Cupid Cats Page 11

  Melissa bustled forward, her face pleated with sympathy; so much for her misgivings. If Chloe “wanted” something, Melissa automatically transferred that condition into “needing” it. Jim braced for an argument.

  “Now, darling,” Melissa crooned,” if you really want, er, Pixie—”

  “Ishy.” The female voice coming out of nowhere cut through the rising tension as neatly as a diamond cut glass. John turned around to face the newcomer, and Chloe leaned forward, trying to peek around Jim’s legs.

  A woman, bent over, was backing out of what looked like a cleaning supply room and was pulling a bucket on casters. Her loose T-shirt draped over a nicely rounded bottom, the uneven hem of a pair of baggy, over-long shorts flirting with the backs of slender thighs and shapely calves that led down to a pair of dingy running shoes.

  Chagrin followed an undeniable stab of heated attraction. Man, if a cleaning lady’s tush could set his pulse racing, he really needed to start dating again.

  “Excuse me?” he asked.

  “Ishy,” she repeated, still bent to her task. “The cat’s name is Ishy.”

  She cleared the door to the maintenance room, kicked it shut, and turned.

  She was unkempt and dusty. She’d hauled most of her hair into a lopsided ponytail, but one loop had caught in the rubber band and stuck out now like a wicket on a croquet field. There was something weirdly cute about her dishevelment, a sort of unconscious sexiness about her loose T-shirt and long, well-toned legs.

  Jim stared but not because she was weirdly sexy. He stared because of all the people Jim might have expected to find scrubbing floors in a nonprofit cat shelter, Dr. Edith Handelman—research department head of the company where nine months ago he’d hired on as chief visionary officer—was dead last. Edith was empirical and rational, her life defined by order, cleanliness, and reason. Until this minute he’d have bet a living wage that her only interaction with animals was with her lab rats.

  He smiled, surprised by his pleasure. Along with her plain brown hair, she had plain brown eyes and, he’d always assumed, a plain figure; yet even when she was wearing a lab coat and hair net, he’d never been able to dismiss her as, well, plain. In fact, he hadn’t been able to dismiss her at all. There was just something about Dr. Handelman that got to Jim. She was such an odd little mouse, and apparently he had a hidden thing for mice.

  Once, when he’d been taking a shortcut through the research department, he’d heard her laughing. A little investigation had discovered her and some of her colleagues bending over a slide. When he’d asked what was so funny, she’d jolted upright, spied him, and flushed, and the mask came slamming down. It was one of her coworkers who finally answered, “Nuthin’, boss. Lab humor.”

  Ever since, he’d wanted to hear her laugh again, see her smile—not the professionally donned smile she did so poorly, but the feature-lighting mirth that transformed her.

  For the briefest of seconds, she checked, and he thought he detected a hint of surprise in her caramel-colored eyes, but he couldn’t say for certain because she always kept her expression carefully neutral. Now, calmly snapping on a pair of oversized rubber gloves, she simply said, “Hello, Mr. Curran,” as if she saw him at cat shelters every day.

  “Hi, Edith.”

  “That’s a mean name!” Chloe’s indignant voice turned Edith’s attention to his daughter.

  “On the contrary,” Edith replied. “It’s a fond diminutive and feminization of the name Ishmael, from Moby-Dick, about a sailor who lives through many adventures.”

  Chloe frowned. “What’s a dimmy—dimmytive?”

  “Diminutive,” Edith corrected in the manner of one used to correcting others, which she was. “It means small.”

  “Do you know this person, Jim?” Melissa asked, her tone chill. She’d been halted in mid-capitulation to her only niece, doubtless anticipating little arms flung in gratitude around her neck, and she didn’t like being thwarted.

  “Yes. She’s a coworker of mine. Dr. Handelman, this is Melissa Bandetti, my sister.”

  But Edith wasn’t paying attention. She’d already bent over to open a bottle riding piggyback on the bucket and dump some of its contents into the water. The sting of ammonia immediately filled the small space. Melissa waved her hand in front of her nose, and Chloe scooted away from the offending odor.

  “Ishy is still a mean name, and it’s not hers,” Chloe insisted.

