Chapter 2

AFTER THE hospital staff decided I was fine, if a bit obnoxious, Tony drove me home. I was pretty rattled from my experience, and was looking forward to some tender loving care from Helen.

“Oh, what a pleasant surprise!” she said as I opened the front door. “It’s so nice that you were able to come home before noon. I’d hate to think of you being all miserable and actually having to put in the full eight hours at your job. Oh, wait, I almost forgot, you didn’t go! But hey, the temp agency just called and said not to come back, so you don’t have to worry about that inconvenience any more!”

“It wasn’t my-”

“But that’s okay. I’m sure the reason you played hooky was to help care for your children. Oh, no, wait, now that I think of it, it was me who got woken up by a call from Kyle’s teacher to pick him up, not you! But hey, I work night shift, I’d gotten in a good twenty minutes of sleep already…why should I complain? It’s all worth it to know that my dear husband had a good time with his friend.”

“I wasn’t with-”

“Oh, by the way, they shut off our water. I know how difficult it is to remember to write checks when they send those funny-looking pieces of paper in the mail, but some people in this country refer to it as paying bills. I suppose that since you rarely bring any money into this household it’s naturally not going to be in your thoughts, but for five minutes a month even you should be able to handle it.”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah, well, sorry helps.” She stormed out of the living room and into the kitchen.

Helen hadn’t been in a sunshiny mood lately. A year and a half ago, I’d gone through a horrible ordeal that eventually involved our children being kidnapped and almost murdered, and me nearly dying from arrow and gunshot wounds. Helen already had a stressful job as a registered nurse, so this didn’t help her ulcer situation. The silver lining to the whole nightmare came when I was offered a substantial amount of money to tell my story, which I then lost when my financial advisor fled the country with all of our money and a pair of lingerie models named Monique and Taffy. The fact that Helen had told me several times not to trust him did not go unobserved.

So I’d figured it was time to become an upstanding, responsible citizen. I’d registered with several temp agencies and gotten a job organizing filing cabinets for a horrible, horrible woman with fangs. I reported to work three unbearable days in a row, but then I decided that somebody who’d rescued his children from a vicious killer and broken up a snuff film production company didn’t need to deal with some ghastly crone whining that McReady came before Madison. So I walked out and went to visit my friend Roger. I probably should have notified the temp agency. Helen was not pleased.

I’ve probably made Helen sound like she walks around in a bathrobe with her hair in curlers and beats the crap out of me with a rolling pin. Physically, she’s not intimidating at all. Actually, she’s a fairly tiny person. Over the past year she’d let her straight brown hair grow well past her shoulders, and before my book money completely vanished she’d traded in her thick glasses for laser eye surgery, yet she somehow retained her owlish appearance, which was kind of weird.

I almost followed her into the kitchen so I could give my side of the story, but I decided to let her simmer down a bit first. Instead I went upstairs into Kyle’s room.

He was sitting on his bed, playing with his Captain Hocker action figures. He looked up at me as I entered. “Mommy’s on the warpath again,” he said.

“Shhhh…I’ve told you not to say that anymore,” I reminded him. “It just makes her madder.”

“Sorry.”

I sat down on the bed next to him. He was small for a seven-year-old, though not quite into runt territory. I’d fought against his current buzz cut and been on the path to victory until he’d managed to get three whole pieces of chewed gum in his hair, so it all had to go.

Considering what he’d been through, the little guy was doing as well as could be expected. Not as well as Theresa, who now seemed mostly unaffected save for occasional nightmares, but not too bad. Upon the recommendation of several doctors, we’d put Kyle in a special school for emotionally disturbed children, but most of the time he seemed perfectly fine.

“So what’d you do?” I asked.

“Nothin’.”

“They just called Mom for no reason?”

Kyle shrugged. In his hands, Captain Hocker saved a planet from the dreaded Gleeker Force of Doom.

“C’mon, buddy, you can tell me.”

“I spit.”

“You spit?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Where?”

“On people.”

“How many people?”

He shrugged again. “A lot.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I dunno.”

“You just decided, hey, I’ve got some extra slobber, might as well share it?”

Another shrug.

I sighed. “Look, buddy, you know that stinky kid in your class that nobody likes?”

“Joey.”

“Yeah, Stinky Joey the Skunk Boy. Well, spitting on other kids is kind of like smelling bad. People don’t like it. And remember how I told you that they don’t let stinky kids become astronauts because it messes with the oxygen system? If you spit, it floats around the space shuttle and gets in the gears and people die. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Kyle nodded.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“So you won’t spit on anyone else?”

“No.”

“You promise?”

“Yeah.”

“Shake on it.”

We shook hands, and then I gave him a hug.

“Andrew, get down here!” Helen called out from downstairs.

“She’s on the warpath again,” Kyle said.

“Don’t say that anymore. I mean it.”

“You said it first.”

“That’s exactly why I don’t want you to say it!” I stood up and hurried out of his room and downstairs.

Helen was seated on the couch, holding an ice pack to her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to yell, but it’s just so frustrating. Where were you today?”

I shrugged. “Nowhere.”

THE NEXT night was Wednesday, which meant Helen’s parents took care of the kids. I tried to convince Helen to take the night off, so we could go out to a romantic dinner, but she was still mad at me for letting her yell at me for so long without explaining that I’d been kidnapped by lunatics.

So I drove over to Roger’s apartment. He greeted me at the door with three scratches that ran from his left eye down to his jaw. The ones on the other side of his face were healing nicely.

“I don’t want that cat anymore,” he told me.

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” I said, stepping inside. Reverse Snowflake lay sleeping peacefully on Roger’s couch, the sides of which the black cat had lovingly shredded. “This precious animal saved my life.”

“So you take it! It scratches me all the time. It sheds all over my furniture. It chews on my ears at night. I found cat hair in a carton of milk that I just opened!”

“Is my Reverse Snowflake a pretty kitty?” I asked, scratching him behind his ears. “Yes he is! Yes he is! Yes he is!”

“I’m serious, Andrew! There’s kitty litter all over my bedroom! You’re the one whose life it saved!”

“Yes, but because he saved my life, I was able to save your life, remember?”

“If that cat had been smart enough to let you die, my life would never have been in danger,” Roger said. “Take it. For the love of God, take it.”

“Helen’s allergic to cats. And they scratch up everything…I mean, look at this place.”

“I’m not kidding around! The cat meows all night and I think it’s trying to impregnate one of my pillows.”

“All right, all right, I’ll see what I can do,” I promised. “My in-laws might take him. But he’s such a sweeeeeeet kitty!”

“You’re a rotten person,” Roger informed me.