Page 59 of The Treasure House

“Chill, Mom!” Flo was crouched over the open cupboard in the sideboard, Jake peering over her shoulder. “Don’t scare them!”

“You’re the one who screamed! And scare what exactly? Please don’t let it be a nest of mice.”

“It’s kittens!” Flo beamed at me.

“No.” I closed my eyes. Not in my sideboard. Not in my kitchen.

“And a mama cat too! Aw.”

“Ah hell, I thought I’d got her out,” Jake grumbled.

“What? You knew?” I was appalled.

“I knew she was pregnant. I just didn’t think she was back in the house.”

“I’m going to call her Mac,” Flo declared. “And all these little ones are Cheese.”

“You can’t call them Mac and Cheese,” Jake scolded her.

“No, you can’t,” I agreed. “Because we’re not keeping them!”

“And because you can’t give pets silly names,” Jake said firmly. “It’s not respectful. You don’t see people named after food.”

“They’re not pets, Jake,” I protested. “They’re strays.”

“My best friend in Pittsburgh is Candy Swivert,” Flo offered smugly. “She’s named after food. And your dog is Hazel—what about hazelnuts?”

“She’s not called Hazelnut. And she’s not my dog.”

“Well, these are my cats and I’m calling them Mac and Cheese. The fat kitten there can be Mozzarella, that one can be Cheddar, that skinny one String Cheese…”

“They’re not your cats,” I told her firmly, “and you’re not naming them because you’re not keeping them.”

But neither Flo nor Jake was listening to me.

“What if I name her Marly after the woman who lived here?” Flo asked Jake.

“Absolutely not.”

“Mac it is then.” Flo cooed at the kittens. “And this one’s going to be called Velveeta.”

Thirteen

September blew in fresh as new linen. The days were brassy and bright, with golden light and gusty breezes, the leaves turning scarlet and amber in the woods. Whales came to the bay: humpbacks and minkes and, once on a buttery mellow Sunday afternoon, an enormous North Atlantic right whale and her calf. The sight of her cresting the water, her tail arching through the air, was something I didn’t think I’d ever forget. Flo had found an old telescope in our piles of junk and liked to stand at my bedroom windows with it trained on the water for a glimpse of a fin or tail.

Flo had found the transition to sixth grade in her new school harder than either of us would have liked. It gave me flashbacks to my own childhood and rooms full of unfriendly faces.

“They all have friends already,” she complained her first week.

“They can’t add one more?”

She didn’t even deign to respond to that. She just stomped upstairs to her room and her cats. The only thing that pulled her out of her mood that whole weekend was the Sunday lobster bake on the beach. The Oxeye residents were celebrating the end of summer and reclaiming their little beach at the foot of the cliffs from the tourists.

“We do it every year,” Josie confided as Flo and I followed her down the winding path to the sand. “Isn’t it lovely to finally have the beach to ourselves?” Oxeye daisies bobbed in the gusty breezes and the scudding clouds caused the sunlight to fall in dramatic shafts on the restless ocean. Josie was carrying a heavy basket stuffed with corn and potatoes. Flo and I had been assigned the ingredients to make s’mores and Flo was swinging the shopping bag energetically as she scurried down to the beach, where Jake and Tom from the gas station were tending to a smoking pit in the sand. I knew the first thing Flo would do when she got down there was pepper them with questions.

“You could cook a whole horse in there!” she exclaimed as she regarded the hole in the sand. “How big is this lobster we’re baking?” She didn’t wait for me to respond, skipping off ahead to ask Jake, who would definitely have the answer.

I felt weirdly shy as I approached the knot of locals on the sand, even though they’d been in and out of my house regularly since we moved in. Doris and Gary from the general store (and bakery) were setting up camp chairs upwind from the fire. Doris was in a lime green windbreaker, her orange hair a blaze of color as she bustled about. Her short, garrulous husband Gary was wearing a threadbare fisherman’s beanie and a coat that was tight on his barrel-shaped frame.