  “Oh?” Edith asked, taking the mop from the bucket and slapping it on the linoleum, splashing Jim’s trousers. He backed away.

  “My kitty’s name is—”

  “Excuse me,” Edith said to Jim, interrupting Chloe. His daughter blinked, stunned. Chloe was unused to being interrupted, let alone ignored.

  “You should move,” Edith said. “All of you. Little girl, pick up Ishy and go to the other side of the room there,” she ordered his daughter. When Chloe just stared at her, she added, “Or put her down. Either way, please hurry up. I have three more rooms to mop before I leave.”

  Melissa made a soft, indignant sound and glared at Jim as though he should put a stop right this minute to anyone’s telling Chloe to do anything she didn’t want to do—except for Melissa, of course, and sometimes, but only occasionally, Jim.

  Chloe, on the other hand, seemed more fascinated than offended. Carefully setting the cat on her feet, she got up and then just as carefully gathered the old cat back up again before heading dutifully to the far side of the tiny enclosure and sitting back down.

  Edith turned her intelligent, candid gaze on Jim. Her lashes were dark and spiky, and she had the sort of complexion he imagined Irish lasses living on the moist coast of a green island to have—creamy, dewy, and radiant. Or it could be that she was sweating. It was hot in here.

  “If you’re her father,” she said, “you ought to keep her from sitting on the floor at animal shelters. Fecal matter carries all sorts of potentially harmful bacteria as well as parasi—”

  “Oh, for the love of God, Jim!” Melissa said, whooshing forward, clasping Chloe by the arm, and hauling her to her feet.

  The cat leaped with weightless grace to the floor as Chloe, always attuned to something new and taboo, demanded, “What’s fecal?”

  Edith considered a second before her face cleared. “Crap.”

  Chloe gasped. Saying “crap” was definitely taboo.

  “Listen,” Melissa said. “Doctor or not, coworker or not, you shouldn’t use words like that in front of children—especially other people’s children.”

  Edith cocked her head. “Why? I assumed from her ignorance of the word ‘diminutive’ that she wouldn’t have understood the word ‘extreca.’ Was I wrong? Some of my colleagues use the term ‘crap’ interchangeably with—”

  “No. You weren’t wrong,” Melissa interjected forcibly. “But that word is a no-no word in our family.”

  “What term would you have preferred I use?” Edith didn’t wait for an answer but wrung out the mop in the squeeze bar, got it soapy again, and once more slapped the mop on the floor with enough force to spray the tips of Melissa’s leather Manolos. Melissa leaped back with a gasp.

  Edith looked up. “I told you to move.”

  “This is ridiculous.” Melissa spun toward Jim. “Someone ought to know there’s a person back here driving off potential clientele.”

  “Settle down, Melissa,” Jim said in a low voice, taking her arm and pulling her off to the side. “Look, she didn’t mean anything by it. Edith just doesn’t have many social skills.”

  “Many?” Melissa repeated. “Try any.”

  “That’s just the way she is. The day we met, she asked me why Global Genetics needed a talking head.”

  Melissa gasped. “Did she want to get fired?”

  Jim smiled, glancing at where Edith and Chloe stood regarding each other like alien species from different planets. Neither was paying any attention to them. “First, I couldn’t fire her. She doesn’t report to me. Second, she didn’t mean to
be insulting. She just heard someone call me that and used the term without understanding the subtext. She’s a little different. She doesn’t do idle chitchat. That’s probably why she’s been assigned cleanup duty.”

  “You sound like you like her.” She sounded accusing.

  He shrugged. He did like her, despite her social awkwardness. He’d spent enough time with her to realize she didn’t have a mean or spiteful bone in her body. Edith was a genius with the girl-next-door’s face, and the social acumen of Sheba the Wolf Girl. “I think she’s unique.”

  Melissa shook her head. “So are these shoes. I waited for these Manolos to go on clearance for months, and this is only the third time I’ve worn them.” Clearly, a line had been crossed when Edith had water-spotted her new shoes. “She should be reprimanded. I’m going to talk to that old bat out front. She’s probably the director.” That said, she was gone.

