“You’re not seriously telling me to sleep on the couch, are you?” said Tex, and there was a pleading note in his voice that Gran had rarely heard there before. “With my back, I won’t make it to the morning, and even if I do I won’t be able to work tomorrow.”
She softened. Tex did have a bad back, and sleeping on the couch would only exacerbate an already painful condition.
“I don’t understand why you don’t have that back of yours operated on,” she said.
Tex swung his legs beneath the covers and lay down.“I’ve told you before, Vesta. The success rate of procedures performed on people with my exact condition is not good.”
“I know, I know,” she said. She shook her head. “I’m going to give that wife of yours a piece of my mind in the morning. Who tells her husband to sleep in the same bed as her mother?”
“Marge probably thought we’d be forced to settle our differences this way.”
“By forcing you to sleep with the enemy, you mean?”
“Something like that.”
For a moment, silence hung like a blanket over the room. Vesta kept on reading about the actress who’d been deserted by her husband, whose second husband had died from a wasting disease, whose three children had drowned when their cruise ship sank off the coast of Norway, and whose third scumbag husband was having an affair with the maid.
Tex cleared his throat.“Listen, Vesta…”
“Mh?” she said without much conviction. She liked her reading of an evening, and she was just getting to the good stuff, where a new man had entered the actress’s life who looked like he might be Mr. Right. He’d better be, cause she was down to the last pages.
“About that smartphone…”
“What about it?” she said, noncommittally.
“There must be some way we can make a deal.”
Gran smiled. Marge was a clever girl. A couple of nights like this and Tex would be willing to do whatever it took to sleep in his own bed again.“Yes?” she said, without taking her eyes of her book. Potential husband number four was married with kids, but his wife had suddenly decided to go back to college, and to dump her entire family.
“Those things are junk, you know that, right? They break down all the time, and besides, the prices they ask are an outrage. Two thousand bucks for a stupid phone.”
“You can afford it,” she said curtly. And I deserve it, she would have added if that argument held any sway with Tex. Unfortunately, it didn’t. Tex had never been all that fond of his mother-in-law, ever since Vesta had thrown him out on his ear back when he was a floppy-haired teenager adamant on dating her daughter. Since at that time his sole ambition had been to become a street artist like Banksy, she’d told her daughter in no uncertain terms what she thought of her dating a so-called artist.
“The thing I’m trying to tell you is that I’m not going to buy you a foldable smartphone,” said Tex, interrupting Vesta’s stream of thoughts.
She looked up in surprise.“You’re not?”
He shook his head. He was lying, his hands under his head, staring up at the ceiling where, for some reason, Odelia had hung a pink paper lamp with Hello Kitty images.
Vesta pursed her lips.“Is that your final word?”
“That’s my final word,” said Tex, who could be as stubborn as his mother-in-law when the mood struck.
She flicked off her bedside lamp.“Fine,” she said curtly. “Be that way.”
“Fine,” said Tex, and turned over, dragging a good portion of comforter along with him.
“Fine,” said Gran, and turned over to her other side, clawing back the comforter.
A fierce battle over the comforter ensued, which of course Gran won.
“I’m cold,” Tex said.
“You should have thought of that before you decided to deny your one and only mother-in-law the one and only little pleasure she has in this world.”
No response.
Finally, and because no one could accuse her of not possessing a heart, Gran muttered,“There’s an extra blanket in the closet,” and promptly dozed off.
It wasn’t long before her loud snores echoed through the room. Next to her, Tex plugged in his earplugs, a dark scowl on his face, got up, dragged an extra blanket from the closet, and returned to a bed that was entirely too small to accommodate both his mother-in-law and himself, and tried to find sleep. When it finally did come, all he could dream about were foldable smartphones that cost a fortune, and that kept breaking down and had to be replaced with an endless stream of new foldable smartphones.
[Êàðòèíêà: img_2]
Odelia, who’d watched the light go out in her room, returned to bed. She was worried. Not only about Max not being home, but about her grandmother and her dad sleeping in the same bed.
“They’re not going to kill each other,” said Chase, as if reading her mind.
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Odelia.
“Oh, but I am,” said the cop. “If Vesta kills Tex, there goes her meal ticket, and if Tex kills your grandmother, Marge will kill him.”
“I guess you’re right,” she said as she watched Dooley and Harriet and Brutus trudge into the room and hop up onto the bed.
Chase watched them with an air of annoyance.“Don’t you guys usually sleep in our room?”
“Yes, we do,” said Dooley. “And since this is now your room, here we are.”
“They keep following us wherever we go,” said Chase. “Have you noticed?”
“Mh?” said Odelia, lost in thought. She hated to admit it, but she missed Max. Silly, of course, for a grownup to miss a cat, but there it was. “Do you think Max will be all right?”
“Of course,” said Chase, who didn’t seem to share her concern. “He’s a big boy, and he’ll be fine. Besides, he’s probably happy for this opportunity to see something of the world.”
“He’s seeing something of a cage, Chase,” said Odelia. “Hardly the world.”
“It is a novel experience, and cats love novel experiences,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, but this is not the kind of experience they usually favor.”
“He’ll be fine,” he repeated, and picked up a copy ofGuns& Ammo from the nightstand and started leafing through it. When that couldn’t satisfy his curiosity, he swapped it forField& Stream, which seemed to hold his attention more successfully.
“I’m not so sure Max is fine,” said Harriet, much to Odelia’s surprise. Usually she was the one least concerned when it came to the wellbeing of her housemates.
“What makes you say that?” asked Odelia.
“When we left him he seemed… not himself.”
“He was being carted off to be operated on,” said Brutus. “You wouldn’t look like yourself if you were about to be cut open with a scalpel to have three teeth extracted.”
Dooley gulped slightly.“I hope she manages to put Max back together again. He’s not going to like being cut open like a fish.”
Odelia smiled.“Max has been through this before, and besides, Vena is a professional. She would never do anything to hurt Max, or any of you, for that matter.”
“Yeah, but he’s all alone in there, with who knows what animals to keep him company,” said Harriet. “He’ll wake up in the middle of the night, locked in a cage in a place that is unfamiliar.” She gave Odelia a pleading look. “Can’t we go pick him up?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Odelia, who didn’t want to wake up Vena in the middle of the night just because she was having qualms about Max. “Look, I know this is hard,” she said as she sat cross-legged on the bed and addressed her cats, “but it’s all for the best. As soon as that operation is done, Max will feel a lot better. In fact he’ll be so grateful and happy that the pain is finally gone, that he’ll soon forget all about his ordeal.”
They didn’t seem entirely convinced, but still nodded their reluctant agreement.
Soon, she was under the covers herself, next to Chase, and was reading on her phone. She quickly found herself incapable of focusing on the article Dan had written about the upcoming Fall Ball, though, and as her thoughts kept drifting back to Max in his cage she finally came to a decision, and swung her feet from under the covers again.