The Blessings of the Animals: A Novel - By Katrina Kittle Page 0,48

very much.

Gabby’s door was still closed, so I stood in the hallway and called her cell. I listened. Yep, sure enough it was still Wonder Woman.

“You’re such a freak,” she said into her phone. “Why are you calling me?”

“I’m going on a rescue with Helen.”

She opened her bedroom door and we stood there, yards away from each other, phones to our ears. Still speaking into her phone she said, “Okay. Good luck. I’m sorry I was a bitch.”

“Apology accepted. Call your father.”

She made a face at me and snapped her phone shut. “Sorry! We got disconnected!”

“You are a bitch.”

“But you love me anyway, right?”

I thought about saying something like “maybe” or “don’t push it,” but some things you don’t mess with. This was my daughter. There was only one right answer. “Of course I love you.”

She stood in her doorway. “I love you, too.”

“Call him.”

She slammed the door.

Chapter Fourteen

BY THE TIME HELEN AND I WERE IN MY TRUCK, THAT RAW, insistent rain of Ohio springtime had begun. “What is it about us?” I asked. “The day began beautifully. I watched the sun rise.”

From the initial drive-by, the house looked normal. We saw two cats on the porch. A cat in the window. The house, painted several different shades of green with purple Victorian gingerbreading, looked well cared for. “Doesn’t look too bad,” I said as I parked.

“The guy next door made the call.” Helen looked at the paper in her hand and said, “Stuart Duberstein. He said it was like something out of a Stephen King book.”

Stuart Duberstein. Hmm. The name conjured a crotchety old opinionated guy, the sort who wrote letters to the editor that began with, “How dare you?” Maybe he just didn’t like cats?

Two more cats appeared in the windows. Nothing abnormal yet.

But the unmistakable odor reached us as I began heading up the front walk. “Uh-oh,” I said.

I still hoped this was a case where we could humanely capture a few cats, take them to the spay and neuter program, and offer some education to a little old lady with good intentions.

As I put my striped Wellingtons on the bottom step of the porch, I had my first inkling that this was not to be. Cats poured forth as if someone had turned on a cat hose.

The front curtain moved and I glimpsed a human hand. “Someone’s home,” I said. The windows filled with more cats. I tried to count. Thirty? More?

“Oh, my God,” Helen said. “There’s just as many inside.”

I slid my feet without lifting them, dragging my legs through the river of cats to ring the old-fashioned turn bell. The sound seemed to summon even more cats to the windows and from under the porch. I suddenly had a new opinion of curmudgeonly Mr. Stuart Duberstein.

I rang four times and pounded on the glass.

“This is freaking me out,” Helen said. “Get off!” She edged her way to the steps, using her folded-closed umbrella as a deterrent. She reentered the pelting rain, her white-blond hair immediately plastered to her head. “If it’s not Stephen King, it’s Alfred Hitchcock for sure.”

I fled to the rain, too, where only ten or eleven cats followed. The rest stayed on the porch, crying and mewling at us.

“Oh. My. God,” Helen said. She opened her umbrella and shielded me while I took photographs of the porch and the crowded windows. We walked around the house, a few cats hop-trotting along, flicking their paws at the rain.

I waded through the cat sea again to knock on the back door. Since it had no curtains, I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered into the kitchen. The floor was solid with cats—they crawled on the counter, in the sink, on top of the stove. What struck me the most were the signs of normal life: a bowl of apples, funny magnets on the fridge, a nice espresso maker.

A gray tiger kitten succeeded in hooking itself to my jean-clad right thigh. While I tried to peel it off, another cat climbed up my back. I plucked the tiger kitten off me by the scruff of the neck and dropped it into the pillow of cat bodies below. The cat on my back had almost reached my shoulder. I dropped my umbrella and plunged back into the downpour. “Get it off me!” I shouted to Helen. She grabbed the cat, but it clung to my coat. I heard fabric rip.

Once she flung it to the ground, it turned and sprang on her, while