Authors: Rebecca M. Hale
How to Wash a Cat (2 page)
“Clever,” I said, tapping furiously.
Rupert flashed me an impish grin and slowly began to back away. I reached out to grab him, but caught only air as he spun around and raced down the stairs that led to the first floor. That pudgy, white fur ball could be amazingly fast when motivated. The chase was on.
Rupert’s long, feathery tail popped up, bouncing like a pogo stick as he hopped down the steps. He rounded the corner at the bottom of the stairs, spinning out as his claws scrambled on the slick wood floor. I dashed down after him, and, seconds later, stood in the middle of the open room that spanned the commercial, street level of the building. Pivoting slowly, I scanned my dusty surroundings for a hint to his hiding spot.
I was standing in the middle of my Uncle Oscar’s antiques shop, the Green Vase. At least, I still thought of it as Uncle Oscar’s. I had recently inherited his antiques business along with the three-story building it occupied.
Rupert’s fuzzy, white reflection in the storefront glass revealed his location, hunched behind the edge of the adjacent counter that housed my uncle’s antique cash register. I didn’t want him to know that he had been discovered, so I continued the pretext of looking under cracked display cases and behind dusty bookshelves, gradually making my way over to the front door. I saw him tense up as I drew nearer.
Easing forward, I inched towards the counter and stepped surreptitiously into position. Rupert held his breath, trying to hold every hair perfectly still.
A small bird landed on the pavement outside. Overwhelmed by his feline instincts, Rupert couldn’t help but glance out the window at it. Seizing the opportunity, I swooped around the counter and caught him by the long hairs on the back of his neck. Rupert made a peeved, squelching sound as my fingers locked around his wide midsection, and I hoisted him up.
“Let’s get this over with,” I said, lugging my captive back upstairs.
Isabella had watched the chase scene from a perch on the top of a bookcase in the showroom. She trailed a safe distance behind as I trudged up the stairs with my despondent cargo.
Rupert’s furry face looked up at me woefully.
“It’s not that bad,” I said soothingly. He shot me a livid look that conveyed his obvious disagreement.
Back in the kitchen, I scrambled to turn on the water and adjust the temperature without losing my grip on the increasingly agitated Rupert. When I finally managed to lower him into the sink, he splayed his back legs out, catching the rim. After a flurry of skin-gouging scratches, I succeeded in positioning him in front of the running faucet. Vengeful, vicious mutterings emitted from the basin as I dunked him under the stream of running water and began to lather him up.
To wash a large, uncooperative cat is to take on a seemingly impossible and sure to be thankless task. I was just about to start the rinse cycle when his slippery, struggling body broke free. With lightening speed, his soapy, white blur jumped out of the sink, streaked across the kitchen, and sprinted up the stairs. I heard him scamper through the litter box and dart into my bedroom, a shower of damp litter spraying out behind him.
Cursing under my breath, I grabbed a large beach towel and raced after him.
Chapter 1
THE QUIRKY LITTLE flat above my Uncle Oscar’s antiques shop had been subjected to over twenty years of his erratic remodeling efforts. The result was a series of irregularly shaped, mismatched rooms spliced together into a gerrymandered floor plan. To pass from the living room to the bedrooms above was like navigating a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.
The kitchen featured faded wallpaper that clung limply to its drywall with the improvised help of unconventional construction materials such as paperclips, staples, and sticky tape. It was also home to a temperamental dishwasher that was prone to sporadic, mid-cycle eruptions. A stray piece of food hidden on the backside of a plate or wedged between the tines of a fork could cause offense. The first sobbing bubbles of self-pity would quickly escalate into a heaving regurgitation of the machine’s entire liquid contents, sending several frothy gallons spewing down its front and out onto the mosaic of chipped and uneven floor tiles below.
But already, the Green Vase felt more like home than any place I’d ever lived. Uncle Oscar’s familiar spirit lingered around every cobbled-together corner. His haunting presence was warm and welcoming from the moment I carried my first box of belongings across the threshold downstairs.
