A Month at the Shore (45 page)

The old house was drafty, the budget tight. It was cold in the shelter—clearly too cold for some of the cats in the cages.

"Poor babies. Hang on; I'm here. Everything's going to be all right now," Zina promised the demoralized cats. She turned up the heat, then began the day's routine of cleaning the cages and replenishing the food in them.

Each of the cats was to be let out in turn as she tidied up; but the one that Zina invariably let out first was the Siamese female with the earsplitting howl—the kind of wail that made homeowners hang out of their windows at midnight and lob hand grenades of shoes and clocks. The Siamese wanted out. Now.

All of the volunteers were hoping, against all odds, that the cat, nicknamed Banshee, would somehow be adopted and leave (she was not only loud but bulimic). But not Zina. She loved every cat in every cage without reserve. Whether the cats were fat or skinny, young or old, male or female, mute or loud, she loved them all. After four years of volunteer work, Zina had made hundreds of friends: almost every one of them had four legs and whiskers.

The door opened, and a woman entered on a sharp gust of April air. "Good morning, Zina. You're here bright and early."

Marilyn
Radisson, volunteer director of Flo's Cat House, was much more clear-eyed than Zina about what it took to run a successful shelter.

Money. "Zina, sweetie, you've got a really heavy hand on the thermostat. Oil prices are sky-high; every degree really does matter," she said, throttling back the heat. "It's the Sphynx, isn't it?" she ventured.

Zina glanced at the bizarre, hairless cat huddled in the back of his cage. "He always looks
so
cold."

"Yes, he does, doesn't he?"

"I know! I'll knit him a vest," she decided. "You think he'd wear it?"

"It can't hurt to try," said
the director
. She paused at
one of the
cage
s
and wiggled a finger through the bars
at a young calico, who
plopped on her back and began gnawing gently on it.

"One of these days, Zina,"
Marilyn
said over her shoulder, "you're going to find yourself a husband. And then you'll be knitting baby sweaters, not cat vests."

After a silence, Zina said softly, "She likes it when you drag a pencil across the cage for her to attack."

Marilyn
turned her wise, middle-aged smile from the cat to the keeper. "Later. After I've caught up with my paperwork." The look she saw on the younger woman's face made her shrug. "Some people—you—are better at parenting than others, Zina. I just happen to shine more behind a desk."

"You're good at everything," Zina said generously.

"Not everything. Some things. And one of them is making sure that this shelter doesn't go belly-up four years after opening. Flo would not approve."

Zina glanced up at the historic photograph that hung, improbably, between the rows of cat cages. Florence Benson, a young woman with a sober expression on her face and a cat on her lap, was seated in a carved chair on an oriental carpet in the very same room that now smelled of cat pee. Below the sepia-toned photograph was a framed excerpt of her will.

I give and devise residential real estate that I may own at the time of my death, located at 24 Wood Road, Hopeville, Massachusetts, together with all buildings and improvements thereon, to the Hopeville Animal Rescue League with the wish that said real estate shall be used for purposes of sheltering abandoned
cats.

How old had she been when she died, this only daughter of a farming couple? Ninety-seven, someone had said. Nearly a century of living without a husband, without a ch
ild. So, yes, it could be done.

"Zina?"

"Hmm?" She had to rouse herself from her revery, as she so often did, and re-enter the world of the here and now. "I'm sorry; I was off daydreaming."

"I said, could you do the calico next? A woman is supposed to come in this morning to look her over."

Look her over.
As if the cat were a used car. It didn't seem right. It never seemed right. Who could pick up a cat, pet it, play with it, and then walk away? The thought that people did that not only with cats and dogs but with children at adoption fairs never failed to shock Zina. But then, she knew that she was easily shocked. Sensitized, her brother called her. Because of that day.

"Okay, but that means the Banshee goes back in her cage ahead of schedule. She's not going to like that. Hold your ears."

The predictable howl of protest drove
Marilyn
to close the door of her office.

Saying awful things in soothing ways to the
prematurely
locked-up Siamese, Zina began tidying the calico's cage while its lucky inmate ro
amed free. "Shh, bitchy-bitchy-
bitchy Banshee, shh, there, now, Banshee, it's okay." She folded the
soiled
newspaper at the bottom of the cage and dumped it in a plastic bag. "Someday you'll have a real home of your own to throw up in. Shh-h. Don't be upset."

She opened the regional news section of the
Worcester County Sentinel
and was fitting it to the bottom of the calico's cage when a photo on the front page caught her eye. It was a shot of a group of men with arms folded across their chests and broad grins on their faces, looking as if they'd just won the SuperBowl.

JACKPOT
!
read the headline. Obviously not athletes, the very ordinary men were wearing suits and ties and standing around a cluster of desks. Zina read the caption below the photograph:

Winners of the $87,000,000 jackpot in their downtown Providence office. The winning ticket was purchased by Ed Baynard, third from left. All eight men plan to continue working at their jobs in the insurance brokerage.
 

Eighty-seven million dollars!
What the shelter could do with all that money!

Zina
took a closer look at
the third man from the left, the one who had made them all millionaires. Ed Baynard was a middle-aged,
average
-looking man with an appealing grin and a pot belly. He looked ecstatic. They all did.

All except the tallest among them, the one on the right, the one whose face was slightly averted. Who looked somehow distressed to be caught on camera, as if he were ashamed to have won so much money without earning it.

What an odd pose, she thought. Maybe he dropped something and was looking around for it.

