2 a.m. at the Cat's Pajamas (2 page)

Clare Kelly never has shark fins when she combs her hair into a ponytail, and her braids always part diplomatically.

Her mother gazes at her daughters from the doorway. “Time to go to school.”

Clare is proud of herself for being the kind of daughter who doesn’t rebel against her parents. Even when they told her she was having a little sister after they’d promised she’d be an only child. She could have answered “garbage” when they pointed to her mother’s swollen belly and asked what she
thought was in there. But did she say garbage, or a stocking of poop or a lizard? No. Clare Kelly said, “My li’l sister,” taking care to furbish “little” with an adorable slur.

Clare helps Elissa into her backpack before donning her own. The Kelly girls file down the carpeted stairs, past the makeshift bar with a sign that reads
Kelly’s Pub
, to where their father waits, cheek thrust out in anticipation of each girl’s kiss. Every day this kiss, then the short city walk to school. Clare, then Elissa plants one on Dad’s smooth cheek and Mom opens the door. Flurries fall in the halo of streetlights. Clare elbows Elissa out of the way. She wants to be first into this snow-wonderful world.

It is her last conscious thought before being struck by a speeding bicyclist.

Clare is hurled against the brightening sky by the force of the handlebars against her thigh. The rider, sliding on his side, meets her falling figure against the base of an electric pole. As if they planned.

Elissa’s screaming hits enviable notes. What range that little girl has!

C
afé Santiago comprises the bottom level of a two-story, aggressively flower-boxed building on Ninth Street. The store fits a table with eight chairs and three display cases selling sweets and prepared foods that vary daily depending on Mrs. Santiago’s moods. Christmas cacti bloom in empty gravy cans on the windowsills. Above the counter hangs a life-sized portrait of Mrs. Santiago’s late husband, Daniel. Mrs. Santiago lives on the second floor with her dog, Pedro, who is currently, on Christmas Eve Eve, missing.

She stands behind the counter feeding sausage mixture into a casing machine, coaxing out smooth links from the other side. The shop smells like fennel, the cold, and coffee.

Sarina Greene, fifth-grade art teacher at Saint Anthony of the Immaculate Heart, peers into a display case, weighing the merits of three different kinds of caramel. She sways to the instrumental jazz playing on the café’s speakers and points to a pile of stately cubes. “Would you say this caramel is sweet or more chalky?”

“Sweet,” says Mrs. Santiago.

“That would be good for Brianna but not for the other Brianna,” Sarina says.

“How many do you need?”

“Only one, I suppose, but it’s a popular name. We call one Brie to keep them straight.”

“How many,” Mrs. Santiago says, “kinds of caramel?”

Sarina grimaces. “My brain’s not working today. I looked for my keys for ten minutes. They were in my hand.”

“Must be love.”

“Ha!” Sarina cries. Mrs. Santiago’s elbow startles a stack of coffee filters. She stoops to collect them. “I don’t know how many kinds I need,” Sarina says. “I have twenty-four students. Leigh is allergic to everything and Duke is diabetic. He’d turn red if he ate a caramel apple. Become unresponsive and die.”

Mrs. Santiago blinks. “We don’t want that.”

“Which caramel would you use?”

“Medium dark.”

“Fine.” Sarina nods. It is her first year back in her hometown since high school, summoned by her mother’s death and the aching blank page that follows divorce. She counteracts the feeling of being a failure by plunging into every task like a happy doe into brush. Today: these caramels. Last night: spelling each of her student’s names in glitter on the brims of twenty-four Santa hats.

“One pound?” Mrs. Santiago says. “A pound and a half?”

Sarina’s phone begins its embarrassing call at the bottom of her purse: “Wonderwall.” She roots through her bag, finds what she thinks is her phone, and shows it to herself—calculator. She paws through tissues, a sewing kit, her wallet, pipe cleaners, a parking voucher from a crochet class she tried, where she made a tote bag, this tote bag, out of old T-shirts—it is kicky but contains too many caverns. The song continues its assault, then—at last—her phone.

Her grade partner is calling, a woman who finds no situation over which she can’t become frantic. Sarina dumps the call into voice mail. The bells of the door clatter. Georgina McGlynn enters from the dark, shaking snowflakes from her coat. Sarina and Georgina, who everyone calls Georgie, went to high school together.

“Picking up a pie for tonight,” Georgie says with an apologetic air. As if she needs a reason to be in this shop at this hour. This cues Mrs. Santiago, who disappears into the back.

