Closing

Greetings from my new home of Stepford, Connecticut, where all of us homemakers are happy as clams as long as we’re oiled regularly and plugged in to charge at night!

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I have several days of sheer drudgery to write about, first.

I was in a bad mood, a week ago Tuesday. Well, not bad. I wasn’t snappy, or crabby, or taking out my frustrations on the nearest available husband who’d come home the day before. I was just drawn thin, and very tired. Ever since the house had sold in April, I’d been on a rampage—packing up crap that needed to be packed, ruthlessly throwing out anything that it even vaguely pained me to think about transporting across the country, donating anything that was reusable to the Salvation Army or some other charitable cause. Any charitable cause that would take the crap. They could’ve been representing the most evangelical Christians or Satan’s Minions or the freakin’ Lollipop Guild for all I cared. So long as they were willing to take a single metal table leg, a bunch of old towels, and a pair of 30-year-old duck boots, I was good to go.

Craig had arrived home from Connecticut, very late Sunday night. He was pretty helpful about pretending to help with my mania, and smiled cheerfully and ambled around while I yelled out things like, The file cabinet has to go to the curb!, or, I can’t tell you what to do! Just pick up stuff! GET IT TO THE CURB!, or, Oh my god, where the effity eff did all those CANDLES come from?! TAKE THEM TO THE CURB! But he was downstairs in the basement when the doorbell rang. I answered it carrying the unlikely combination of a bathmat, a fluorescent light tube, and a tub of Clorox bathroom wipes.

A short, ferret-faced man stood outside. His hands were on his hips, and he stared at me. He didn’t say anything for a moment, and I wasn’t exactly in the mood to come up with a snappy greeting, so I just raised my left eyebrow and waited. I honestly thought he was going to solicit me for spare pop bottles, which is what they did with alarming frequency in my old neighborhood. (Who is drinking that many carbonated beverages?)

But no, instead he huffed out, “I am the agent for the other side, and I demand to know your intentions!”

My eyebrow remained raised for another few moments while I processed that one. At first I thought he was playing secret agents, the way some kids play cops and robbers. But that made no sense. “Excuse me?” I said.

“Are you the owner? Cause look. I needa know what the hell is going on here,” he growled, hands still on his hips. I flipped the lock on the screen door. Because, you know, a flimsy little metal latch and a thin layer of plastic screening is the best protection from crazy people lunging at you. ”What are your intentions?”

Only then did it really occur to me that this guy was the real estate agent for the couple buying our house. Mind you, he hadn’t introduced himself to me by name. He hadn’t given me a business card, which would have been nice. He’d just marched up and told me what he needa know. “Well,” I said, in that tone I fly in directly from the Arctic Circle when I’m affronted. “Tomorrow we are closing. Thursday, the movers come to pack our belongings. Friday, they move us out.”

“Well, how’m I supposeda know that?” he barked. “No one told me.”

“Our agent has known our plans for weeks,” I said. “We made the moving arrangements the week after we got the offer from your clients.”

“Well I didn’t know.”

“Did you call our agent?” I asked, deadly calm.

“No.”

“Perhaps, sir, if you had,” I said, “we could have avoided this unseemly confrontation.” If you ever need to judge my level of upset, just listen to how I’m speaking. If I drop my usual mush-mouth routine and suddenly sound like Mr. Darcy addressing the Bennet sisters as if they were dancing a quadrille on his very last nerve, I’m likely seething.

“My clients wanteda close on the twenty-fifth!” he growled at me. “And they thought you were gonna be out on the first.”

“We never made any plans to close on the twenty-fifth,” I told him. “The purchase agreement has always stated that closing would be on the first, and that we would have three days after to vacate. My agent could have told you that at any point.”

“Well are you planning to pay the per diem?!”

I was pretty sure that the per diem had been written into the agreement, but I wasn’t going to commit to anything on my sketchy memory and then find out the whole thing had been a gotcha! setup. “If that’s what the agreement says.”

“Is that what the agreement says?”

“Forgive me, but you don’t seem to know when closing is, or how long the agreement says we have to vacate, or whether there’s a per diem,” I said. My hackles were thoroughly ruffled, by now. I mean, hadn’t he been the one who’d actually drawn up the agreement on behalf of his clients? “I advise you consult the agreement in order to find out its exact terms.”