She studied his face more closely, aware that her cheeks had begun to burn and her heart to beat faster. It was impossible to see his features clearly, and his hair was so much shorter and receding,
and there was a kind of puffi
ness that was different, but
...

She studied his face more closely.

It wasn't him, of course. It couldn't be him. But her breath was coming short and fast now, and she felt weak. She found herself holding the folded paper up over her head and trying to see his face from underneath, an exercise in futility.

She studied his face more closely: squinting, tilting her head to one side, all the time aware of the thundering of her heart. What if it were him? Why couldn't it be him? He had to live somewhere, be something, do something. Why couldn't he be working in Providence for an insurance brokerage and buying tickets in a lottery pool?

She ran into
Marilyn
's office and, in a voice that didn't sound anything like her own, said, "A magnifying glass—please, I need one!"

Marilyn
looked up, startled. "I don't have one."

Zina looked around wildly, the way she would for a fire extinguisher if the next room were ablaze. "Oh, God. Oh, God, I have to go home."

The director jumped to her feet from behind her desk. "Are you all right? Are you feeling well?"

"Yes, I'm fine. But
... I have to go home."

"Now?"

"Now!"

"Is it truly important, Zina? Because we talked about how I was leaving at ten and wouldn't be back until one. And the woman is coming about the calico."

The director's
look of dismay said
very
plainly that Zina was failing her, failing the calico, failing
Florence
. All for a magnifying glass.

Zina raked her hands through the sides of her long blond hair while she reconsidered her overwrought reaction. It was not him. It couldn't be him. All this time, just a few hours' drive away? Not in Hollywood, not in London, but living in Providence? Not an actor, not a playwright, but an insurance agent?

She was making a fool of herself. Again. She had done it twice before—once, when she had chased a stranger down a street in Boston, and another time, more recently, when she had tried to convince Zack that she'd seen Jimmy in a home-mortgage commercial on cable TV.

Wrong then. Wrong now.

With a wrenching effort, she forced a smile. "I forgot that you had to go somewhere," she confessed. "This can wait,
Marilyn
. I'll stay."

"Are you sure?"

"Absolutely." She felt a nipping through her sock and looked down to see the calico wrapping its front paws around her ankle. Her melancholy smile turned more cheery.

"Monster. You're hungry, aren't you—or is it that you just want to play?" Scooping the calico up with both hands, she nuzzled
it
nose to nose and then carried the young cat out of the office.

Chapter 2

"Dad! It's for you!" Tyler slapped the phone down and tore up the stairs, taking them two at a time, tripping near the top and recovering with a thump.

"
Tyler
,
walk
!
"
Wendy yelled up after him. "How many times do I have to tell you? And pull up those pants!"

There was, of course, no response from her son other than the slamming of his bedroom door to drown out the sounds of the new video game that he wasn't supposed to be playing until his homework was done. Sighing, Wendy brought in the overlooked newspaper, its underside damp from lying on the wet coco mat, and scanned the headlines before laying it alongside her husband's supper plate.

She was relieved to see that they were no longer frontpage news in the
Providence Journal.
A new mess at City Hall, another empty mill burned to the ground, a groundbreaking ceremony for a new hotel—these were the stories currently on people's minds.

"Thank God," she muttered. "Maybe they'll leave us alone from now on."

After a glance at the upturned phone on the hall table, she walked over to the door of the basement stairs and called down. "Jim, did you hear Tyler?"

Her husband answered from the musty bowels of their tiny house, "Yeah, get that, would you?"

Jim was good at ping-ponging the minor irritants of life back to her to field. After all, he was the one who had to handle all the big stuf
f—like winning an eighty-seven-
million-dollar lottery. Wendy shook her head, unable, still, to come to terms with their new wealth. It had come so suddenly on the heels of their old poverty.

She picked up the phone and said, "I'm so
rr
y; Jim can't come to the phone right now. Can I take a message?"

There was a short pause, and then a cheerful voice answered, "Wendy, hi, it's me."

"Hey, Dave. What's up?"

Her brother was the reason that Wendy had met and married Jim in the first place. Dave and Jim had worked together in a motorcycle shop one summer, had hit it off, and had been pals ever since. Why not? They were two of a kind: fun-loving, optimistic, impulsive, and eerily flippant about money. Which was fine if, like Dave, you happened not to be the marrying kind and didn't need a certain amount of it to feed and clothe a family.

"So what's Jim up to? Has he spent all your winnings yet?"

Wendy let out a wary laugh. "He's trying. He's down in the basement with the contractor and the plumber, working on the estimate for the addition."

"It's gonna look great." There was another pause, and then Dave went on. "So. Here's the thing," he said sheepishly. "I've got a lee-tle problem with my cash flow this week. Just until my next paycheck."

No surprise there. Dave Ferro routinely had a leetle problem with his cash flow. That next paycheck was the elusive brass ring in the merry-go-round of his life.

"How much do you need?"

"Just the rent. Seven hundred."

"I'll have to
bring it up with
Jim."

"You know he'll say yes."

Wendy did know. "Stop by after supper, then; I'll write you a check."

"I'm keeping track, Wendy; so help me God I am. I'll pay back every cent the minute one of my ships comes in."

He had a whole fleet of them wandering around out there: Lotto, BigBucks, Powerball, a screenplay that he hoped Bruce Willis would option, and at least one patent that was apparently actually pending. Wendy wanted desperately for one of her brother's ships to sail back fully loaded—not because they couldn't afford to help him out, but because she couldn't bear the guilt for helping to corrupt him.