The Cat Sitter's Cradle by John Clement Blaize Clement

Author:John Clement,Blaize Clement
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

15

When my grandparents moved here, the Key was a completely different world. First of all, there weren’t nearly as many houses as there are now, not to mention condos and high-rise apartment buildings and restaurants and shops and chic hotels. It was just a quiet fishing village, and what few houses there were certainly never made it onto the cover of Fancy-Pants Mansion magazine. Secondly, there was no such thing as a “private” beach. Even when Michael and I were kids, we would roam for hours on end exploring every inch of the island, and not once did we ever encounter a NO TRESPASSING sign. Back then most of the island was covered in sea grape and sugarberry trees and live oaks that towered over jungles of saw palmetto, wild olive, and creeping moonflower vines. It felt like our own personal jungle for two.

These days people like to joke that if you look away too long, the jungle starts to creep in and reclaim its stake. That definitely seems to be the case on Windy Way, where the houses peek out from behind a densely woven curtain of tree limbs and vines, and you have to carefully maneuver your car around the occasional island that’s opened up in the middle of the one-lane road, where patches of saw grass have sprouted and overly ambitious cabbage palms are poking their way through.

I pulled into the driveway of a low-slung ranch house with pale gray siding and a lipstick red front door. A huge live oak huddled over the house like a regular at the neighborhood bar, resting its leafy elbows on the peak of the roof. Mrs. Langham was sitting in a beach chair in the open bay of the garage with her feet propped up on an old ice cooler. She was stick-thin with salt-and-pepper hair and bright pink lipstick. Perched on the bridge of her nose was a pair of bifocals attached to a string of white plastic beads around her neck, and she was busily pulling a needle and thread through an embroidery frame—probably an applique for a dress she was working on. As I walked up she laid the embroidery frame down in her lap and slid her glasses off.

“Well, well, look what the cat dragged in!”

I said, “I know, I know. I’ve been meaning to call you forever.”

“Oh, don’t you worry about it. I knew you’d come sniffing around one of these days when you got desperate enough. Come on back. It’s in the sewing room.”

The last time I saw Mrs. Langham was months ago when I had dropped by on a whim. She had been my grandmother’s seamstress, so I’d known her since I was just a little girl. I remembered lying on the floor of the sewing room in this very house, playing with her black poodle while she and my grandmother talked about clothes and men and neighborhood gossip. It turned out she had made a few outfits for my mother, too. Seeing

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