“So what are your intentions, then?” he wanted to know.

I thought we’d covered that bit by now. “Please contact my agent if you have further questions.”

“Look, I’m just trying to look out for my clients here.”

“Please contact my agent if you have further questions,” I repeated.

Then I shut the door in his face. And watched as he huffed off to his car to call our agent. Which is what he really should’ve done in the first place.

I’m not really one of those people who thrives on confrontation; it makes my nerves jangle for hours after. Days, even. Heck, it’s been a week and I’m still not shaking it off. Though I was aware I’d stood up for myself pretty well in this case—though I still wasn’t exactly sure for what I was standing up or why I’d had to do it—I still have the automatic instinct that not rolling over and being the politest sweetest most helpful young feller is wrong and ungrateful, and as if I’m letting someone down, somehow.

But I had trash to accumulate, and stuff to wipe with Clorox, so I went about my business and it was only fifteen minutes later, when Craig emerged from the basement after pretending to do something or another, that I thought to get indignant and tell him a story that began, “You will never believe . . . !”

At the closing the next morning the hairs on my neck were still raised enough that I seriously considered demanding that I not be seated in the presence of that man, but he wasn’t even there, to start. Only the couple buying the house were present, and they were both as cute as a couple of extremely cute buttons, so it was difficult to maintain my usual icy hauteur (even though they kind of freaked me out a little by introducing themselves to me with the words, “WE READ YOUR BLOG!” and I was all like, oh crap, which one, the boring one, or the secret documents I prepare for Wikileaks?).

Their agent arrived about a half-hour late, after just about everything was signed, and played Angry Birds at the other end of the table on his phone the entire time. Only once did he speak up, and that was when the buyer was insisting that she’d gotten some kind of mortgage payment insurance that didn’t seem to be reflected in the papers. The mortgage person went through all the documents, looking for anything that might verify her claim, and wasn’t finding anything. The agent spoke up. “She just doesn’t understand what she’s talking about,” he said, in the most condescending tone imaginable, to the mortgage woman. “Don’t worry about it.”

And I was like, dang, if he’d been my agent and spoken about me like that, I’d have fired him on the spot. The mortgage woman, to her credit, got up from the table and made a couple of phone calls, only to come back and announced that the buyer had indeed been correct about having that particular kind of insurance, but it simply wasn’t reflected in the paperwork. The agent didn’t apologize. But secretly, I was all, BOOM! In yo’ FACE, Angry Birds loser!

Because dude. Would it really have killed you to have given me a card when you introduced yourself?

The Goodreads Roundup

I've lately been taking advantage of my local library's ebook loans. I like the convenience of the ebooks, and the freeness of the library. Yet browsing the selection of offerings that Overdrive provides is not the most optimal of processes, to be honest; you'd think that a library would be more on top of providing its patrons ways of investigating what books they have to lend electronically.

Oh, it's simple enough to investigate what they have by flipping through a list of books by topic. Adding a book to your checkout list, however, is a multi-click process that, when you're done, takes you back to the library's main page. So if you were originally ten pages deep in the biography section, well, that's tough luck. You'll have to navigate back to where you left off, if you remember.

The selection at my local library is pretty horrid, too. I'd be in luck if I liked vampire novels (I don't), or very long young adult Harry Potter knockoff series. So usually I have to make do with what I find in the biographies or nonfiction areas, with the occasional novel tossed my way.

My biggest complaint—or perhaps it's the source of a lot of excitement, it's difficult to tell—is the delivery method. I've never once been able to download a book immediately. Even for the most obscure titles I've been placed on a waiting list. I never know exactly when I might be notified that my book's ready for checkout. All I can do is wait, and then one morning I'll fire up my email client and receive a notice to rush! rush! rush! and download my book as quickly as I can before the privilege is taken away from me. I leap into action, and then watch the countdown timer slowly start to tick away on my two weeks to finish the darned thing.