  Jim looked at Edith. She was listening. “I told her to move,” she said faintly.

  Jim’s heart went out to her. It wasn’t Edith’s fault she was one hot mess. Her file said she’d graduated high school at age fourteen, finished college by fifteen, and received her second doctorate by twenty. Now only twenty-eight, she’d already been head of Global Genetics’ research department for three years. Those who worked in her department loved her. Those who didn’t wrote her off as too frank, too gauche, and too odd, but one helluva research head.

  “I didn’t realize you liked cats, Edith,” he said.

  She blinked at him. “Yes. I find the combination of domesticity and independence interesting.”

  She spoke as though she felt she needed an excuse to like cats. He smiled. “Have you worked here long?”

  “I’ve been a volunteer here for just over four years.”

  “I didn’t know that.” But then, he didn’t know much about Edith’s life outside of Global Genetics. She was a very private woman.

  “Why would you?” she asked, sounding puzzled.

  Because I’m interested in what makes you tick? he thought, but instead answered, “It’s just the sort of thing I would have expected to come up in casual conversation.”

  “Oh,” Edith said, and returned to her mopping.

  Chloe had edged around the parameter of the room, carefully avoiding the wet parts of the floor, until she stood beside Edith, frowning in consternation. Jim looked on in amusement. Chloe had finally run into a woman who wasn’t charmed into helpless servitude on first sight of her curly dark hair and wide blue eyes, and apparently it shook her child-sized world.

  “This kitty’s name isn’t Ishy,” she said pleasantly. “It’s Pixie. And we’re going to adopt her.”

  “No, you’re not,” Edith replied, wiping a loose strand of hair out of her eyes with the wrist of one blue-gloved hand. “Ishy is the shelter’s cat. This is her home.”

  That pretty much put paid to that. Jim knelt down by Chloe. “Sorry, kiddo.”

  “But she’s my mommy’s cat!” Chloe insisted. “We can’t leave her here.”

  Jim raked his hair back with his fingers. He loved that Chloe believed anything and everything was possible, and it seemed needlessly cruel to insist she give up her belief in this little piece of magic she’d conjured for herself. She was still so little. But how was he to convince her the old cat was better off here, without destroying her illusion that the cat was Pixie? Added to which, he didn’t want Chloe thinking he would abandon Steph’s cat.

  Apparently deciding that the major obstacle standing between her and the cat was Edith, Chloe brought out the big guns. She turned her big blues on the good doctor and said in a small, heartrending voice, “My mommy’s dead.”

  Jim winced. It was a ploy Chloe had been using lately and always to great effect. And he hated it. Somewhere during the last year his poppet, sweet as pie and twice as cute, had become a master manipulator.

  He waited for Edith to drop her mop and scoop his little motherless girl up in her arms, promising Chloe that she not only could have the cat, but any ten cats she wanted and not only that, but that Edith would come over every day and clean the litter box.

  “Mine is, too,” Edith replied. “What has that to do with your adopting Ishy?”

  Chloe’s mouth fell open and she stared, stunned into gape-mouthed silence. Jim burst out laughing and at once, consumed with guilt, turned it into a cough. Dead mommies were no laughing matter.

  Melissa reappeared in the doorway, wearing a decidedly unhappy expression as Chloe just stood there, little and defenseless, cradling the old ginger cat. The cat did look like Pixie. And he had promised Chloe any cat she wanted. And guilt over his mistimed laugh was having its way with him.

  Before he could stop himself, he heard himself asking, “Can’t the shelter get another cat?”

  Edith opened her mouth to reply, but before she could speak, Melissa broke in. “Look, the cat will have a much happier life with Chloe,” she said in the manner of a woman about to whip out her checkbook and say, “Name your price.” “She’ll have a great home, great food, toys galore, and the run of the neighborhood.”

  “You would give her open access to the out-of-doors?” Edith asked.

  “Of course,” Melissa said. “Cats need to be free.”

