Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof by Blaize Clement

business. I was a pet sitter, not a surgeon or social worker. That being the case, I needed to keep my mind on my own life and not indulge in the ego trip of taking on other people’s problems.
    I told myself that Jeffrey had excellent surgeons and caring parents. I told myself that Laura was an intelligent woman with a family she could call for any support she needed. I told myself that no matter how much I sympathized, I actually couldn’t make any difference in what either of them was going through.
    With that determined, I got up and padded naked to the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Carrying the tea to my closet-office, I flipped on the CD player to let Patsy Cline’s no-nonsense, no-equivocation, no-shit voice break the silence. That’s what I needed, less of my own morbid thoughts and more of Patsy Cline’s soul. While I whipped through the clerical parts of my business, Ella sat on my desk and tapped her tail in sympathy for Patsy Cline falling to pieces at the sight of an old lover.
    After we were done with record-keeping and grooving on the heartbreak of love, I hauled out the vacuum cleaner and sucked up all the dust in my apartment. I scrubbed my bathroom shiny too, until I was high on Clorox fumes. All the time I did it, I heard my grandmother’s voice saying, “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” which annoyed the heck out of me because it reminded me that I’ve become as much a cleanliness freak as she was. I swear, all those bromides that mothers and grandmothers repeat must change a person’s DNA.
    Nevertheless, I felt in control of my little corner of the world when I’d got my environment clean and neat. I almost swaggered when I put away the vacuum. Then I ambled to the closet-office and pulled on a satin thong. I put on a bra too, because I would see Pete later and I didn’t want to give him shortness of breath.
    I still had some time before I had to leave for my afternoon rounds, so I took Ella out to Michael’s deck for a spirited session of chase-the-peacock-feather. Watching a moving peacock feather arouses a cat’s innate hunting instincts, so I buy peacock feathers by the dozen. Both of us were a little winded when I got my grooming kit and put Ella on the plank table. Being a Persian mix, she has medium-long coarse hair with an undercoat that can knot up, so she needs to be groomed every day.
    As soon as I put her on the table and got out my brush, a squirrel with an exquisitely buoyant tail scampered to the foot of the old oak at the edge of the deck. He picked up an acorn in his paws, turned a backward somersault and came up still holding the acorn. While Ella and I stared at him in round-eyed admiration, he scampered up the tree trunk and disappeared in the branches.
    I said, “My gosh, squirrels must be the clowns of the animal kingdom.”
    Ella said, “ Thrrripp !” She didn’t exactly shrug, but she sounded as if she thought it was time to talk about her and not about a squirrel.
    Like all cats, Ella likes her throat brushed more than anything in the world, so I started there. Careful not to tilt my slicker brush and bite her skin, I ran it down her throat while Ella stretched her neck and closed her eyes, swooning at the pleasure of it. It took just a few seconds more to move down her chest and under her arms, back to her throat for a couple of soothing strokes, and to the outside of her front legs. Then a quick pass over the top of her head and neck, a cat’s second most favorite grooming spot, a few strokes down both her sides while I ran a protective finger down her spine, and then her bloomers.
    For a second, my mind drifted to Jeffrey, but I jerked it away as if it were a dog on a leash going somewhere dangerous and forbidden. Like his parents, I had to believe Jeffrey would come through the surgery with no problems. I had to believe the surgery would completely end his seizures. The alternatives were too terrible to even contemplate.
    I finished grooming Ella with a