“Pie is …” Sarina says.

The women look in different directions. No radio plays. The street hovers between night and dawn. This is the second time they’ve run into each other in the neighborhood, both times marked by stammering and adamant friendliness.

“Key lime,” says Georgie.

“Wonderful.”

“You should come!” Georgie’s volume frightens both of them. “It’s the old gang.”

Sarina has never been part of a gang. “Tonight?” she says, then remembers Georgie has already said tonight. A forgotten flurry announces itself on the top of her head. It burns wet. “I can’t tonight.”

“You must.” Georgie’s tone is panicked. “They would love to see you. Michael, Ben …”

Mrs. Santiago returns with the pie.

“You don’t want this bag of potatoes hanging around,” Sarina says.

The room’s silence doubles down. Sarina has no idea why, in the presence of this ex–punk queen from high school, she
is compelled to insult herself. Bundling the pie, Mrs. Santiago tsks.

“You’re not a bag of potatoes,” Georgie says. “Is that ‘Wonderwall’?”

Sarina searches the bag again. This time it’s Marcos, her ex-husband. “Must be Call Sarina Day,” she jokes, dumping the call into voice mail. Georgie wasn’t present for the other phone call, she realizes. So the joke makes no sense and Sarina now seems like a girl who rejoices upon receiving any communication from the outside world.

“Key lime.” Mrs. Santiago passes it over the counter and Georgie pays. She pulls a card from her wallet and hands it to Sarina.

“Call if you change your mind.” She bells onto the street, pie in hand.

Sarina says, “Two pounds.”

Mrs. Santiago weighs and bags the caramel.

Is it Sarina’s imagination or did Georgie pause for the length of a sock in the jaw before Ben’s name? On the sidewalk outside the shop, a mechanical carousel horse leaps to nowhere. “What’s the deal with that horse?” she says.

Mrs. Santiago looks up from the scale, her face still arranged in an expression of scrutiny. “The deal?”

Sarina’s grade partner is calling again. She answers.

“Clare Kelly … has been attacked by a biker!”

Sarina apologizes to Mrs. Santiago with her eyes, gathers her bags of caramel, and slips outside. Flurries second-guess through the alleys. “Is she dead?”

“She’s at the hospital now, poor lamb. I called Principal
Randles. We need to find a replacement to sing at this morning’s mass. But who? When she sings it’s like God is hugging you.”

Sarina supports her bags on the carousel horse and rolls her eyes. Her opinion on God: You work your side of the street, I’ll work mine. She mentally sorts her students for a singer. The twins, James and Jacob, two variations on the same, dull boy. Brianna, the other Brianna. Maxwell, Devon, Mackenzie. A classroom of girls angling for a future in swimsuit modeling. Maybe don’t name your kid on an empty stomach. Her mind’s eye rests on Madeleine, a hastily combed little girl in the third row. She recalls some teacher’s lounge gossip: Madeleine, assembly, singing.

“What about Madeleine?” she says.

“Good Lord, no,” her grade partner chortles. “She sang last year but it was … unpleasant. I doubt the principal thinks of that day fondly.”

“She was that bad?”

“Did I say she was bad?” the woman says. “Things happened.”

“If we need a singer, she’s all I have,” Sarina says.

“She probably won’t want to sing after what happened.”

“What happened?”

“It was unpleasant. Let’s leave it at that.”

Sarina freshens her tone. “I could ask her.”

“You could.”

“I will.” Sarina hangs up.

Mrs. Santiago has waited for her to end the call. The
window between them, the women wave good-bye. Sarina mouths the words:
Thank you
.

“My pleasure,” Mrs. Santiago says, at full volume.

You can hear through the window, Sarina realizes. Another stunning miscalculation on her part.

I
n Fishtown, beneath a pile of construction flats, Pedro the dog launches out of a nightmare. The bear that chased him becomes an advertisement pasted to the bottom of a box, a tax attorney with reasonable rates.

Pedro is an open-air pooch, not prone to evenings at home. His joints are nimble and his snout superb. He spent the previous night following the scent of a bitch, pink notes and hydrangea and dung. The pursuit led him out of the meat and coffee smells of his neighborhood to the minty trash of Fishtown. Flirting around the periphery of his brain is an idea both completely vivid and at the same time so malleable that it is not only an image but a hope. When he moves from one street to the next he feels he is moving more toward himself. He is lonely and knows he is lonely. He is in love but is not sure with whom.