For someone whose library experience has typically been walking in and coming away with an armful of books right there and then (maybe not always my first choice, but definitely there's some immediate gratification involved), it's a disappointment not to know exactly when I'll be getting my choices. Worse was when I got three of them, which I'd requested at various times over the course of maybe four months, all within three days. One of them was an extra-large tome that I didn't even get a portion of the way through before my time ran out. And who knows when I'll get it again?

Anyway, I thought I'd share some of my Goodreads reviews of some of my recent reads, for those of you who aren't on Goodreads.

Water for Elephantw

by Sara Gruen

2 out of 5 stars

Everything I Learned in Water for Elephants: A Book Report by V. Briceland

1. Growing old sucks.

2. Men who are mean to elephants and women, but mostly elephants, deserve their grisly deaths.

3. A pageant of cardboard characters is totally okay as long as someone gets thrown off a moving train every 20-30 pages.

The End.

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

by Mike Brown

4 out of 5 stars

Short and eminently readable, Brown's account of his race to discover the solar system's tenth planet—and the subsequent change of heart that led him to recommend that neither it nor Pluto be considered planets at all—has two distinct plusses. First, he makes a lot of difficult material extremely approachable for non-astronomists. Second, it contains a ripping cast of villains, from evil internet chat room folk to disreputable scientists scheming to steal the work of others . . . and more importantly, Brown faces off against the two great antagonists of all astronomers, the too-slow passage of time and light itself.

If Brown tends to go a little overboard for my tastes in his passages devoted to his daughter, it's still refreshing to see a man of science who's even more passionate about his parenting. Otherwise, the work is an informative, quick, and fun read that's suited for just about anyone who's gazed at the sky and wondered what else could be out there.

Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

by Gabrielle Hamilton

2 out of 5 stars

Toward the end of Hamilton's interminable chef memoir, she admits to having a certain sense of Gallic superiority to the rest of the world. Hoo boy, is that an understatement. While Hamilton's recollections of her unconventional childhood and rise to celebrity as the owner of Prune offer up a credible pastiche of MFA-style literary writing, the author's personality is so off-putting that I found the book nearly unreadable.

When Hamilton is talking about cooking, or about the restaurant industry and its quirks, she's very nearly engaging--that is, if one can overlook her arty tendency to switch between first-person-past and second-person-present-tense narrative on the turn of a very thinly-sliced wafer of pancetta.

Hamilton's narrative style rests on the piling-on of rich layers of detail, however, yet throughout long passages of the book I found myself distrusting the accuracy of those details. I raised an eyebrow, for example, when she described driving down from Ann Arbor, Michigan, across 8 Mile Road into downtown Detroit--a nice shout-out to one of Detroit's more infamous landmarks, but a geographically-dubious route into the city. And it's outright disingenuous of her to spout foodie nonsense about how her childhood once-a-week dessert was a single square of really good imported chocolate or a lightly-sweetened slice of buttered bread, when she's mentioned, only a few pages before, gorging on Tastykakes. If one can't trust the details, what, exactly, can one relate to in a memoir like this?

Certainly not the thorn-skinned author, herself. A similar tone of superiority mars a good deal of the narrative. Hamilton dislikes children and their preference for French fries and macaroni and cheese over that single square of really good chocolate, or any of the more exotic fares she serves in Prune; she's dismissive of their parents and indeed, of anyone who will eat less-than-gourmet fare instead of skipping a meal altogether. She spends a large portion of the book secretly mocking and sniggering at her graduate school comrades only to turn around and justify the behavior by accusing them of condescending to her. And the meandering last third of her book turns on the cold fury she experiences, and the subsequent two-week silent treatment she gives to her (long-suffering) husband when he mentions that he'd like to buy a new iPhone.

There really is some minutiae that probably should be left out of a memoir, apparently.

American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare: The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee

by Karen Abbott

3 out of 5 stars

Gypsy Rose Lee's rise to fame rested upon a strip-tease act in which she removed very little and left her audience hanging. Karen Abbott's biography of the forceful personality manages to do very much the same.

Half straightforward biography and half social history of the rise and fall of the American burlesque theater, Abbott uneasily alternates between a historian's documentary approach to her subjects and third-person present-tense narrations of Lee's thoughts and inner turmoils. She further muddies the waters by jumping backward and forward in time, between Lee's successful career after the events narrated in the musical and movie Gypsy, and the actual events that went into the heavily fictionalized and sanitized account of Lee's upbringing. Toss in the alternate narrative of the Minsky brothers and the burlesque stages of New York City, and it's a confusing, if amiable, mess.