  “No, they don’t,” Edith said. “That’s a myth, as damaging as the notion that neutering an animal destroys its spirit. The average life span of indoor cats is about fourteen years whereas cats allowed to roam have an average life expectancy of four. Not only are outdoor cats more than likely to become infected with parasites and diseases and have high incidents of injury by car or in altercations with other animals, but scientists list cats as the second-most serious threat to bird populations worldwide. Based on the proportion of cats bringing home at least one prey item, a 1997 British study of nonferal cats’ impact on wildlife estimated that their nation’s population of approximately nine million cats would have brought home twenty-five to twenty-nine million birds over a six-month period. Given these facts, one of the stipulations for adopting a cat from this shelter is for the prospective owner to sign a contract promising to keep the cat indoors.”

  “Twenty-five million birds? That’s ridiculous. I don’t believe it. It’s just propaganda,” Melissa declared. “Cats hate being kept in prison in a house. It’s unnatural.”

  Edith looked at Jim, her brow furrowing. “Clearly, any discussion is pointless. This woman is one of those people for whom data and evidence have no meaning. So, what should I say to her now?”

  During the year since he’d been hired by Global Genetics, Jim had taken on the part-time task of mentoring Edith in learning more sophisticated social skills.

  Growing red-faced, Melissa stared at her, “Excuse me? One of those people?”

  Edith nodded, happy to elucidate. “It’s quite common. Many people form emotional attachments to opinions that exist irrespective of the facts of the matter. Researchers have shown that for these people overwhelming evidence has no impact on beliefs.”

  “This woman,” Melissa announced in a tight voice, “will be waiting for you in the car, Jim. Don’t be long.” She whirled around and stomped out the door.

  Chloe regarded him with a trembling lower lip, Edith looked confused, and the cat kept purring.

  “Daddy, please can I have Pixie?” Chloe whispered. Jim met Edith’s gaze. “Look, Edith, I promise not to let the old girl out. Can’t the shelter get another cat?”

  Edith didn’t answer him. She answered Chloe. She squatted down so she was eye level with his three-foot-tall daughter and said, “It’s not the shelter’s say; it’s Ishy’s. Other people have tried to adopt her and only a few have even managed to get her out as far as the street. The two people who did finally get her to their homes ended up bringing her back because she yowled nonstop from the moment they took her until the moment they brought her back. I’m not going to put her through that again. She’s old. She wants to stay here.”

  Edith peered up at him. “It’s really
a rather fascinating example of locale fixation in a domesticated species. What makes it interesting is how she imprinted on this area so late in her life. I wish I knew her history. The answer may be as simple as early cognitive familiarity.”

  Jim smiled weakly. For a moment there, Edith had almost seemed like a real girl.

  He put a hand on his daughter’s shoulder. “The kitty likes it here, Chloe.”

  Chloe shook her head. “She wouldn’t go with anyone else ’cause she didn’t belong to them. She was waiting for us.”

  Edith straightened and stepped over to the door marked EMERGENCY EXIT. She took out a set of keys, disconnected the fire alarm system, and pushed open the door. “Go ahead. Try to take her through.”

  Not a shred of doubt appeared on Chloe’s face as she marched for the door carrying the cat. The ginger cat began to squirm. Then wriggle. Then yowl. Jim started forward, concerned lest the cat scratch Chloe, but at the same instant the cat broke free and launched herself from Chloe’s arms onto the floor, scuttling away.

  Chloe stared after her, betrayal and hurt filling her little face. She turned her gaze up at Jim. “Why’d she do that, Daddy? I thought she liked me.”

  “She does like you, Chloe,” Jim answered. And, indeed, the cat was already back, rubbing lightly against Chloe’s legs and purring gently. “She just wants to stay here, Chloe. She’s not Pixie.”

  “She is,” his daughter whispered, reaching down to pet the ginger cat’s little wedge-shaped head. She sighed, and Jim’s heart turned in his chest; this was her first real experience with rejection.

  “Maybe she’s just not ready yet,” Chloe said. “If she wanted to go with me, would you let her go?”

  “If Ishy ever went willingly with someone, we certainly wouldn’t stop her,” Edith said, sounding a little gruff.

  “Really?” Chloe asked.

  “Really,” Edith answered.