At the time, all I knew was that I had traded in the quiet, predictable solitude of my previous life for an uncertain future in a vaguely defined self-employment. Fate had kicked open a door and punted me through. Dusting myself off on the other side, I had no inkling of the inscrutable eyes that were following my every move.
MY OLD APARTMENT had been a short drive away from Oscar’s antiques store. Stacked like a pancake into an art deco building on a busy street up in the center of San Francisco, my living quarters were economical, if not luxurious. After a week spent hunched over my desk, silently crunching numbers, I would load the cats into my trusty Corolla and escape down the hill for one of Oscar’s decadent, high calorie feasts.
Uncle Oscar loved to cook for us, and we loved his cooking. His specialty was fried chicken, a dish rarely prepared in this health-conscious city. You could always tell when Oscar was working in his kitchen; succulent smells wafted out the living room window and percolated down to the street below. My mouth would start watering as soon as I pulled up to the curb outside.
I can still remember our last visit. I let myself in through the store entrance on the ground level with my spare key and released the cats from their carriers. Rupert and Isabella bounded up the stairs to the kitchen, knowing they would find tasty appetizers waiting in their dinner bowls.
I brought up the rear, winding my way through the labyrinth of Oscar’s store. It occupied a long, cavernous room that took up the entire first floor. Or at least it would have felt cavernous if it hadn’t been so completely jammed with Oscar’s collections.
The floor, where visible, was made up of dark, hardwood planks that made pleasant creaking sounds as I walked across them. Dusty molding trimmed the edges of the walls and gathered cobwebs on the ceiling.
I stumbled through the room, late afternoon sunlight flickering on the many gold-infused objects that cluttered the store. A stale, musty smell hung in the air, mixing with the fried chicken fragrances coming from the kitchen above.
When I finally reached the stairs at the back of the room, they were partially blocked by a massive wooden crate propped up against the stairwell. Each time I visited, it seemed more and more shipping containers were stacked inside the store.
My sweater snagged on the rough exterior of the crate as I squeezed through the narrow opening between it and the wall. By the time I untangled myself and ascended the rest of the way to the kitchen, both cats were smacking up chunks of sautéed chicken liver from saucers underneath the table. Rupert gave me a reproachful look for my tardiness.
“You’ve spoiled them,” I complained, giving my uncle a hug. “They refuse to eat regular cat food now.”
He was a scruffy old guy. He had thick, bushy, gray eyebrows with several wild, straw-like quills poking out of them at odd angles. A couple of days’ stubble studded his rounded cheeks and scratched against me as I wrapped my arms around his short round shoulders. His navy blue collared shirt was spotted with ingredients from tonight’s menu.
“They told me you were starving them again,” my uncle responded with a wink towards Rupert, who was squirming at our feet anticipating the next course.
Uncle Oscar’s antiques store was called the Green Vase, although a passerby could be forgiven for failing to see the faded gold lettering on the front door announcing this information. The windows were dingy and cracked in places, and everything inside was coated with a thick layer of congealed dust. Items were randomly grouped together in piles or stuffed into deteriorating cardboard boxes, sometimes with no clear rationale for their association.
Oscar had a ‘true believer’ theory about antiquing. Worthy shoppers, he felt, should appreciate the challenge of digging through his haystack piles in the hopes of finding a single, precious needle of antiquity. If they were not up for this task, he would grumpily direct them to one of the many well-lit, neatly arranged stores down the street.
“Amateurs,” he would harrumph with derision at the end of this oft-repeated rant. To my untrained eye, the Green Vase showroom looked a lot more like a flea market than an antiques store, but I kept this opinion to myself.
The Green Vase sat in a quiet corner of downtown San Francisco, just to the north of the financial district, in a neighborhood called Jackson Square. Tucked behind the city’s signature Transamerica Pyramid Building, this area was mostly forgotten by both local San Franciscans and the city’s crowds of tennis shoe tourists. Only a few pedestrians and the occasional delivery truck shadowed its sidewalks. A sophisticated hush blanketed the (mostly) high-end antiques stores that filled the shady, tree-lined streets.
