Barn Cat Read online

  It never occurred to Jill or me that my mother might be hiring a realtor to sell her house. Surely, she would have given the realtor her contact information.

  “Do you have my mother’s phone number or address?” I ask.

  The woman frowns and steps back a pace. The driveway is empty except for her own car. She must be wondering how I got here. Maybe I’m not my mother’s daughter but a scout for a home-invasion team and my accomplices are hiding in one of the bedrooms.

  A couple of plausible lies run through my mind. I accidentally deleted my mother’s number from my cell phone. I wrote down her address but forgot to bring it. But the truth is simpler.

  “My mother didn’t know I was coming because we’ve been out of touch. I need to find her.” The woman doesn’t respond so I ask, “Did you meet my mother when she came to your office with the key?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know I’m her daughter. There aren’t many people around here who look like us.”

  “That’s true,” she says.

  “Please. I’m worried about her.”

  She opens her purse, takes out her wallet, and finds a business card. “This is where she told me to leave her a message.” She hands me the card.

  The card has a tiny picture of an unidentifiable tree. Under the picture, the name of the business, Vander Hei Garden Center, is printed in green, followed by the address and the phone number. I return the card to the realtor.

  “Don’t you need to write down the information?” she asks.

  “I know where the garden center is.” The realtor looks puzzled so I add, “I grew up on that farm down the road. Our family bought fireworks every summer at the gas station next to this garden center.”

  Jill is still in her meeting so I leave a message on her voicemail. Then, I throw on my T-shirt, shorts, and running shoes and jog to the farm. Debbie’s station wagon is still next to the mulberry tree, as is the black kitten. He’s a couple of months old. His brothers and sisters are beginning to act aloof, but this one is still unafraid. My mother believed that only a half-starved, half-feral cat made a good mouser. She yelled, like Debbie did, and turned the garden hose on the kittens that came too close. In time, she could blast the sweetness out of any living thing.

  I pick up the black kitten and put him on my shoulder, where Ozzie used to perch. He presses his head against my neck and clings.

  Debbie is at the kitchen table with the baby on her lap. I can hear the TV from the living room, where her sons must be watching it. I tap on the screen. Debbie puts the baby in the basket on a chair and gets up. She eyes the kitten through the screen and shakes her head.

  “You and Jill,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I can’t believe you guys grew up right here on the farm.”

  I don’t have time to argue. “A realtor came to the house and told me I should contact my mother at the Vander Hei Garden Center. May I borrow your car to drive there?”

  “Can’t Jill come and get you?”

  “She’s in a meeting.”

  “Kumiko’s going to sell the house Don built for her?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Debbie gets the key from the hook by the door and hands it to me through the screen she cracks open. I thank her, walk down the driveway, peel the kitten off my shoulder, and put him on a patch of grass. “Maybe I’ll see you when I get back,” I tell him. He understands about cars in the driveway. Otherwise, he’d have been run over already. His sweet disposition wasn’t the only thing I’d noticed when he turned over on his back. Cars will be his number one danger next spring—if he lasts that long—when he starts roaming the countryside at night.

  As I drive away, I remember the first year I was here, how I cried every time I saw a dead animal on the road or in the barn. My mother must have been desperate to give up her life in Tokyo as a rich man’s mistress and become a farm wife. Whether she did it for herself or for Don scarcely matters. I should have been kinder to her.

  NINE

  My mother’s truck is parked in front of the garden center. I run into the main building and approach the teenage girl at the counter.

  “I’m looking for my mother, Mrs. Larson.”

  “She’s in the greenhouse. You have to go back outside.” The girl points toward the door I came through.

  The greenhouse is on the other side of the parking lot. Inside, the air is soupy, and I feel like I’m choking on the wet petals of the petunias on the mark-down table. The peak planting season is over. All the customers are in the main building buying lawn furniture or barbecue equipment. It doesn’t surprise me, then, that the woman in the green shirt and khakis misting the ferns is my mother. She hears my footsteps and looks up. Because of my chopped-off hair, she doesn’t recognize me right away. When she does, she turns off the hose and lays it carefully at her feet.

