Cats.
• • •
I ate a bowl of cereal and a piece of toast for breakfast, then spent a happy couple of hours reading. Some might call rereading Cynthia Voigt’s Jackaroo for the fifty-second time a guilty pleasure; I called it therapy.
At noon, I went all out and made a fried egg sandwich with a side of steamed broccoli for lunch.
“Don’t tell, okay?” I said to Eddie as I picked up the sandwich. “About the cooking thing, I mean.”
He was sitting on the bench seat across from me, and the bottom of his chin was level with the tabletop. I was pretty sure he was hoping to get his own plate at the table, but I was equally sure that was never going to happen.
After chewing and swallowing, because I always tried to maintain my table manners, even if my dining companion was a cat, I asked, “So, what should we do with the rest of the day?”
Eddie didn’t say anything, so I picked up my phone and sent Tucker a text.
Day off for me. Recommendations?
A couple of minutes later, my phone dinged. Assisting on a hip resurfacing, Tucker wrote. Come watch—we start in 30 min.
Which meant that the surgery would start three and a half hours before I arrived.
Maybe next time, I texted back. I started to type, Good luck, but stopped. Maybe surgeons were like actors and being wished good luck was bad luck. Of course, texting Break a leg didn’t seem appropriate, either, so I sent my standard Miss you! and set aside the phone.
“I still don’t have any plans for the day,” I told my cat, who looked at me intently.
“No,” I said, “I’m not going back to bed to nap away the afternoon. You can do that if you’d like, but I’m going to do something productive.”
A bright light flashed. Half a second later, thunder crashed overhead.
Eddie’s yellow eyes didn’t blink.
“Nice try,” I said. “But just because I’d be risking life and limb by going outside right now doesn’t mean my only alternative is to do what you want. And stop that. Your sighs don’t influence me at all.”
Which was a downright lie, but he didn’t need to know that.
Eddie jumped up onto the back of the bench and flopped down onto the lap blanket I’d had on my legs when I was reading. My brother and sister-in-law, Florida residents, had given the beach-themed cotton throw to me for Christmas, and Eddie seemed to particularly like lying on top of the palm trees.
I watched Eddie settle down at the base of his favorite tree and thought about snapping a cell phone photo and sending it to Matt, my brother. I could ask him if—
“Brothers,” I said out loud, and reached for my phone.
Half an hour and four phone calls later, I had the numbers for all of Henry’s sons. While living in a small town can limit some of your options, it can also make it relatively easy to get the information you need.
From oldest to youngest, their names were Mike, Dennis, and Kevin. Ages went from forty-three down to thirty-nine. Occupations were a firefighter, a computer programmer, and a piano tuner. Locations were upstate Maine, Denver, and Southern California.
Three sons, three different time zones. I pondered the wisdom of calling, then decided that thinking too much might stunt my growth, and dialed.
When Mike Gill answered, I introduced myself, saying that I’d been a friend of his father’s, was sorry for his loss, and that I was calling because I’d heard a developer was trying to convince the heirs to sell the property.
“Same old Chilson,” Mike said, chuckling. “Rumors run around up there faster than the speed of light.”
“Well, I don’t know how much people are really talking. I ran into Felix Stanton yesterday and he happened to mention it, that’s all.”
“If Felix told you, he’s probably telling everybody.”
Which sounded like a fair assessment of Mr. Stanton. “If you do sell, I hope you give someone a chance to buy your dad’s maple-sugar-making equipment. There’s a lot of history there, and I’m sure someone would love to have those things.”
“Not going to happen,” Mike said.
“Oh.” The light around me went flat. “I see.”
“No one’s going to get Dad’s things,” Mike said confidently, “because next year we’re all going to be up there.”
“You mean . . . you’re not going to sell?”
“I won’t lie to you—we thought about it. We got together via Skype the other day and hashed it out. With Mom and Dad both gone now, it’s on us to make it a point to get together. We’ve talked about it for years, especially now that we all have kids, but it never seems to happen.”
“Scheduling can be hard,” I murmured.
“Absolutely. But the three of us used to help Dad with the syrup every spring—it’s not rocket science, just a lot of wood and a lot of time—and we figured it’s time to start doing it with our own kids.”
He went on, describing the plans they were making to get a neighbor to collect the maple sap—“We’ll let him take at least half”—and how they were going to time their vacations, since syrup making was so completely weather dependent, and how they were already collecting canning jars.
I wished him and his brothers the best and hung up, hoping that Felix wouldn’t be able to convince them differently. Money was a smooth talker, and the lure of making maple syrup might not hold up against the lure of a lot of zeros on a check.
• • •
“What do you think, Eddie?”
My cat, who was still on top of the palm tree, opened his eyes a small fraction, then closed them again.
“So you’re saying you don’t want to go outside for a walk with me?”
As I spoke a gust of wind buffeted the window. Though I didn’t exactly see the glass flex under the wind’s pressure, it probably should have.
Eddie jumped to the floor and made a beeline for my closet. I followed him and found him wedged into the closet’s back corner, wrapped around my rain boots. “You are the weirdest cat ever,” I told him.
He burrowed his head deeper toward the bottom of the closet and didn’t say a thing.
“Have a good nap, my fuzzy friend.” I packed my backpack with cell phone, wallet, and a couple of books because you just never know, pulled on my raincoat, and headed out into the wild weather.
Outside, another buffet of wind almost made me change my mind, but I knew it would do me good to get out and do something, even if it was just driving around. And I could even do something marginally useful, such as check out possible bookmobile routes. I never took the bookmobile down a road without vetting it first with my car—what looked fine on a map had the potential of being problematic for a large, tall, thirty-one-foot-long vehicle with the turning radius of a semi-truck.
I pointed the front bumper of my car south and east of Chilson, and a dozen miles later, once I got around the east end of Janay Lake, I headed straight south to farm country. There were roads down here I’d never driven, and who knew what fun things I might see?
There were all sorts of possibilities, really. Barns with murals painted on their sides. Fences made from stacks of fieldstones. Garages made of hundreds of short pieces of wood stuck together with concrete. Wide vistas of hills and woods and lakes and sky. Deer. Turkeys. Grouse. Woodpeckers. Bald eagles. Black bears, even, and I’d heard rumors of mountain lions, which seemed unlikely but you never knew.
Though it was still windy, the rain had stopped. I pushed in a CD of a Canadian group, the Bare Naked Ladies, and was happily humming along about having a million dollars, enjoying the countryside that was starting to fuzz with green, when the rattletrap pickup that had been a couple of hundred yards ahead of me for the last few miles took a left turn.