Mr. Mott returned, puffing harder than ever, burdened with a plastic dishpan-looking thing filled with various sacks and bowls. “He should only have this one brand of cat chow,” he said, “on account of his kidneys. You can find it easy in most grocery stores. He’s not allowed to eat canned food. He’ll tell you he is, but he’s not.”
Mercy wondered how he would tell her. Also, it sounded to her as if Mr. Mott was thinking they might be away long enough so she would need to buy more cat chow. This was a little bit worrisome. But she said, “We’ll get along fine, Mr. Mott. Don’t give him another thought. I hope things go well with your daughter.”
And she saw him off with a smile, and waved as she closed the door.
The litter box did fit in the bathroom, but just barely, and it came with a plastic spatula gadget that she laid alongside it. Desmond’s water bowl and his food bowl—both unnecessarily large, in her opinion—had to be placed on the kitchen floor beside the counter, where they were clearly visible from anywhere in the studio. This violated her no-clutter policy. It made her unhappy. She told herself that in time she would stop seeing them, but this thought made her even unhappier.
Overall, though, Desmond turned out to be less intrusive than she’d feared. He wasn’t a nagger or a whiner; nor was he a lap cat. When she sat on the daybed he sat next to her, rather than on her. He lay curled up like a nautilus, purring. At night he slept between her ankles but on top of the covers, so that the only time she was aware of him was when she stirred her feet or turned over. Then she felt the warm weight of him holding down her blankets.
She developed the habit of talking to him while she was painting. Just brief remarks; no baby voice or anything like that. “Oh, shoot,” she would say. “Look what I’ve gone and done.” Or “What’s your opinion, Desmond? I’m worried this looks fussed over.” And Desmond would give her a measured stare before he went back to bathing his left shin.
Often as she was painting she found herself drifting back through her past like someone wandering through an old house. She thought of her father, who used to take her for neighborhood walks on Sundays when she was a child so that her mother, already an invalid, could get her rest. “Notice the rust stains below those eaves,” he would say. “Below Mrs. Webb’s eaves. I don’t know how often I’ve told her she needs to have her gutters cleaned.” And once, when it began to rain, “Have you ever wondered where rain comes from?” “No, not really,” she had said bluntly, but he had told her anyhow—all about evaporation, condensation…Now she saw that he had adored her, and she felt a deep wave of regret for her failure to realize that before.
She thought of Robin as he was when he was courting her, when he came by the store too often and made little trumped-up purchases just so he could catch a glimpse of her behind the counter. So bashful, he’d been; so tongue-tied and respectful. It was a fad back then for boys to address girls as “kiddo” and treat them with the cool amusement that Humphrey Bogart, say, displayed toward his leading ladies. But Robin had called Mercy “Miss Wellington” until she laughingly told him not to. Some of his pronunciations were backwoodsy—“strenth” instead of “strength,” for instance, and “ditten” instead of “didn’t”—but he took great care with his grammar, and he made a point of using longer words than he needed to. “I’m wondering if you might ever want to go on a social engagement,” he’d said. He meant a movie, it turned out; she couldn’t remember now which one. It was such a hot evening that once they were settled in their seats, she had drawn a small jar from her purse and plucked out a cotton disc soaked in toner and blotted her upper lip. Then, on second thought, she had tapped him on the arm and offered him the jar as well, and he had glanced at it in surprise and then taken a disc himself and popped it into his mouth. Mercy had looked quickly away, pretending not to see. She had worried he would try to swallow it so as to save face, but a moment later she sensed a surreptitious movement in the dark as he removed the disc from his mouth and, who knows, perhaps slipped it into his pocket or dropped it beneath his seat.
He had extremely blue eyes that seemed clearer than other people’s eyes. They made him look trustful and hopeful. His lips were distinctly etched, double-peaked at the center in a way that she found intriguing. He knew everything there was to know—instinctively, it seemed—about everything mechanical. In that respect, he was very like her father.