“You’re going to do a whole lot more?”
“Naw, nearly finished. I think I’ll be done in just about a week. Why?”
I just waved it away. “Never mind.”
The renovations didn’t go on for another week, or two or three, but four. A whole damn month.
I tried to talk to him a couple times, but each time he grew less and less sympathetic. “The noise is driving us crazy,” I would say. “The dust is coming up in puffs through the floorboards. And the mice. The noise isn’t just driving us crazy; it’s driving them crazy, too. They’re all over us.”
“But you can’t blame me if you’ve got mice.”
“I said—”
“I know what you said. You can’t tell me what to do in my apartment. I’m not stopping my renovations just for you.”
I had told myself to keep a cool head, so I bit back what I really wanted to say and stayed polite. “Look, I don’t want to fight. Just tell me, how much longer?”
“For however long it takes,” he said and slammed the door in my face.
I knew he didn’t have a permit for the changes he was making, and I thought about reporting him more than once. The city inspectors would’ve shut him down but quick. If it had been the landlord, I would’ve dropped a dime in a minute. But you don’t do that to another tenant. Not in Harlem. Tenants should always stick together.
So Mama and I swallowed our aggravation over the noise—and the mice. Clearly, Milford’s renovations were driving the mice to literally climb the walls. Their population had doubled. And they were having babies. You could hear them squealing. I went out and bought rat poison, but then Mama said not to use it. The mice would eat it, crawl into some little hole and die. Then their rotting little corpses would stink up the place.
Good grief!
We didn’t even bother with mousetraps. We’d tried them before. Either the mice weren’t interested, or if they were—and this was the worst part—they got caught in them, but didn’t die. You’d walk into the kitchen in the middle of the night and find one of them very much alive and kicking. And that meant you’d have to kill it yourself. Not for Mama, and certainly not for me.
So, I kept pushing the idea of getting a cat, but Mama held out, No, No, NO!
That is, until the day she found mice in her bedroom, playing on her sheets. Suddenly, she didn’t want just one cat, but two.
The next day, I got them, rescues from the animal shelter. Dizzy and Gillespie. They were the cutest little things. Fast, too. And hungry. Those mice were gone within days. Fine with me.
Fine with Mama.
But not fine with Milford.
Soon, we heard a knocking on our door. Milford looked exhausted.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He had mice, he said. Not just a few, but hordes of them.
“They got into my bedroom closet, my kitchen cabinets. I found a dead one in my bathtub the other day. And yesterday, I was trying to do a photo shoot, you know, in the living room, and a mouse ran right across the client’s feet. She walked out, and now she won’t pay me.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but—”
“So, I’m wondering if you guys were doing something—”
His gaze dropped and his eyes widened. I glanced down and saw Dizzy and Gillespie, standing guard at my ankles, staring up at him.
“Cats!” Milford said.
“Obviously.”
“You’ve got to get rid of them.”
“S’cuse me?”
“I said, you have got to get of those … things.”
I couldn’t believe his nerve. “Ain’t happening. They’re my mother’s cats, and they are here to stay.”
And they really had become her cats. I had been the one to push for them, but she was the one they took to. And she took to them. It was Mama who came up with the idea of naming them Dizzy and Gillespie, after the great jazz musician of the 1940s. It was Mama those two cats cuddled up to at night. It was her they loved, and it was clear that she loved them. She had found renewed strength to go down the hallway to the kitchen. She couldn’t stand long enough to cook, but she could feed her cats, all the time fussing about “how you’ve got to feed them just right.” Then she would come sit in the living room with me and watch them play and get into mischief. She would laugh and clap her hands! She said she used to be afraid of cats, but she wasn’t afraid no more.
“They something else,” she said. “So pretty, and so sharp! Why, they understand everything I say!”
We’d tried every medicine under the sun to bring down Mama’s blood pressure; they’d all failed or caused bad side effects. Dizzy and Gillespie got it down to normal in a week. Between the mischief that made her laugh, the purring that soothed her nerves, and the security of knowing she could sleep in a mouse-free bed, those cats had brought Mama more joy and better health than I could’ve imagined.
So, no. We were not going to get rid of them.
“Why don’t you get cats of your own?”
“Hell, no!”