What?

"What are you doing?"

He glanced up to where she was sitting on the bed. "I spilled jelly on the floor."

"Wipe it up."

"Oh, I am." He spit on the floor again. "I don't want to leave the floor sticky." He rubbed the spit across the remaining jelly with with a crumpled paper towel.

Lee looked up in surprise at the sound of exasperation in her voice. "I mean, use a sponge, for crissakes, not saliva! God, how guy can you be?"

"What?" He wadded up the paper towel with a flourish. "See?" He patted the floor. "Not sticky."

"You disgust me."

"What?" He was looking at her now.

She wrinkled her nose. "It's unsanitary is what."

"No. This would be unsanitary." He flicked a blob of jelly off the half-eaten piece of toast onto the floor. Catching her eye, he bent down, slurped it off the floor, then sat back. For good measure he swiped the spot with the still-wadded up paper towel. "Oh, I think I got a cat hair." He fished around his lips with his fingers. "Got it!" He looked back at Jen.

"What?"

A middle-aged lady, her hair still black, or was it dye? Middle-aged clothes off the racks at Mervyns that everybody wore, even the young women, the girls in their make-up and curled hair. The same that the middle-aged women wore. Except that lady wore rings with stones the size of chickpeas, and they weren't from Sears.

A middle-aged lady, sitting in front of a screen, watching the documents scroll past, five days a week. Sometimes she developed the film, or sorted the boxes instead. Five days a week for the past seven years, never calling in sick, two weeks of vacation a year. Where did she go?

A middle-aged lady, who chose Nora for her American name, happy in her bubble where the worst thing that happened was heavy traffic for the commute, or a supervisor in a jealous snit. Nothing things. No patrol squads, even though it was a military town. Never bodies on the sidewalk or guns in the hall. Happy. Banal. Safe. But still wearing those rings to work just in case.

Clearly

We were again in a living situation with a busy street and no yard, and that can be hard on a cat, especially one that grew up with outdoor privileges. I discovered, though, that if I left the back window open Izzy could jump onto the trunk of a palm, and scootch down to the carport roof and into the courtyard. A reasonable compromise, but I soon began finding bird corpses in the house. Always fascinated by birds but never developing the skill to catch them, Izzy turned to raiding their nests in the palm: easy pickings. But she eventually drew the attention of the neighborhood tough. She never wanted to be the sole cat in a territory, and never fought with other cats, even if they came into the house. That back window was in G’s daughter’s room, and she once raced into the kitchen calling for help: Izzy had seen that big black cat and raced up the palm and jumped through the window. Except the window was shut. Izzy was two floors up, hanging onto the sill and scrabbling for purchase with her back claws. The black cat was creeping up the palm. I pulled her in while G squirted the tough with a hose.

Checkmate

Fuzzy was the queen, no question. She was built low to the ground, with a barrel chest and well-muscled, bowed legs. A tank in camoflage tiger stripes. She knew how to fight, having kicked the butt of any cat or dog that wandered into the apartment commons. Izzy, a second cat of Oriental slimness and prissy demeanor, only tried to stay out of Fuzzy's way.

Then we got a third cat.

By then Fuzzy was old, and when the kitten made mock battle with her, she turned aside. You've seen in cartoons when a lightbulb goes off over someone's head? Izzy watched the kitten tease Fuzzy. The day the lightbulb went off over Izzy's head was Fuzzy's last day of peace. Oh, she didn't go down without a fight or copious amounts of passive-aggressive urination, but down she went, and a new queen rose victorious. She made sure Fuzz got hers for every slight, snub, and affront in their ten years of unwanted cohabitation.

Izzy got old in turn, and the kitten, Tyson, turned out to be a bruiser like Fuzz. Unlike Fuzz, he was okay with a power-sharing arrangement: Izzy lorded it over everyone inside the house, but he was king of the neighborhood. And he had the scars to prove it, too.