What's disappointing about the book is that it promises to expose many of the scandals involving Lee and her domineering, force-of-nature mother. It does not. It hints heavily at murders, mob involvement, and family betrayal, but never makes good on the promise to explain any of them—not well, at any rate. Like Lee's act itself, Abbott teases at the evidence, then backs away, leaving readers uncertain how much (if anything) they might actually have glimpsed.

American Rose is highly readable, but that seems to be more a function of Gypsy Rose Lee's outsized personality than Abbott's leap-frogging narrative. And that's a shame, because instead of a nation or even a strip-tease artist laid bare, I felt like a spectator in the front row of the Minsky's Republic after one of Lee's specialty numbers—highly entertained, but aware that the artist had done little but rearrange the draperies.

Lips Unsealed: A Memoir

by Belinda Carlisle

3 out of 5 stars

When it comes to celebrity memoirs, I can't think of any I've read that have quite as many eye-popping drug-related revelations as Carlisle's tell-all. In fact, I'm not sure how any of them are going to top Carlisle's confession about taking a large opium ball as a suppository. And I'm not sure I'm really want to find out.

Carlisle's memoir is a fairly absorbing read about her outsider childhood and adolescence and the founding, flare-ups, and eventual reconciliations between the Go-Go's, mostly set against a background of drug and alcohol abuse that continued for the vast majority of Carlisle's career. Her frank confessions of repeatedly lying in public and to the press about having kicked her habit while still hitting the hard stuff, however, leaves the reader unsettled and uncertain about the reliability of this particular narrator. And that's a shame, because like the best of the Go-Go's output, I want this particular song to end with a jangling major chord.

The Murder of King Tut

by James Patterson & Martin Dugard

1 out of 5 stars and I wish it could've been less than that

I have never read any of Mr. Patterson's other books, and therefore can't state with certainty that they're all written as if for developmentally-challenged seventh graders. But this one certainly made me feel as if I were reading while riding on the short bus.

Mr. Patterson's begins his investigation into the death of everyone's favorite ancient boy king with a prologue reminding readers (in all capital letters) that the role of the historian is never to embellish, but only to illuminate fact. He then follows up his decree with dozens of chapters filled with made-up dialogue and awkward, imagined sex scenes.

As for the mystery itself, well, apparently this book need be the only last word on the cause of Tutankhamen's death. His solution must be correct because, as Mr. Patterson reminds us in a late chapter, Time Magazine called him "the man who can't miss!" It's tough to beat so sound and circular a logic.

Neutron Star Fred

My younger cat, Fred, is not so imposing to look at. She’s not one of those cats that can swagger into the room and raise eyebrows with her sheer bulk. Nor is she one of those particularly muscular felines that gives the impression of wearing the tabby equivalent of football shoulder pads. No, she’s really an unassuming cat of ordinary proportions. Quite compact, actually. On the tiny side.

But holy crap. What Fred doesn’t have in volume, she makes up in mass. She’s not fat. She’s dense. Fred is the freakin’ neutron star of cats. A teaspoon of Fred weighs more than all of the solar system’s inner planetary system together.

She’s not a delicate cat, either. She doesn’t pad softly into a room; she chooses a spot from the floor above or below, gives herself a good running start, and then thunders through the house until she skids to stop in front of me, leaving visible smoking skid marks where her paws have been. Nights, she won’t simply hop onto the bed to sleep with me. She’ll wait until the moment I’ve completely gone underneath and am breathing slowly and heavily, and then she’ll pound up the stairs, catapult herself up into a broad arc, then land so heavily on the mattress that she throws me, the sheets, and the pillows high into the air—giving me a minor heart attack in the process.

Fred’s a sweetheart. But Jesus, is she ever heavy.

Lately she’s been extra-snuggly at night, forsaking her usual spot at the foot of the bed for the warmer climes in the curves of my body. True to form, though, she doesn’t inch up and nestle in a spot next to my slumbering chest, or sweetly nestle in the nook created by the back of my legs. No, she announces her intention by standing, shuffling up to my face and staring in it, tickling it with her whiskers until I groggily awake and pet her. And then she’ll stalk over to the place immediately next to my body at which she intends to sleep, pause, and topple over, throwing her entire considerable weight on that one spot.

