There is a knock on the door.
Lulled into a half-lidded stupor by an afternoon of Celebrity
Bowling – a game show from the 70s on just one of the nine fabulous channels
received at Casa del Pearl – I rise from the couch.
“Well, look at you,” she says.
Liza Bean Bitey, of the Minneapolis Biteys, steps
forward, dragging a brown paper bag.Former-roommate-now-cat-next-door
and current holder of the world’s record in the mouse steeplechase, she leaves
the parcel at the door.Sitting down, she cocks
her head, studies me.
I frown.“What are
you doing?”
“Hmm?”She looks
at the bag.“Oh, this.”She chuckles.“Sunday Funday, ol’ bean.”She
twitches a delicate whisker, shifts her head to stare at me from another angle.She sniffs the air.“You’ve been laying on the couch all day,
haven’t you?”
“I resent whatever it is you’re saying,” I say.I take what I imagine to be a surreptitious
sniff at an armpit.
She wrinkles her nose.“We’ll ignore that.”She nudges the
bag to one side.“I came bearing gifts, but
now that I see you,” she says. “I’ve changed my mind.”
I bend over, pick up the bag:a bottle of gin, a bottle of tonic, roughly two
dozen limes.I look up at her.“I always wonder.Where do you –“
“Are you wearing that?” she interrupts. “I’m going to
need you to change.”
I look down at the flannel pants.“Change?”
“Pants,” the cat says.“Shirt.Jacket.Perhaps a scarf.”The cat rises, leaps to the back of the
couch, where she checks her reflection in the mirror on the wall.
“I know what “change” means,” I say.
“Oh, Pearl,” she says.“I cannot, in good conscience, let you sit here looking like that.”She places a thoughtful paw on her chin.“There’s the drunken spelling bee at the
331.There’s karaoke at the Vegas.
“She stops.“Oh, I know.What say we go up to the Spring.We can watch the people sing along to the jukebox.Maybe that guy with the Tom Petty fetish will
be there again.”
“Or the guy that does all that AC/DC.”
“Better yet,” she says, eyes sparkling.“We go up to Jimmy’s. We’ll aim for the corner booth, we’ll eat that
three-dollar shrimp cocktail they serve.We’ll catch up.”She abruptly stands.
“I’ve decided,” she says.“It’s decided.Go get
dressed.We’re going to Jimmy’s.”She jumps to the floor.
And you know what?
The cat is right, dammit.
“Pearl?”
“Yes?”
The cat taps the side of her nose with a paw.“We’ll text your boss on the way to the
bar.You might as well call in sick
now.”