Read Online Fall from Grace by L. R. Wright - Free Book Online Page B

something for you.”
    â€œLike hell you have.”
    â€œYeah, I have, really.”
    â€œYou got nothin’ I want, Grayson.”
    â€œNo, but listen—”
    â€œLay off. Stay away from me. Or I’ll have your ass.”

Chapter 8
    H ETTY WILLIS WOKE at six o’clock the next morning, as usual, when her clock radio came on. She lay in bed for fifteen minutes, getting caught up on the news. There was certainly a great deal of friction in the world. Things could—and did—so quickly, so easily, get out of hand.
    She got up, and did some slow, cautious stretching exercises before getting dressed and opening the curtains and making her bed.
    It was almost seven when Hetty went out into the hall, where several cats awaited her; her bedroom was one of the few rooms in the house in which cats were not allowed. They roamed freely through most of the house, and in and out of it freely, too, through the pet door in the kitchen.
    Hetty made her way downstairs and into the cats’ room. Here she refilled the fifteen food and water dishes, which in another life had served as containers for yogurt, cottage cheese, or margarine. Then she went into the kitchen and had breakfast, watched by several cats arranged on the tops of cupboards, on the seats of chairs, on windowsills. After she had washed the dishes, she set about doing the cat chores.
    She took a plastic bag into the cats’ room and scooped into it the droppings from all fifteen litter boxes. Then she selected three of them for a thorough cleaning, dumping the litter into a plastic garbage bag, scouring the boxes, sprinkling them with baking soda, and adding clean litter. Each day she did three boxes in this way.
    She took a wicker basket from the cat cupboard and checked its contents: brush, flea comb, a dozen new white flea collars, felt pen, ointment. Then she climbed the stairs and proceeded to search the house, room by room. Each cat she came across along the way got checked for fleas, and for scratches or other minor injuries. When she found a cat whose flea collar was dated more than three months earlier, she replaced it. Every day she flea-combed all the cats of the same or similar coloring; today it was the black ones. She didn’t bother to try to keep track of the cats as she inspected the house, looking for them; she had decided long ago that the odds were she’d encounter all of them frequently enough to keep everything under control—health, cleanliness, fleas. But she had to look for them diligently—under furniture, on top of bookcases, behind curtains—because cats liked to hide, and they especially liked to hide if they weren’t feeling well. Today Hetty found nobody injured, nobody sick, and the flea situation wasn’t bad, either: it must be the heat, she thought.
    She made preparations for lunch, and then sat down on the couch in the cats’ room with a cat on her lap—a Siamese—and four more arranged around her. She stroked the Siamese and did a bit of planning for the end of her life, which she judged to be about eighteen months in the future. In twelve months she would be seventy-five and it was at seventy-five that each of her parents had died; and her sister, Lucy, too, in Barbados just last year. Hetty spent a small portion of each day considering this matter. Careful planning was essential to the success of any endeavor, including death.
    These preparations had become more urgent, lately, with her nephew’s reappearance in her life. It’s an ill wind, she thought… It was his stepfather’s recent heart attack that had brought Bobby out of exile and although God knew she meant the man no harm, she was happy that Bobby had come home.
    Oh what a bad time he’d had, she thought. He deserved to have some happiness come dancing into his life.
    Hetty took the cat’s face in her hands and looked into his eyes. She often did this; searching for cat-souls, she