pleased to know that at least one of her admonitions had stayed with me. “You know that wooden puzzle of the United States? It’s in the living room on the shelves with the jigsaw puzzles.”
She frowned. “The puzzle that was a gift from my grandparents the Christmas I was six.”
I hadn’t known that, and said so.
We sat at the kitchen table, listening to the sounds of a cat playing with something he shouldn’t.
My aunt’s expression was a little pensive, so I dabbed my face with my napkin and got up. In the living room, Eddie was crouched in the corner, batting at two puzzle pieces, one much larger than the other.
“You,” I told him, “are a horrible cat.” I reached down, picked up the wooden bits, and carried them and the entire puzzle back to the kitchen. I set the puzzle on the table, checked the pieces for damage and Eddie spit, and handed them to Aunt Frances.
“Michigan,” she said. “And Maryland. Do you think he was going for the M states?”
“If he was, he missed Mississippi, Minnesota, and Maine.”
“Massachusetts.” She counted on her fingers. “Seven. There’s one more.”
“Missouri.”
“Mrr.”
We looked down at Eddie. “You missed some states,” I said. “Better luck next time.”
He jumped onto my lap, then up onto the table. Before I could grab him, he swiped at the Maryland puzzle piece and sent it skittering onto the floor.
“If you’re trying to destroy them alphabetically,” Aunt Frances said, “you should take out Maine first.”
“And if you’re trying to do it geographically,” I said, picking him up and putting him on the floor, “you still got it wrong, especially if you’re trying to go west to east.”
The two humans in the room started laughing.
Eddie looked from me to Aunt Frances and back to me. Then he put his little kitty nose in the air and stalked off.
Which only made us laugh harder.
“Don’t go away mad,” I said, wiping the tears from my eyes.
“Just . . . go . . . away,” Aunt Frances managed to finish.
Eddie gave Maryland a final swipe, sending it underneath the stove.
“Hey!” I said, my laughter gone. “That wasn’t funny.”
He stopped, gave us a look that clearly said I win—again, and made a dignified exit.
Chapter 14
The next day was a library day, and I spent the first part of the morning as I usually did, catching up on the jobs that had piled up when I was out on the bookmobile.
All was well until I opened the last of my forty-three e-mails, from a college friend who was working for a moneyed foundation, and read that she’d never heard of any grants for bookmobile operations. There are purchasing grants, sure, but, Minnie, basically no one gives grants for operations. You know the theory, that if you can’t afford operations, you shouldn’t have purchased it in the first place. Good luck, though!
I sent her a quick thank-you and deleted her e-mail. If I deleted it, maybe it wouldn’t be true. Sure, that was it.
But I knew it wasn’t.
I put my head in my hands. What had I done? How could I have created a program that couldn’t be sustained? What had I been thinking?
Tears stung at my eyes. Tears of self-pity.
“Stop that right now.” I spoke out loud, and, instead of my own voice, I heard my mother’s. And Mom was right—this was no time to feel sorry for myself. At this point it didn’t matter whether my championing of the bookmobile program had been the right thing to do. This was not a time for self-doubt; this was a time for action. And since, as everyone knew, action was fueled by caffeine, what I needed was a refill.
I grabbed my mug and headed for the break room. It was half past ten, a typical coffee-refill time. If I was lucky, I might even find someone to talk to.
Ten feet from the open doorway, I heard Josh and Holly arguing about something. I slowed, trying to get a handle on the topic before I entered the room, then realized they were fighting about the best way to cook a turkey. Since my opinion on that was simple and irrefutable, I was practically whistling when I entered the room.
“You are so wrong,” Josh was saying emphatically. “Hey, Minnie. What’s the best way to cook a turkey?”
I picked up the coffee carafe. “Have my Aunt Frances do it.”
Holly laughed, but Josh gave a snort of disgust. “That’s a cheater answer.”
I toasted him with my mug. “But accurate.” I couldn’t care less about the turkey-cooking methodology as long as I didn’t have to involve myself with the actual cooking.
Holly filled her own mug and ripped open two sugar packets. As she stirred them in, she asked, “Minnie, do you know if the Friends are going to have their postholiday book sale?”
“Haven’t heard.” A tickle at the back of my mind told me that I should have known, that I would have known if I hadn’t been so busy with the bookmobile. I took a tiny sip of coffee, hoping that would get rid of the tickle. “Why wouldn’t there be one?”
Holly took a sip of her coffee, grimaced, and set it down to rip open two more sugars. “It’s just that Pam Fazio was supposed to run the sale this year, and now that she’s gone, I wonder if anyone else will step up.”
I’d forgotten that Pam had been talked into doing the sale. “I’ll ask Denise,” I said. The annual postholiday book sale was held in mid-January and was the biggest winter event for the Friends. It was also the only winter event, but the sale was well attended and netted a reasonable amount of money. I would have thought they’d do better having a sale before Christmas, and had at one point said so, but the blank look I’d received had as good as said, “But we’ve always done it this way. Why would we ever change?”
Josh laughed. “I wish I could have been there to see Pam’s farewell scene.”
“If we’d known in advance,” Holly said, “we could have sold tickets.”
I sipped my coffee and realized why Holly had added so many sugars: It was a Kelsey-brewed pot. As I opened the refrigerator door and checked the sell-by date on the small jug of milk, I said, “I was out on the bookmobile that day. I missed the whole thing.”
“From what I heard,” Josh said, “it was spectacular. Pam just stood up, right in the middle of the meeting, right in the middle of whatever Denise was talking about, and walked out.”
Holly took up the tale. “Denise asked her where she was going, told her the meeting wasn’t over yet, and Pam said that it was for her.”
“Yeah,” Josh said. “Denise asked, ‘What do you mean, it’s over?’ and Pam said she was quitting. That the only way she’d ever come back to the Friends was over Denise’s dead body.”
He laughed again, but his laughter trickled off. “Okay, that’s not as funny now as it was before . . . well, before.” He shifted, obviously remembering Roger’s death and the probable attempt on Denise’s life, which was now public knowledge, thanks to Facebook.
I wasn’t so sure Josh’s retelling was accurate. When I’d heard it from Denise, she hadn’t used that quote, and when Pam had told me, she certainly hadn’t. Then again, would she have? And if Denise hadn’t remembered the events accurately, it wouldn’t be the first time.