The Miseducation of Henry Cane by Charles Brooks

Author:Charles Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

The last thing I wanted was a roommate, but I didn’t really have a choice.

Sperry’s dad and Kelli-Anne were splitting up. Maybe just for the summer, but also maybe for good. It was difficult to get the entire story about what happened, but it either had to do with Sperry’s dad sleeping with one of their Central American cleaning women or the fact that he refused to let Kelli-Anne adopt a seventh Chihuahua. Both of those things were true, but who knows which was the straw that broke the camel’s back. If I had to wager I would guess it was the Chihuahua.

In their haste to come to a separation agreement, Kelli-Anne was retaining ownership of the house for the rest of the summer.

“She won’t ever get it for good,” Sperry insisted. “My father is the MacGyver of prenups. But she does have it through Labor Day, which means—”

Oh no.

“I have to move in with you.”

I didn’t want Sperry living with me for a number of reasons, chief among them the fact that he would realize I was hardly ever home during the week and would start asking questions I didn’t want to answer. But I’d never been able to say no to him, and I didn’t have a good enough reason to start now, so I agreed to help him move in on a Tuesday afternoon.

I hated the fact that I needed to skip work and another chance to possibly see Elisabetta. The scarf still wasn’t tied to the post on the turret. That fact worried me when I allowed it to. What if she’d discovered my snooping? What if she never wanted to see me again?

Sperry had an awful lot of stuff for a twenty-two-year-old man. The boat shoes alone took a single trip between the two houses. He also had all these bow ties and summer suits and, of course, there was Mrs. Frankweiler, Sperry’s obese one-eyed tabby cat. Sperry had found the cat about fifteen years ago as a one-eyed kitten shivering in a rainstorm beneath one of his father’s classic cars. Sperry heard the kitten’s mewling and crawled on his belly beneath the car. She was no bigger than his hand, but she fought him with everything she had as he pulled her out and brought her into the house. We’d just read that wonderful book about a brother and a sister who ran away from their fancy Connecticut families to take up residence in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and, like every fancy kid raised within a thirty-mile radius of Central Park, we maintained our own fantasies of running away and sleeping in the Temple of Dendur.

“This cat is an old soul,” eight-year-old Sperry determined to me. “She’s Mrs. Frankweiler.” It was a strange thing to call a tiny adorable kitten, but Mrs. Frankweiler grew into her name in no time. Since that fateful night under the car Mrs. Frankweiler lived in the lap of luxury, traveling everywhere Sperry went, including Dartmouth, where he got an apartment in Hanover because pets weren’t allowed in the dorms.

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