  “Lily, what are you doing here?”

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.” My resolve to be kind is waning fast. “I came home to look for you. Jill called the police she was so worried.”

  My mother turns down the corners of her mouth as if to mock our concern. “Don’t be melodramatic. I haven’t been gone a week. I wanted to make sure this was the right move before I told anyone.” She glances down at the hose as if she meant to pick it up again and go on with her work.

  “Can we sit down to talk?” I ask.

  With an exaggerated sigh, she leads me to a work table topped with a rosemary bush she must have been trimming. A thick scent rises, equal parts bitter and sweet, from the leaves and twigs scattered on the table. A folding chair is set up against the table. My mother brings another chair and motions me toward it.

  We sit at right angles to each other, like customers at a crowded café. I have to move the plant to see her face. Her shoulder-length hair has more grey streaks. Otherwise she looks the same.

  “Where are you living?” I ask.

  “In a trailer out back. I can keep an eye on the store at night. The Vander Heis want to start selling fresh flower arrangements this fall. I’ll be in charge of that.”

  “I didn’t know you needed a job.”

  “I don’t. Don was very careful when he retired. I’m not going to be a burden to you.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I like working with plants.”

  “I flew home because I was afraid you’d run away.”

  My mother makes a little snorting noise.

  “Jill thought you might have gone back to Japan. I told her you had no reason to do that. In fact, I told her everything.”

  My mother picks up a rosemary twig.

  “Jill was upset with me for assuming you were a liar. She thinks it’s none of her business or mine, what you did or didn’t tell Don.”

  “She’s right,” my mother says. “It is none of your business.”

  “I kind of thought so, too, after Jill scolded me. But now, I’m not so sure.”

  “What makes today different from yesterday?” she asks, as though I had changed my mind about buying a new set of dishes or reorganizing the kitchen.

  “When I was worried I’d never see you again, I was ready to forgive anything. I even thought I was the one who owed an apology. But you were here, half an hour away. All you do is lie and keep secrets.”

  “What do you want to know?” she asks. “Ask me anything.” Her face is flushed and her eyes have brightened.

  Kumiko means forever beautiful. When my mother was born, every family in Japan wanted a boy. Women her age have sensible names like Keiko (respectful), Junko (obedient), or Shinobu (long-suffering). My mother’s parents must have been unusually proud of her to call her beautiful. So how did she end up alone in Tokyo as a Nigo-san? Maybe she came from a well-to-do family that suffered a tragedy. Her parents might have died suddenly, leaving her to fend for herself. Perhaps she wanted a child because she had no one else. Or she was a scheming woman who was worried about her future and believed having a child would help secure
Ojisan’s favor. Either way, I must have been a disappointment to her. She has never been tender toward me. My mother cannot love me the way other women love their children because her life has been nothing like theirs. She might even have left me in Japan if Don hadn’t believed she was a hardworking single parent like himself. I could learn to forgive her if she told me the truth, but I don’t know how to ask.

  She fixes me with a daring look and declares, “I can’t help if you want to find your father. I have no idea what happened to him after we left.”

  I hardly knew Ojisan even when I lived in the apartment he paid for. “I couldn’t care less about my father,” I tell her. “It’s you I’m worried about. Whatever lies you told Don before you were married surely involved me. You can’t lie about me and say it’s none of my business.”

  My mother rubs the rosemary between her thumb and finger, releasing its scent. Then she drops the tiny crushed ball on the table. “Did you ever wonder why Don and I didn’t have children together?” she asks.

  Confused, I answer, “No.” For a moment I think she’s going to tell me another outrageous lie, like she never slept with Don and their marriage was only for our citizenship papers.

