Feature: Like Cats

By Christopher Stokum

He was soaking in a blue inflatable kiddie pool in the back yard when Susan came to get her things. He heard her car in the drive, and getting out and drying off seemed the proper thing to do. Plus, he’d run out of cigarettes, and there was another pack in the house somewhere, so getting out was bound to happen soon.
“How long have you been out here?” She had come around the side of the house before he could move.
“Hour or two, maybe,” he said.
“I’ve got some things inside I thought I’d pick up,” she said. “I was around, so I thought I’d stop by and do that.”
He considered offering to help but couldn’t reconcile helping her move out with his wanting her to move back in. He stood up and picked up his towel. It’s still the proper thing to do, he thought, regardless of what either of us want here.
“Is Paulie home?” she asked. They walked in through the back door. He wondered if he should’ve gone in first, since it was all his house now, but then she might’ve gotten the idea that he saw the house as being unquestionably his, that there was no possibility that it could be even partly hers again. Which may not have bothered her or changed anything, sure, but it may have.
“I don’t know,” he said. He sat at the table and listened to her move around the house. It had thin walls, the house, so he didn’t have to talk too loudly for her to hear him, for which he was thankful. “I don’t know if Paulie’s home. I haven’t seen him outside today, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
“I might stop over there before I go back home.” He rubbed his thumb over the patch under his chin where his beard had never fully grown in. She paused in the kitchen doorway with two cardboard boxes that he didn’t know he’d had. “I want to make sure everything is square between the two of us. And the two of you.”
“Between all of us,” he said.
“Right, between all of us.”
+++
She really did have a lot of things at his place. There was some kind of order that she collected the things she had at his place in: expensive or sentimental or otherwise valuable things first, then mass-produced but nonetheless cherished things – e.g. the Fiestaware from her grandmother, the inflatable bed that she’d slept on when they’d stopped sleeping together, which he supposed held some kind of odd nostalgic value for her – then general things that there wasn’t much of a reason not to take, cooking pans and utensils and the combination VHS/DVD player that he hadn’t realized was hers. He couldn’t decide whether the order was conscious, but he guessed that it probably wasn’t.
He went upstairs and changed out of his trunks and put on some cologne in the bathroom. When he got back to the kitchen she’d carried everything to her car except for a few things that wouldn’t fit in the boxes that he figured she could get without his help, just a stack of books and the big broken clock that had been in the closet that she had absolutely fucking refused to put in the trash.
“Hungry at all?” he asked when she came back from her car. “I could make some sandwiches.”
“Coffee will be fine,” she said, “if you have it.”
He tried to remember how strong she liked her coffee and if she took cream and was surprised to find that he didn’t know. He was sure he had known at some point. She didn’t take sugar, at least; he was sure of it. She couldn’t taste it well. It was something to do with her taste buds that was the cause of it, maybe, or a problem with her neuro-connections. He’d been smoking a lot when they went to the doctor to have it looked into. The whole memory was hazy. Still, he was sure she couldn’t taste sugar well, like cats, so it wouldn’t make much sense for her to want it in her coffee. She sat down at the table.
“Where’s this apartment again?” he asked.
“Ulster Ave.,” she said. “Off of Lincoln, by the magistrate’s office there.”
“Nice place?”
“Nice place.”
“I’m happy for you,” he said. He wished that the conversation seemed stilted, but it wasn’t much different than the ones they’d had before she had moved out.
“Are you?”
“Of course. I’m glad you have a nice place. Setting makes all the difference.”
“It’ll be nice to get something on the walls,” she said. “I took some pictures down. I took the one from above the fireplace. I don’t know if you remembered that it was covering that hole because I didn’t.”
“Neither did I,” he said. “It should be easy enough to find something that will take its place. It’s a small enough hole.”
He found her a clean mug and filled it and left the coffee black, which she didn’t seem to mind. They sat sipping the coffee and looking at the things on the table. He wanted to reminisce since she was there. Not with her, out loud, just to himself or maybe for himself. He’d thought that seeing her would help bring it back, but it was the same as before. He could recall the facts just fine, but they didn’t carry any weight. No more weight than anything else he could remember did. Being introduced to her at the botanical garden was about on par with taking a bus the day before, making the coffee. It hadn’t been at the time, of course. Looking back, though, he couldn’t tell what had made meeting her any bigger than anything else. He didn’t know if there was a word for temporal parallax, but he felt that there should be.
“I still don’t know what you bought this clock for,” he said. “It was practically broken when you got it.”
She fingered the clock’s hands gently. He rubbed the patch under his chin. “It used to be really grand,” she said. “I knew that when I saw it. Its grandeur has just sunken down a bit. Or maybe the sediment’s just gotten stirred up and made it hard to see. It still is grand, kind of. It’s funny what time will do to things, even clocks.”
“What’d you want to see Paulie for?”
“I thought he should know why I moved out of here,” she said. She watched his eyes, like she always did. People don’t do that much anymore, he thought. It makes it disconcerting as hell when she does it.
“I told him,” he said. “You remember.”
“I remember that you told him to stay away from me. I remember you told him that moving away from here would be the smartest thing he could do.”
“Safest thing, I said.”
“Well, I wanted to explain what you were trying to say.”
“You love him?” he asked.
“Since the fourth grade, alright?” she said levelly. That was absolutely not a question, he thought. “I’ve loved him since I met him.”
“Don’t get snarky, Suze.”
She shrugged and set down her coffee. “I’m going over now to see if he’s there. Please take care of yourself.”
“You know I will.”
“I know.”
+++
He followed her to the door and watched her pack the last few things into her car. The sky was dotted with clouds, and he hated it because it wasn’t clean, because it was fragmented by the tufts of moisture, because it wasn’t together in the way that he felt it should be.
“Do you love him for his scars?” he asked. He appeared calm. Susan had told him once that a dog bit Paulie on the face when Paulie was a kid – eleven or twelve years old, probably, because it was after Susan knew him. She’d visited him at the hospital and Paulie’s brothers had laughed and said Paulie had a girlfriend, which Susan had apparently been alright with.
“Drop it,” she said and turned to face him.
“Or do you love him for his meth? Because he can’t remember your name most times you see him?” He wondered if he was being cruel. He didn’t want to sound cruel, just frank, but sometimes the two are hard to distinguish.
“I love him because he’s not what he’s got,” she said. “And because nobody understands that, I have to love him.”
He nodded and watched the kids down the street play catch. The fat one never caught the ball, never, but the other kids liked him anyhow. Behind the kids, the sun was setting, and her rays exploded into the sky with compassion, and he wished that he had worn sunglasses, and his eyes ached and he closed them.