As the dog awakens, the city awakens. Crust on its windshields and hungry. Snorting plumes of frustration in the harbor. Scratching its traffic on the expressway. Bone cold and grouchy, from the toes of its stadiums to the strands of its El. One by one each Main Line town revs its city-bound trains. Against the light of dawn, their track lamps are as worthless as rich girls.

Good morning
, the city says.
Fuck you
.

The dog does not consider himself lost, though several neighborhoods away, his person’s worry manifests in food
prep. Fat sausage and sweet bread. The flurried sidewalk dampens his paws as he sniffs around a fire hydrant. Her? Her? A street vent. Her? The trunk of a tree that in warmer months brags cherry blossoms. Her? A stretch of fog-colored siding, then a blunt interruption—the cement steps of the Red Lion Diner.

Inside at the counter, Officer Len Thomas finishes his breakfast. This final bite, the corner of toast dipped in the bit of ketchup piled with the last of the eggs, is the culmination of ten minutes of planning. Napkin dispensers on the counter: gorged, gleaming birds. He chews thirty times, gives up after sixteen, dabs his mouth with the napkin, and with a succinct gesture signals for the check.

The waitress, who had to promise him twice that she understood what
dry
meant, watches a television that hangs in the corner. A famous actress is coming to town. The waitress does not see Len’s gesture or hear the whistle he adds when he performs it again. She is officiating the marriage of two bottles of ketchup; overturning one and balancing it on the mouth of the other so it can empty its shit.

The man whistles again. The waitress turns around and in one fluid motion replaces his plate with the check. It strikes Len, still enjoying the slide of egg-bread-ketchup down his throat, that the waitress and the actress have physical traits in common. If the waitress lost twenty pounds and straightened her hair she could be the actress’s fatter, less attractive cousin. Len unfolds his wallet and counts out bills. The waitress doesn’t hide her interest in the badge and picture in his wallet: a Sears shot of Margaret holding their alarmed-looking son.

“Your wife?” she says.

“Ex.” Len flips the wallet shut. “The Cat’s Pajamas is on this block, right?”

“Next block.” This man has rejected her niceties, so the waitress returns to a glare. “Not open this early, though.”

“They’ll open for me.” Len forces a laugh.

“Sor-ree, Mr. President.”

“You look like her.” He counts out a tip. “That actress.”

“Nah,” she says.

“Change?” he reminds her.

She rings him up and deposits the change onto his palm. “Good luck with Lorca.”

“Pardon?”

“Cat’s Pajamas, right?” She turns her attention back to the television.

Outside, Len unrolls a stick of gum from a pack he keeps in his breast pocket. He’s accustomed to people not liking him. The waitress, everyone in the Boston precinct he left behind, and probably whoever this club owner is whose day he’s about to ruin. The morning feels scraped clean. He folds the wrapper into a neat square and tosses it into a nearby trash can. He knows the numbers on his license plate add up to fourteen. He knows the latch on his belt is centered because he has checked, twice. A dog sniffing a newspaper stand notices him. Perfect flakes twitch in his whiskers.

“Hello, pooch,” Len says.

The dog finds nothing it needs in the figure of Len Thomas and goes back to searching.

T
he only sojourn Madeleine is permitted to make alone is the half-block walk to Café Santiago every morning to eat her breakfast. It is one of the many rules that snap frames around her newly motherless life. No alleys. No sleepovers. No going anywhere except Santiago’s after school.

Her apartment complex is shaped like a horseshoe; her father’s apartment is on the fullest swell of the round. In the center stands a halfhearted fountain that has surrendered to time and inattention. Madeleine marches past it, through the arch that leads to the street, past the store of stained-glass lamps (a line of dancers; their jeweled heads bow), through the cobbled alley (screw off, rules), to the blue carousel horse in front of Café Santiago. She rests her mittened hand on the horse’s saddle.

“Hello, horse,” she whispers.

Madeleine can feel its yearning to go up and down, its hooves frozen in midgallop. Slipping a quarter into its rusted change box would elicit nothing but a lost quarter. It’s busted, marooned and affixed to the sidewalk by an indiscreet pole, with no carnival for miles and no equine company. But Madeleine loves the horse, and saying good morning to it is one of her traditions. Skipping it would feel as uncomfortable as an incorrectly buttoned coat.