Amid this placid, sanitized atmosphere, it was hard to imagine what the scene had been like during the raucous days of the Gold Rush. But in the warm, comfortable kitchen above the Green Vase, Oscar’s stories brought the colorful characters from that time to life.
According to Oscar, gold was first discovered in the Sierra foothills in the spring of 1848. As more and more nuggets began rolling into San Francisco, rumors of the California El Dorado circled the globe, escalating in scale on each re-telling. Reports of miraculous riches, sparkling in the riverbeds for anyone to scoop up, spurred many to hitch a ride west by any means possible.
Before long, a desperate mass of humanity had inundated San Francisco. This eternally optimistic crowd had convinced themselves that they were but one day away from hitting the mother lode. While they waited for that eventuality, they spent their meager vials of painfully collected gold dust in this ‘anything goes’ corner of the city.
Saloons were crammed into every spare foot of available space—in ramshackle buildings, lean-to shacks, and leaky canvas tents. These establishments offered patrons far more than a good stiff drink. Gambling, prostitution, and tawdry sideshows were the norm. Blatant criminal activity carried on unhindered by any police deterrent. The unwary were quick to lose their shirts, if not their lives.
Nowadays, the historic Jackson Square neighborhood contains some of the only buildings to have survived the infamous 1906 earthquake and the subsequent firestorm that swept through the rest of the city. Three story red brick structures predominate, with many having undergone extensive renovations. Elaborate ornamental trimmings frame the windows, eaves, and gutters of several of the storefronts.
Uncle Oscar couldn’t have cared less about such architectural details. He was far more interested in the people who had calculated, connived, and caroused their way through this corner of the city. He knew everything there was to know about everyone who had come to San Francisco during the Gold Rush.
Oscar had read countless books on the topic, studied every historical map he could find, interviewed local historians, and sifted through the remains of endless estate sales. He was well known at the San Francisco library, where he had combed through their entire historical documents section. His knowledge on the Gold Rush period was encyclopedic.
After dinner, Oscar would dig around downstairs in the store, bring up a recently acquired item, and entertain us with a lively narrative about its past and the people who might have used it.
I am sure that the ghosts of the free-spirited characters from Oscar’s stories still wander other parts of the city, but they have long been expelled from Jackson Square.
A collection of high-end art galleries and antiques stores have moved into this once derelict, now dressed up, neighborhood. Rows of pretentious storefronts line the streets, displaying a range of high-priced settees, credenzas, vases, maps, prints, engravings, pewter pieces, and historic trinkets.
Uncle Oscar had blatantly ignored this trend. Plopped down in the middle of a row of these highbrow stores, the Green Vase could not have been more out of place. The bright and shiny storefronts on either side blushed with embarrassment at its faded awning, cracked glass, and crumbling brick exterior. Oscar had not cared much about appearances, his own or the store’s.
While I found his cavalier spirit endearing, others did not—particularly his new next-door neighbor, Frank Napis. From the moment he moved in, Frank began filing complaints about the Green Vase with the city-appointed board responsible for ensuring the historical preservation of the buildings in the Jackson Square neighborhood.
Oscar’s attorney usually represented him during these board meeting confrontations. He rarely attended.
“I don’t like to give
Frank
the satisfaction,” Oscar would say, spitting out the name as if it tasted bitter and unpleasant.
Frank
the satisfaction,” Oscar would say, spitting out the name as if it tasted bitter and unpleasant.
Even as Oscar finished preparing our dinner that last Saturday night, he was still fuming about the board meeting that had been held earlier that week.
“What a bunch of nonsense,” he said bitterly, aggressively whipping a large, wooden spoon through a bowl of mashed potatoes. Oscar turned his attention to the sizzling sounds of the chicken simmering in his heavy, cast iron skillet. “This time, he’s complaining about my
gutters
.”
gutters
.”
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