She carried the wiggling fur balls and he followed behind her with a blue plastic pan, half a bag of litter, and two bowls: one for water and one for the jar full of dry food he’d fetched from the big bag in the barn.
***
Clarice and Dotty peeked around the corner of the hallway leading to Clarice’s little apartment, where they’d been hiding all along.
“Look at them, taking their first babies up to the bedroom. Simba and Bocephus. I like that. We sure dodged a bullet when that hussy showed up here, but I told y’all Emily would keep our secret. She even did better than keeping it, she helped us. We need that girl on Lightning Ridge,” Clarice said.
“Don’t be gettin’ your hopes too damned high, old girl. It might not pan out. She thinks with her heart and he thinks with his head. It ain’t going to be easy,” Dotty whispered.
“Listen to them giggling. There’s nothing like baby kittens to bond a couple, now is there? I remember our first house cats when Lester and I married. We used to get so tickled at the way they walked all sideways and cocky. And Dotty, it might not work out, but it won’t be because I didn’t do everything in my power to make it happen.”
Dotty poked her on the arm. “You’ve got everything you ever wanted except Marvin, but I’m tellin’ you, if you have a heart attack because she leaves, I’m going to die with you. Losing that sumbitch husband of mine wouldn’t be as tough as losing my best friend. Might as well just go on and die with you as I drink myself to death.”
“You are full of shit, Dotty!” Clarice said.
“Why, Clarice Adams, such talk comin’ out of your mouth! You been hangin’ around with me too long. Let’s go to my room and make some of that microwave popcorn that tastes like damned old Styrofoam and break out a bottle of cold Pepsi to celebrate our new grandcats.” Dotty grinned.
“When we go to Walmart this week, we’ll buy blue baby blankets and cute little collars,” Clarice said.
“You know what that makes us, right?”
Clarice raised an eyebrow. “What? Grandmas?”
“Hell no. If they’d have gotten dogs we would be grandbitches. They got kittens so we are grandpussies.”
“Dotty!”
She put her hand over her mouth and giggled. “That old floozy that showed up at the cabin don’t have a thing on us.”
“You are horrible.”
“Yes, I am and proud of it. When we go to Walmart I’m going to buy one of those tree things to sit in the corner of the den for our grandkitties to climb on while we are babysitting them. You know she’s not going to leave them all alone up there in her room while she is out working with Greg on the ranch. Like I said before, we can’t go countin’ the chickens before they are hatched, but I do believe we might have worked some magic with our kitten shirts today.” Dotty looped her arm into Clarice’s and they tiptoed to Dotty’s room.
“And we didn’t even know that she liked cats when we wore them,” Clarice whispered.
Emily pushed the covers back and leaned over the side of the bed to watch the kittens chase each other and fight with the fringe on the chenille bedspread. When they tried to climb the side of the bedspread, she swept them up into her arms, kissed them on their cute little foreheads, put them back on the floor, and watched her step on the way to the bathroom. They fought with her toes, and then Simba chased Bocephus behind the potty and into the corner.
“Sing to him, Bo. He’s mean as a lion, but you can tame him with your singing.” She laughed.
As if the kitten understood her, he started to meow pitifully until his brother bounded out of the corner and they rolled on the floor, chewing on each other’s tails and ears until they grew tired and fell fast asleep on the rug.
“It’s amazing how you do that,” she whispered. “One minute you are fierce and mean as rattlesnakes, and the next you are sleeping like sweet little babies.”
She’d barely finished brushing her teeth when her cell phone ringtone said that Taylor was calling. She had to dig the phone out of her hip pocket, and her jeans had been tossed into a dirty clothes hamper. She finally picked up on the fifth ring.
“Good morning. You are calling early. Is everything all right out there?”
“You sound chipper before the sun is up,” Taylor said.
“I’ve got cats. A gray one named Bocephus and a yellow one named Simba. And they are so cute. If I didn’t wake up in a good mood with them around, there would be something severely wrong with me. Simba is the alpha male like a fluffy miniature lion, and Bocephus is gray and slick and he’s the lover, not the fighter.”
“I sneeze when I’m within twenty feet of a cat,” Taylor said.
“You and Gramps both. You’d think y’all were blood kin instead of shirttail kin.”
“You can have a kitten now if you want it. I can’t come see you if you do, but you can still come see me. You’ll have to shed all your clothes and take a shower before you come in the house, but it can be done,” Taylor said.
“You are full of shit, Taylor Massey. You should see them. They’re sleeping like two little fur balls on the bathroom rug right now. A minute ago they were trying to tear each other’s ears plumb off.” She laughed.
“Nothing about a cat is cute. They’re just overgrown rats with fluffy tails and more meat on their bodies. I’ll get you a puppy if you’ll come home tomorrow. You can even keep it in the house. I’m not allergic to dogs, just cats,” he said.
“I’ll keep fifty cats in the house if I want to. It’s my house and I’m bringing Simba and Bocephus home with me. Dotty said I could,” she said.
