This time it was my very own human who’d come to bring me great tidings of joy—or sorrow, as the case may be.
“Hey, Max,” said Odelia, sounding and looking a little breathless. She was blushing, and looked as if she’d just run a marathon—or at least a 60-yard dash. “How are you, my precious little Maxie?” she said, and started nuzzling me in the most outrageous fashion: digging her nose into my neck and making the kind of nonsensical gibbering sounds humans usually reserve for the moment they encounter a newly born baby.
“I’m fine,” I said a little frostily. Being rudely dragged from those precious snatches of sleep will do that to a cat. This time I’d been dreaming of a nice piece of fish fillet that had my name on it.
Odelia was still fussing over me, and stroking my fur and even going so far as to tickle my fluffy cheeks, grabbing my face in both hands and rubbing me under my chin. And in spite of the fact that I’d had my imaginary fish fillet rudely snatched away from me, I couldn’t resist to smile at the treatment my human was giving me, and then, of course, I was betrayed by my own body when I started purring. It’s an involuntary thing, I tell you.
“So what’s the emergency?” I asked finally, when Odelia’s fervor started dissipating.
“No emergency,” she said with a smile as she grabbed her phone from the table and made herself comfortable on the couch next to me. “Just happy to see my precious baby.”
I cleared my throat. Maybe this was the time to address the issue Harriet had brought to my attention. No time like the present, right? “There have been some complaints.”
“Oh?” she said distractedly, as she’d started reading something on her phone.
“Yeah, about cleanliness and a general lack of hygiene.”
“Mh,” she responded as she started tapping a message on her phone. Clearly I’d missed my window of opportunity and had lost her full attention.
Still I trudged on. “The thing is… Harriet feels that standards have been dropping precipitously as of late, and she doesn’t think this is necessarily a good thing.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah—it’s all the dust she seems to object to, mainly. Dust bunnies in particular. She doesn’t like them. She found one underneath this couch, and one over by the window.”
We have one of those nice hardwood floors, and with the sun bathing it in a warm glow right now, the dust bunny was clearly visible from where I was lying and looking.
Odelia didn’t even glance up, though, focused as she was on her digital gizmo.
“Odelia?” I said, gently giving her leg a tap.
“Mh…”
“So what do you think should be done about this dust bunny issue?”
“That’s great, Max,” she said, and then got up and moved away, her eyes still glued to her phone, and her fingers too, as she tapped out another message with lightning speed.
I let out a deep sigh and vowed to give it another shot at a later date. Tough to compete with a smartphone for your human’s attention, I mean to say.
But as luck would have it, just then Gran walked in, looking as spry and chipper as ever. Well, maybe not chipper. As a rule Grandma Muffin doesn’t do chipper.
“Gran,” I said, perking up. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Later,” she snapped, as she searched around for someone who wasn’t me. “Odelia,” she said as she located her granddaughter. “The neighborhood watch are organizing a meeting next week and I want you to come. Odelia, are you listening? Odelia!”
“What?” Odelia asked, looking up from her phone.
Gran had pressed her lips together and gave her granddaughter a look of reproach. “I swear to God, one of these days that thing is going to be the death of you.”
“What thing?” asked Odelia.
“So are you coming or not?”
“Coming to what?”
“See? I knew you weren’t listening. Here, let me have that.” And with these words, she unceremoniously grabbed my human’s phone and tucked it into the pocket of her green-and-purple tracksuit.
“Hey, that’s my phone!” Odelia cried, as if she’d just lost a limb or vital body part.
“I know, and now it’s mine. And if you do as I say I just might let you have it back. Now are you going to listen to me or not?”
Odelia frowned, and crossed her arms in front of her. She clearly wasn’t happy to be treated like a recalcitrant child. “I’m listening.”
“I’m organizing a meeting of the neighborhood watch next week. Big meeting. We hope to welcome plenty of new members. I want you to come. You and Chase.”
“I’m sorry, Gran,” Odelia began, shaking her head.
But Gran arched a menacing eyebrow. “No meeting, no phone,” she said.
“You can’t do that!”
“Watch me.” Then she softened. “Look, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. There’s been a spate of burglaries lately, and we need to get on top of it before it’s too late.”
“Burglaries? Have you told Uncle Alec?”
“He’s too busy buttering up Charlene Butterwick,” said Gran with a throwaway gesture of the hand. “No, it’s up to us to save this neighborhood from falling prey to this gang of burglars, and that means you, too. The neighborhood needs you, honey.”
“Okay, sure,” said Odelia with a shrug. “If you think I can help.”
“We can only pull this neighborhood away from the brink if we all work together,” said Gran, sounding so much like a motivational coach even Odelia looked impressed.
“No, of course,” she said. “Anything I can do to help.”
“That’s settled then,” said Gran, and turned to leave.
“Wait, my phone,” said Odelia.
Gran dangled the phone from her fingertips. “Are you sure you want it back? You know smartphones aren’t good for you. They’re like the crack cocaine of the digital age.”
“Please please please can I have it back?” Odelia begged, inadvertently proving her grandmother right.
The old lady sighed, then handed her granddaughter back her phone. “Sometimes I fear for your generation,” she said, then stalked off and slammed the door.
Odelia, a happy smile on her face, immediately was immersed in her phone again.
The dust bunny was swept up from the floor by the draft caused by Gran’s departure. It happily fluttered through the living room, then into the salon, and finally settled right on top of my nose. I squinted at the bunny, cross-eyed, then sneezed, dislodging it from its perch. It flittered down right next to me, and for a moment I watched it for signs of malevolence. When nothing happened, though, I slowly drifted off to sleep again, proving once and for all that dust bunnies and cats can live together in perfect harmony.
Chapter 4
Mort Hodge was seated at his desk, hard at work as usual, when a sudden sound had him look up.
Mort, a popular and successful creator of comics for daily distribution in all the important and even the less important papers in the country, had made his fortune drawing a daily cartoon about a cat. Titled Mort’s Molly, it had been an instant hit and now, forty years into a lucrative and rewarding career, people still clamored for Mort’s creation. Unlike lots of other cartoons, Mort still did most of the work himself, and had turned part of his home into his office, the nerve center of Mort’s Molly’s universe.
“Megan?” he yelled loudly, referring to his wife. “Megan, is that you?”
When there was no response, he got up and went in search of answers. Next to his desk, a radio was quietly playing, and the atmosphere in the studio was mellow and relaxed, just the way he liked it.
He emerged from his workspace, located at the back of the garden, and glanced around. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, he decided he could use a snack, as his tummy was rumbling, and he felt like taking a break. That, and a chat with his wife, to bounce a couple of new ideas off her, and to sit down for that snack and a cup of joe.