There Was an Old Woman

Chapter Nineteen


The sound track of Mina’s dreams that night was the roar of heavy equipment. She saw herself standing helplessly across the street as a wrecking ball slammed, over and over, into the front of her house. She could hear poor Ivory meowing and see a skeletal Angela Quintanilla rapping at the front window, both of them trapped inside.

She woke up, drenched in sweat, to find that Ivory really was mewing and rattling the closed bedroom door. This was Ivory’s morning routine, sticking her paw under the door and trying to pull it open. Mina had done everything she could think of to discourage her. Quiet would reign again only after the cat had been fed.

Mina tried to sit up, but she felt like a cement block was resting on her chest. Her heart pounded, and the acrid smell of diesel filled her head. What finally got her up was the cat. Not mews but silence. Like a quiet toddler, that was never a good sign.

Sure enough, when she got out to the kitchen, Ivory was perched on the counter, licking a puddle of liquid that had dripped off the package of chicken parts that Mina had left to thaw on the shelf and forgotten all about. Before Mina could stop her, Ivory sat back on her haunches, tail twitching, and leaped for the shelf, catching the edge of the plate, which came down with a crash.

“Bad cat!” Mina scooped Ivory off the counter and dropped her with a thud on the floor. Ivory gave her a sour look and a reproachful meow.

Mina had put the chicken into the refrigerator and was sweeping up the broken plate when she noticed it was nearly eight o’clock. She hadn’t slept that late in years. No wonder the cat had been frantic with hunger. As if sensing her advantage, Ivory started to complain again.

“All right, all right already,” Mina said. She opened a can of Fancy Feast tuna and mackerel, even though she hated the smell. That was Ivory’s favorite.

Mina’s breakfast would be her usual instant oatmeal with raisins and a splash of maple syrup and skim milk. She turned on the kettle to start the water, still puzzling over what could have happened to those papers she knew she’d hidden under the seat cushion of the couch. Well, they didn’t just sprout legs and walk. That’s what her mother would have said.

That girl, Evie, could have taken them. But why would she? More likely it was Brian, thinking he’d be so very clever. He could easily have tucked those papers under his jacket. Which would mean that he was onto her little charade. Perhaps it was just as well. No would still have been her answer even after slogging through that document and looking up every unfamiliar term.

She opened a kitchen cabinet, reaching for where she always kept the oatmeal. Only it wasn’t there. She stared at the empty spot. She’d made oatmeal yesterday morning, and the box still had four or five packets left in it. Had Brian walked off with that, too?

Mina hauled over her step stool and got up on the second step for a better look. There was Raisin Bran cereal that probably needed to be thrown out. Gingersnaps. Minute Rice. Egg noodles. Crackers dotted with sesame seeds instead of the salt that she’d have much preferred but that the doctor told her to avoid. Though why, at this point in her life, did it really matter what she ate?

She pulled everything down, setting the packages on the counter, until the cabinet was completely empty. No oatmeal.

Sighing, she poured some Raisin Bran into a bowl and opened the refrigerator. There, right next to her half gallon of skim milk and the thawed chicken parts she’d just put away, sat the oatmeal.

That didn’t bother her so much. Many’s the time she’d put ice cream away in the refrigerator, only to find it melted to soup the next morning. What shook her to her core was that, sitting on the refrigerator shelf on the other side of the skim milk, was her pocketbook.

She reached in and touched the hard, cold vinyl, just to convince herself that it was really there. Then she took her purse from the refrigerator and looked around, as if someone might be in the kitchen watching her.

What could she have been thinking? Clearly, she hadn’t been thinking at all. If Brian could have seen her now, he’d have had a field day.

She was about to remove the oatmeal, too, when an infernal screeching sound startled her. Instinctively, her hands flew up to cover her ears.

Of course she knew that sound. Her smoke alarm. She spun around to see plumes of smoke billowing from her teakettle. She grabbed for a dish towel, reached for the kettle, and flung it into the sink. Then she turned on the water, full blast.

She jumped back as steam hissed and spat. The air was thick with scorched-metal smell, and the alarm seemed to blare even louder.

Mina turned the water off, switched on the fan over the stove, opened the kitchen windows, and stood there, holding on to the counter, her heart pounding so hard it threatened to burst from her chest. As she gulped in fresh air, the speckled gray and white of the Formica countertop seemed to swirl before her eyes.

She peered into the sink. The kettle lay there on its side, a black char covering the bottom and running halfway up the sides. A scorched hole was burned into the dishcloth. For some reason, the whistle—that infernal whistle that had been her reason for buying that particular teapot in the first place—had not gone off. Or if it had, she hadn’t heard it, and how could she have missed that?

Or . . . She poked at the kettle, turning it over. The whistle, that little gizmo that reminded her of miniature organ pipes on the end of the spout, was gone. She didn’t even know that it came off, and yet somehow it had.

Finally, the smoke alarm stopped. Mina sat down. An incinerated teakettle she could rationalize. It could happen to anyone, and after all, she’d been distracted. But coming right on top of leaving her handbag . . . in the refrigerator? That went beyond misplacing and uncomfortably a few steps beyond what her doctor referred to, in that patronizing tone that fortysomething doctors used to address their elderly patients, as “benign senescent forgetfulness.” There was nothing benign about senescence.

Mina stood, straightening her bathrobe and tucking her hair behind her ears. She’d be damned if she’d let herself be swallowed up by self-pity. All she had to do was put things back in order. She took a deep breath. And then keep them that way.

She placed a quilted placemat on her kitchen counter and set her purse on it. From now on, she promised herself, that was where she’d leave it. Then she lined up everything she’d taken down from the cabinet, sorting the packages—cereal, cookies, crackers, grains, and beans—and checking the expiration dates before placing them back in the cupboard.

While she was at it, she reorganized her canned goods in the adjacent cabinet, wiping tops that had become dusty and tossing anything past its use-by date. Then she double-checked the shelves in the refrigerator to be sure that everything that was there belonged.

Later, after eating the stale bran cereal, she boiled herself a cup of water in the microwave, dropped in a tea bag, and carried the cup and the morning paper out onto the back porch. There, she settled into the glider and opened to the obituaries, determined to start the day afresh.