Seriously, it’s like being in the wrong place when someone tips a cow. I’ve got actual bruises.

It’s still mostly cool enough in Michigan that she seeks me out for warmth during the daytime. It’s comforting to have a cat on my lap while I’m working, and she’s a fairly considerate lapmate who will either slumber quietly or lay still while she watches the squirrels through the back door of the den. After a while, though, the pressure of her body will start to put my arm to sleep. “Fred,” I’ll say. “I kind of need you to move.”

At the sound of her name, she’ll up up at me, squinch her eyes, and chirrup. She still has a little kitten voice, a high-pitched, girlish way of mewing that turn the hardest heart into marshmallow. “Sweetie,” I’ll tell her. “Please move.”

Again, she’ll meow sweetly, and lay her head upon my forearm. “I can’t feel my fingers,” I’ll complain, and she’ll roll onto her back and invite me to blow on her furry tummy. Or, if I attempt to shift her onto the blanket next to me, she’ll let out a series of squeaky protests so pathetic and sad that recordings of them would prompt the ASPCA to write me up on charges of animal cruelty.

She’s not a kitten anymore, though. And I need to feel the nerve endings in my fingertips, thank you.

The Sweet Smell of Addiction

I’d like to talk for a moment about candles. Ordinary, everyday candles. Because right now, I hate ‘em.

Yes, I know the candle has a noble history and that countless generations of honeybees have given up their wax so that civilization may progress to a higher plane. Yes, I’m aware that the exalted candle was burning brightly while Shakespeare quilled his greatest tragedies, and that it was candles that kept hope alive during the darkest nights of the black plague.

Whatever.

Why am I so waxophobic, you wonder? Why am I advocating candlemaker-bashing? Well, it’s because someone in this house—not I—apparently has a bad candle habit, and it’s slipped unnoticed until now.

While our house was up for sale, the one thing I kept hearing from people who had no idea of what to say about about selling a house but wanted to indicate that they were savvy watchers of HGTV was, “Oh, bake some cookies before each showing!” Well, people. I don’t really care what you’ve heard on your curbside appeal shows. When your house is up on the market for almost eight months, there are only so many cookies one can bake. Seriously. I had forty-five showings during the month of March. Do I really need to bake four dozen batches of cookies?

Do I look like a Keebler elf?

“Oh,” they’d say, when I would balk. “You don’t have to bake an entire batch. Just buy some of that pre-cut cookie dough and bake one or two!” No, people. One or two cookies doesn’t even make enough of a smell to cover up the scent of a hamster pellet. You go out and buy some pre-cut cookie dough and put it . . . well, I’m too much of a gentleman to tell you what to do with it.

But you know. I got the general message. Prospective buyers like to walk into a clean-smelling house. I might not want to bake dozens of batches of cookies (and don’t tell me I could merely throw them out. That’s insanity. Do you know how many starving Africans my parents told me there are?), but I don’t want to walk into a house reeking of kitty litter and last night’s stir-fried curry noodles, either.

So I compromised. It occurred to me that over the years, my husband has picked up a scented candle or two. Well. We’re not able to pass a candle store without stopping in, really. Yankee Candle franchises tend to get really excited when they see him approaching. Like a connoisseur, he’ll investigate the new scents and delicately sniff, then consider, and then pronounce his verdict like a wine critic. “Earthy, with a citrus zest.” Or, “The resemblance of this waxen version of candy corn lies mainly in its appearance, yet not in its too-heavy overtones of vanilla without the leavening of dairy.” Something like that. Then, clutching his purchases beneath his arms, we’ll finally be able to exit the joint.

At some point during the eight months, I thought to myself, “Hey, candles are smelly. How about instead of baking, I light a few of those suckers?” We’ve always kept our candles in an inaccessible cupboard behind the baby grand, but I managed to wrench open one of the drawers and pull out a couple—a buttercream-scented pillar for the first floor and a cinnamon-scented jar for the basement, where there’s less air circulation. A couple of hours before each showing, I’d light the candles, let them release their scents, and then right before I left during the showings, I’d cap the candles and disappear, confident in a sweet-smelling house.

