Have You Seen Marie? (2 page)

The Reverend Chavana, who lives in the corner house across the street, said he hadn’t seen any new cats around, but he did add as he drove off, “I’ll put it on my request list to God!”

“Have you seen Marie?”

Dave, the cowboy next door, came home for lunch, his truck backfiring like the Fourth of July, same as always. “We can do a river search on horseback,” he said. “But my kid is coming over this weekend. Can you wait till next week?”

“Have you seen Marie?”

My neighbor Carolina came
out to her front gate with her
Yorkie yapping at her feet.

“Oh, my, my, my,” she said.
“My heart would break if
I lost my Coco.”

She knew about heartbreak
all right. Her brother and
mother had both died within a
year and left her all alone.

“Have you seen Marie?”

Across the street under the shade of a giant pecan tree, the widow Helen sat on the sidewalk doing business with weeds.

“I can’t see much of anything till my cataracts are removed,” she said. “Would you like a Big Red soda?”

“Have you seen Marie?”

In the blue house that faces mine, Roger and Bill stopped their garden work long enough to read the flyer and shake their heads. Bill had lost his oldest boy a few Thanksgivings ago, and Roger’s sister was in the hospital again with cancer. “We haven’t seen nothing,” they said, but I knew they had seen a lot.

Down the block where Stieren meets Guenther, a father trimmed a lantana bush, his two girls hanging upside down from the porch rail like possums.

  
“Have you seen Marie?”
  

The bigger girl snatched the flyer from her daddy’s hands before he even had a chance to read it.

“How much is the reward?” she asked upside down. “One hundred dollars,” I said, making up the amount on the spot.

“A hundred dollars!” A boy sailing past in a bicycle tumbled into the lantana, bike and all.

The smaller girl leapt off the porch rail and took the flyer over to her cat.

“Muffin, have you seen this kitty?”

Muffin sniffed the flyer, but did not or would not say.

We walked past the wedding-cake mansions on King William Street and over to the O. Henry footbridge, the iron walkway bouncing and pinging beneath our shoes. Midway we stopped to watch the sky and clouds floating in the water. A jogger mom trotted by pushing a baby in a runner’s buggy.

“Have