“Hey, don’t go all Rambo on me.” Taylor laughed. “I didn’t call to fight with you.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I really would get you a puppy, two if you want,” Taylor said. “I won’t even make you take a shower before you come in my house. I’ll just send Dusty out with one of those sticky rollers to run all over you,” Taylor teased.
“You probably aren’t even allergic to cats. What you are allergic to are those damn cigarettes,” she fussed.
“Leave them cats out there and I’ll have two big old fat puppies waiting for you,” Taylor said.
“Good night, Taylor.” She hung up without arguing any further.
Simba woke up, yawned, and sat down at her feet, looked up, and started to purr so loudly that Bocephus came to check on his brother.
When she picked them up, they immediately snuggled down together in her lap. “Puppy, my ass. I might have a puppy, but only if y’all like it.”
***
Clarice looked up from her morning newspaper when Emily made it to the kitchen the next morning. “Good morning. Did the new kittens keep you up?”
She headed straight for the coffeepot. “No, it was pretty quiet all night. I didn’t even hear snoring. What’s on the agenda today?”
“The cleaning ladies come on Monday. They missed last week because they were off to a family reunion. Three sisters, so when one is gone, they all are. They’ll be here all day. We’ll be working on our bazaar stuff. I’d planned for us to go into town and shop today, but I’ve put it off until Wednesday,” Clarice said.
“You can help Greg feed again this morning and we’ll take care of the new babies,” Dotty said. “Bring the litter pan down to the utility room. We’ll have to get another one when we go shopping in a couple of days, so we don’t have to keep moving it.”
Emily took a deep breath. “It’s two kittens. Greg brought in a gray one and a yellow one. We named them Bocephus and Simba.”
Dotty clapped her hands. “Of course not. Now we won’t fight over who gets to hold the baby.”
Clarice winked at Dotty on the sly. “I get the gray one.”
“We’ll just see about that. I bet they both like me better than you, anyway. I had cats in the house the whole time Jeremiah was home. Lord, that boy drew strays to his side like a red flower draws a hummingbird. If there was a stray within forty miles, he’d find it and come totin’ it home. If we’d been twenty minutes later getting to the grocery store that day, the gray cat Greg rescued would have gone home with us instead of you,” Dotty said.
Greg yawned and dug at his eyes with his fists as he headed for the coffeepot. “I hear the talk of the morning isn’t on the bazaar or that date auction y’all cooked up, but it’s on the new kittens.”
“We’re babysitting while y’all feed this morning. We don’t want them to get lonely. And besides, the cleaning ladies are coming. The vacuum might scare them,” Clarice said.
Greg filled a mug and carried it to the table. “I peeked in at them. They’re ferocious attack cats. They’d tear that vacuum up if it came at them. They told me they were going to practice learning their fighting skills with y’all’s crochet thread this morning.”
***
After breakfast, Greg and Emily donned coats, hats, and gloves and were on their way out the back door when Max yelled at them from the cab of his truck. “I’ve got plenty of help for feeding this morning, but Albert called in a while ago. Now his wife is sick and Louis has gotten a second dose of it, so they’re both staying home.”
Greg groaned. “I guess that means we’ll do the stable duty until he gets back.”
“Horses get all skittish around most strangers, but they liked Emily and they’ll tolerate you.” Max chuckled.
“You mind?” Greg asked Emily.
“Work is work and it’s all got to get done on a daily basis. When we get done, can we exercise the horses?”
“Not can. Have to. Albert usually recruits a hand or two to help him with that part, but they’ll all be busy today. I hope this is the last of winter. Spring is busy, but it’s routine busy. Snow in February is a bitch.”
Emily crammed her cowboy hat down over a stocking hat that had been pulled down over her ears and crawled inside Greg’s truck.
“Hey, cowboys open doors for their ladies,” he said.
“Hey, today I’m hired help, and I’ve been opening my own doors since I was old enough to reach the handle. And darlin’, I’m not your lady,” she said.
He got into the truck and drove toward the stables. “What are you, Emily?”
She hesitated for a minute. “Your friend.”
He wiggled his eyebrows. “With or without benefits?”
“We’ll cross that path when we get to it. The one we are on right now leads to the stables,” she said.
Paths.
That word kept popping up in everyone’s conversations.
Nana saying that she chose the path when Greg had said, “Nana, just think if y’all had the technology that we have today, Marvin could have texted you or emailed you and it wouldn’t have gotten lost the way it did.”
“No, thank you. There is something about a letter that you can hold in your hands even after sixty years and still experience the emotions that you felt that day. An email doesn’t have the same feel. Now go on to bed and let me get back to living in the past. It’s a good place for me to visit on these cold evenings. And Greg, the path I wound up on led me to a wonderful life. I wouldn’t have you if I hadn’t traveled down it,” she had said.
Emily kept talking about the paths behind them and the ones ahead of them and being careful to choose the right one.
It seemed that every time he poked his head in Nana’s door these past weeks, that box of letters was close to her.
Something
about
a
letter
that
you
can
hold
in
your
hand, even sixty years later.