  “When I was pregnant with you,” she says instead, “I promised your father I’d get myself fixed afterward. Having one child with a Nigo-san was one thing. More than that would have been unseemly. I couldn’t hide that from Don forever, not when he wanted to have a child with me. We kept trying, and nothing happened.” My mother pauses. Fixed is what you’d say about an animal. “Why would a widow have an operation like that? Don immediately guessed my story. We could hardly look at each other for months, but we got over it. Don didn’t ask to know the details. He had things he didn’t want to talk about, too, from when his wife left him. We called a truce.”

  “I thought you were running away because you felt guilty about your past after Don died.”

  “I’m not as pure-minded as that,” my mother says curtly. “Maybe you want me to be.”

  “I don’t know what I want you to be.”

  “All I wanted for you was a different life from the one I had in Tokyo,” she says. “You have that.”

  Now I’m the one with a secret. “Actually,” I confess, “Sam and I aren’t living together anymore.”

  “So what? A failed marriage isn’t something to be ashamed of nowadays.” At first, I’m relieved that she doesn’t criticize, but she doesn’t say she’s sorry or she’s worried about me. She doesn’t ask what went wrong or what my future plans are.

  “Maybe I’ll come back here if Sam and I get divorced,” I offer.

  “Not to be near me, I hope,” she shoots back.

  “Of course not,” I say, my voice as stiff as hers.

  My mother explains how she met the Vander Heis when she brought in the wreaths she’d made. Mrs. Vander Hei got interested when my mother mentioned she arranged flowers for weddings.

  “I can’t stay on in Denmark doing nothing,” she concludes.

  That doesn’t excuse how she left without even a note. “You’re not going to hide from Jill and me, are you? I’ll be here for two weeks staying at her house.”

  “I’ll see you if you promise not to treat me like a poor lonely widow who needs company.”

  “I’ve never thought of you as a poor lonely widow,” I protest. “And Jill only means to be helpful.”

  She shrugs.

  Our conversation is over. My mother doesn’t get up when I stand to go. She’s never been comfortable hugging me. So I give her a pathetic little nod and walk out.

  From the parking lot, the greenhouse looks like a glass ark. My mother is sailing into the future with plants instead of animals. In her promised land, there will be nothing but flowers, vines, and little perfumed trees whose leaves fall at her touch.

  TEN

  “My mother wants to be left alone,” I tell Jill as we sit at the picnic table outside her nature center. I picture my mother twisting the fragile blossoms of baby’s breath into a wreath. She always seemed happiest when she could concentrate on something small and precise. “Being alone comes naturally to her.”

  “I don’t doubt that for a second. Even when she was helping me with Josh, Kumiko didn’t drop her reserve.” Jill pauses. “Here’s something I should have confessed to you, Lily. I was glad she acted no different around you. Whatever coolness I felt from her wasn’t because I was a stepdaughter.”

  “No, she froze me out even more. She was nicer to you.”

  Jill reaches across the table and puts her hand over mine.

  “If my mother is happiest alone, shouldn’t we let her be?”

  “No. We should keep trying. We can’t just give up.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not good for her or anyone to be alone all the time. What we want isn’t good for us if we carry it to the extreme.”

  Before I can think of what to say, the glass door of the building flies open and a young woman in a yellow Nature Center T-shirt dashes out.

  “Someone’s on the phone saying a little raccoon fell through a hole in her ceiling and dropped into her living room.”

  Jill stands up. “Get the caller’s address and text it to my phone.” She taps her pant pocket to make sure she has her cell phone. “Why don’t you go back to Denmark so Debbie doesn’t freak out about the car?” she says to me. “I’ll take off the rest of the afternoon and meet you there.” The next moment, she’s running to the parking lot. Everything she needs for an emergency is in her truck.

  ELEVEN

  The black kitten has ventured deeper into the mint patch by the house. He lifts his head at my approach, hops out, and comes running. I open the screen door, place the key on the counter, and let the door bang shut. Debbie and her children must be in another part of the house. The kitten leaps onto my right shoe, sinks his claws in, and chomps down on the shoelace.