Well, it must’ve worked. After months and months, the house finally sold a couple of weeks ago. The buyers intend to close on June 1; we’re supposed to be out of here within a few days after that. My last couple of weeks have been a flurry of meeting with moving companies and trying to clean out the crap that I don’t particularly want to take with us—like old electronics boxes, or books I no longer want, or the odd little drawers of ephemera that I don’t want to be paying a moving company vast amounts of dollars an hour to pack for me.

And then I got to the candle cupboard.

It would seem, to put it mildly, that my husband might have more of a problem than I thought. He’s concealed it well, these many years. The real addicts always do. I’m not even sure he’s aware he has a problem.

Yet, when I opened those two drawers and pulled ajar the doors to the cupboard, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of scented wax tumbled out. It honestly was a bit like a Looney Tunes short in which Elmer Fudd opens Bugs Bunny’s closest and is instantly crushed by its contents. Complete with whistling tweety birds around my cracked cranium.

And oh my god, the smell. Between the vanillas and the cranberries and the fresh pines and the sweet fruits and the almond mocha bean clean linen pineapple cilantro pomegranate mango madness, my nostrils shorted out. Basically it smelled like Lisa Frank had cut a really enormous fart in there.

That wasn’t the full extent of it. There were boxes and boxes of candlesticks. It would seem as if every time we went to a post-Christmas sale or pre-school sale at Eddie Bauer or Ikea or Bed Bath & Beyond, my other half would see candles on sale and think them a good deal. “Oh,” he’d say. “Look at these boxes of twenty-four white candlesticks! Only five dollars! Let’s buy four of them!” Then he’d toss them into the cupboard and not think about them again. Do that several times a year for the thirteen years we’ve been living here, and folks, that’s a hell of a lot of candles.

Obviously, I could throw away the three candles out of that enormous stash that had actually been used. I could probably with a clear conscience get rid of the ones that had yellowed, or had gone lop-sided from melting in the summer heat. But that still left an awful lot of freakin’ candles. Since then I’ve been giving them away to whomever will take them. Hey, friends—thanks for driving me to karaoke! Let me leave you some candles in your back seat as a token of my appreciation! Hey, other friend! Listen, are you interested in taking some of my spare liquor off my hands before my move? I’ll throw in some candles! Listen, neighbors—have you thought about your lighting contingency plans in case of worldwide dystopia?

Once I’m reunited with my husband, however, something has to be done. I’m having a candle intervention. I’m sending him to whatever is the candle addict’s equivalent of the Betty Ford Clinic. Yankee Candle might take a heavy hit in their next quarter’s earnings, but I can live with that.

Game for Cats

On my iPad I downloaded an app called ‘Game for Cats’, a couple of weeks ago on whim. Game for Cats has two separate levels—one free, one costing a buck. The free game simulates a large, fuzzy-edged laser pointer against a dark background. The pointer travels on and off the screen, sometimes pausing and gyrating slightly, as if waiting for the cat to attack. It varies speed, stops completely, and vanishes for unpredictable amounts of time. When the cat reaches out to catch the light, it dissipates with a soft, satisfying ‘bweep.’ And the cat scores a hundred points. That’s it. No boss levels. Just your cat’s dirty paw, your expensive iPad, and a rapid succession of slaps and bweeps.

The level that costs a dollar is vastly superior, my cats tell me (on the ‘select a level’ screen, it’s the only one they’ll go for, these days); it involves an animated mouse with a long, twitchy tale and beady eyes scampering across a cheese-colored screen. Sometimes it’ll peek out from the edges, and then dash to the other side. Once in a while it’ll linger in the screen’s center, doing whatever it is that mice do in their spare time, as if it thinks it’s unobserved.

The cats go freakin’ nuts over the mouse. Sarah, the cat that’s going on twenty-one, will rouse from her hard life of eating and sleeping on the heater vent to slap at the screen over and over, causing the mouse to scamper and squeak every time she scores. She’s the current household high score holder—over 20,000 in a single game—because she’s so determined to slap that little squeaker into submission before exhausting herself into another geriatric catnap.