The idea appeared like a cartoon bubble above his head and he knew exactly what he was going to do that evening before he went to bed.
***
Emily bailed out of the truck the second it stopped. She jogged to the long building, sucking icy cold air into her lungs and wondering if they’d freeze before she could even see one horse. The wind whistled through the center aisle, creating six-inch-tall tornadoes with loose straw strewn about the concrete floor. She didn’t stop until she’d loaded a wheelbarrow with a small rectangular bale of straw, a shovel, and a bucket of feed and pushed it to the first stall.
“You get right at it, don’t you?” Greg followed her lead.
“Got lots of work to do, and these horses are eager for a little exercise. Come on, Star Baby, we’ll get your apartment all cleaned while you eat your breakfast and then we’ll go for a gallop out in the snow. It’ll be melted off tomorrow, so you’d best enjoy the feel of it on your hooves. This will most likely be the last that you see this year,” she talked to the big black stallion as she led the horse out into the center aisle, tied him to a center post, and draped a full feedbag over his neck. She stopped long enough to pet him and kiss him right between the eyes.
“Your cats will be jealous,” Greg called out from the other end of the stable.
“Not if you don’t tell them.”
“I won’t have to say a word. They’ll smell the horse on your lips when you kiss them,” he said.
She giggled and ran the blade of the shovel under the dirty, wet straw and tossed it into the wheelbarrow. Would Greg taste horse on her lips if he kissed her right then?
They worked stall after stall and finished at mid-morning before he said another word. When he did open his mouth it was just to say, “Time to saddle up. It’ll take right up to dinnertime to get them all ridden even fifteen minutes each.”
“What are we doing after our noon meal?”
“You can do whatever you want. I’ve got some errands to run in town. Want to go with me?”
“No, I want to ride each horse longer than fifteen minutes. If we aren’t done by noon, you can run errands and I’ll ride the rest of them. And Greg, I don’t need a saddle. I can exercise them bareback.”
“Not Star Baby. He’s wild as the March wind,” he said.
She led him out into the center aisle and crooned into his ear a minute before she hiked a boot on the rungs of a stall door, held his reins, and mounted. “There, there, pretty boy. We’ll ride free and wild like horses were supposed to be ridden. See you in half an hour, Greg. We’re headed up to the cabin and back.”
***
“Well, damn!” he exclaimed as he hopped on the bare back of Wild Bill and rode after her. It had been years since he’d ridden bareback and though exhilarating, it took every bit of his concentration to stay put and not slide right out onto the frozen ground.
She rode with wild abandon, hanging on to her hat with one hand and the reins with the other, giving the feisty horse all the speed and power that he wanted. She’d be rubbing him down for a good thirty minutes when they got back to the stables. But it was a beautiful sight to watch the way that she and the horse connected and became one on the ride to the old cabin. She had slid off and was giving him a handful of grass that she’d found in a spot where the sun had melted the snow when Greg rode up into the yard.
“You planning on riding back at that speed or walkin’ him back?” he asked.
“Whatever he wants to do is fine with me. This is his exercise program, not mine. I’ll rub him down good. He loved being set free,” she said.
Greg slid off Wild Bill to let him catch his wind. Emily had said a week, but that was her rule, not his. He marched over to her side, put a hand on each shoulder, and kissed her passionately. She tasted like cold morning and coffee mixed together with just a hint of breathlessness.
“Think about that while we are getting through this helluva long week. Better not wait too long or he’ll get chilled.” Greg hopped on his horse, turned Wild Bill around, and started back toward the stables. He hadn’t gone five feet when he lost his balance and slid right off the side, landing in the cold wet grass.
Emily hopped off her horse and ran back to him. “Are you hurt?”
He sat up and dusted off his jeans with his hat. “Just my pride. You are right, ma’am. I do need you. I could have laid here and died.”
She rolled up on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. “Since you didn’t die, I bet my horse can beat yours back to the stables.”
Greg hopped back on and gave Wild Bill all the rein he needed to race. Both horses were sweating and both riders were gasping when they reached the stables. Emily slid off Star Baby’s back and immediately started rubbing him down, talking to him the whole time.
Greg did the same with Wild Bill, only instead of talking he listened to Emily. Her voice set easy on his ears, as his grandfather used to say about Clarice’s. Marvin had never heard Clarice say a word. He had words on paper, but never a voice to go with it. At least Greg knew Emily in person and had heard her voice and felt her lips on his.
What would happen if one man had it all?
“What are you thinkin’ about so hard?” Emily asked.
He turned around to see her hanging on the other side of the stall, arms crossed and her chin resting on them.
“The perfect woman,” he said.
“Which is?”
“I’m not going there,” he declared.
He took two steps forward and stopped just inches from her nose. His face was on the same level with hers, and he wanted to kiss her so badly that his body ached with desire. Her blue eyes softened, and she licked her lips.
His willpower weakened, but he got control of it seconds before his lips found hers. “I’m starving,” he whispered. “How about you?”