  I take a step back, then another. The kitten rides my shoe down the driveway to the mulberry tree. I disentangle him, his claws resisting like Velcro, and sit down on the grass. While he’s attacking the left shoe, I slip off the right, pull out the shoelace, and dangle it in front of him. He pounces. I pull it away. He follows. I can lead him in circles around me. The shoelace is an invisible leash, like gravity. If I were the earth, the black kitten would be Yuri Gagarin orbiting around me.

  Jill answers the phone in her truck, with the raccoon yowling in the pet carrier.

  “Mission accomplished, it sounds like,” I say, and Jill laughs.

  “I was hoping to find the mother raccoon and get her to take back her baby, but she was nowhere to be seen or heard. She and the rest of the litter must have moved on. So I’m dropping him off with a volunteer who’s really good with baby raccoons,” she says. “He’ll grow up with the other orphans and we’ll be able to release them together when the time comes.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It would have been better if the mother had come back.” She sounded wistful.

  “Hey, remember that dollar you lost in the bet?” I ask. “You can take it out of what I’m going to owe you when we stop at a pet store on our way back to your house. You run in for some supplies while I wait with the cat.”

  “The cat from the farm?”

  “Yeah, the sweetie. Can he stay in your spare room with me for the next two weeks?”

  “Of course.” Jill starts planning how we can get the kitten vaccinated by the vet who volunteers at the nature center. I won’t be able to take him home on the plane otherwise, she reminds me. “The park ranger from Ohio called and said the turtle was looking good when he put him on the bike path,” she says before we hang up. “He moseyed away and disappeared into the grass.”

  Holding the shoelace above his head, I watch the kitten jump. Ozzie leapt onto my shoulder and clawed at my hair to demand my attention. He chewed holes through the newspaper, recipe cards, my students’ homework. He got up before dawn to bite my feet through the cover
s. He didn’t leave me alone. He didn’t back off the way I had from my mother’s rebuff. He didn’t flee as I had when Sam’s unhappiness scared me. If I’m going to help Jill draw my mother out, I will have to be as stubborn as Ozzie was.

  Ozzie’s mother dropped headless mice on the barn floor to teach her kittens about food. The morning I took him away, she had brought a maimed mouse, and Ozzie was the one to finish him off. Instead of a short but glorious existence as a hunter and tomcat, Ozzie had to accept a long, civilized life as my companion. To make up for the barn and the countryside he lost in the bargain, I got out of bed at dawn to play with him. It was Ozzie’s job to disturb and annoy me.

  I’m taking the black kitten with me to Boston so I won’t be like my mother in her glass ark with her beautiful, silent flowers. Whether we move on together or apart, Sam and I have to break the false peace we made. The two of us brooded over uncertainties and disappointments. We believed we were respecting each other’s privacy when we were just afraid to talk. I shouldn’t have run away when he said he wanted a child. I should have reminded him why I didn’t and talked to him. The best my mother expects from people—even someone she loved, if she loved Don—may be a truce. But a truce without a fight is a lie.

  Jill spent weeks with the box turtle that would have died without her. Then she packed him as carefully as she would a fragile treasure and handed him over to two women she’d never met. She doesn’t name the animals she rescues because to name them is to claim them. She says the animals are teaching her how to let go. That’s the hard part for her. Holding on comes easy. She hasn’t seen her mother since she was twelve. Still, she writes to her every Christmas with news of herself and Josh. Just to stay in touch, she says, even though her mother, who lives in Chicago with her second husband, has repeatedly declined to see them. Jill will never give up on her mother or on mine. I’m the opposite, an expert at letting go. I needed Ozzie, and now this little black kitten, to teach me to hold on.

  “What should I call you?” I ask the kitten, who is getting tired finally and moving slower. Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, I could name him in honor of his birthplace. But my favorite character is Horatio, the devoted friend, the one who lives to tell the story.