Fred, on the other hand, is more crafty with the game. She seems to think the iPad is some kind of cage for the mouse; she’ll spend her time trying to reach under the device in order to get at it from the inside. Or she’ll attempt to use her nose and paws to turn the iPad onto its glass front, in order to tip out its contents. She’s also much more creative in her play. When I put the iPad onto the floor in the office while I work, in order to keep her from bugging me, she’ll sit on the desk for a while and watch the mouse from above—and then suddenly she’ll throw all thirteen considerable pounds of herself at the screen in a terrifying death pounce. Lately her favorite strategy has been to use her nose to nudge the pad over to where the office door lies open, and then to line it up so that its lip is perfectly parallel to the door’s edge (it’s eerie, how anal she is about that). Then she’ll tiptoe excitedly around to the other side of the door and bat at the mouse from underneath it.

I feel a little guilty about fobbing off Game for Cats on my pets when I’m too busy (or lazy) to get out their toys and give them some exercise. It feels a little bit like giving my young a couple of jelly doughnuts and a big box of McNuggets and muttering, “Go play with yer video games and get out of my hair, y'damn kids!” Though I can’t understand the hours of amusement they’ve both had with the thing, so far.

The worst side effect, though? They both regard the iPad as theirs. I can’t read in bed at night without Fred interposing herself between my face and the glowing screen to look for mice. When I lent the iPad to one of my friends the other day, Fred jealously hopped onto his shoulder then walked down his chest and attempted to push the iPad out of his hands.

Worse still, Fred seems to think that any flat-screen device is a potential mouse cage. I can’t answer a phone call without her running over to push the phone away from my ear. It was bad enough that she already checked her email and played World of Warcraft without me; now she sits behind my computer screen and hangs her head over the top, cocking her head so she can check for rodents. I have to hide the iPad itself when I’m not using it, because otherwise I’m likely to find it flipped over and nudged beneath a cabinet or a door. I’d even posted a video on Facebook last week of the cats alternating scoring points with the game; the sound of the slapping and squeaking will bring Fred running from the house’s most remote reaches, ears twitching and whiskers a-quiver.

Game for Cats. I’m still trying to figure out whether it’s the smartest dollar I’ve ever spent, or whether the decision means I’ll have to buy the cats an Apple device of their very own.

The True and Fantastic Story of the Amazing Pepe

In the late autumn I was sitting in my den working, on a very cold, crisp afternoon. When I looked up and out of the sliding glass doors at the back of the house, I saw Fred sitting outside.

Now, I panicked immediately, because to the best of my knowledge, my cat Fred was doing what she does almost every day during the nine cold months of Michigan’s weather year—she climbs under the flannel sheets and blankets of my bed at nine in the morning, bakes herself to a toasty finish, and emerges at dinnertime, yawning. I’d gone out earlier in the afternoon, however, so it occurred to me that the little imp could’ve slipped out. Like I said, it was a frigid afternoon, and the thought of Fred out there in the cold, for hours, threw me into a panic.

My heart pounding somewhere in the vicinity of my adam’s apple, I leapt up and opened the door. The cat strolled in quite calmly, tail lifted and flicking the last half-inch, and rubbed against my leg, grateful. Then it walked over to the kitchen and proceeded to start eating the dry food. I cooed and petted its cold fur and told it how sorry I was and how I’d never, ever make the same mistake and let it out by accident ever, ever. . . .

And it was only at that point I realized the cat wasn’t Fred.

Oh, they looked the same. Both are standard-issue tabbies with pretty much the same markings. Both were roughly the same size. Fred’s coloring was a little more brown where this cat’s was gray, however, and the cat making itself home by rolling around on the kitchen carpet and settling down in front of the air duct for a nap didn’t have Fred’s heft, shall we tactfully say. Fred’s a small cat, but she’s surprisingly heavy. Dense, even. She’s like some kind of Time Lord cat, bigger and infinitely heavier on the inside than the out. This cat was a lot lighter. It was obviously fed regularly, though it didn’t seem to be minding the snack it had from my bowls.

Even Sarah couldn’t tell the impostor from the real thing. She took one look at the strange cat, shrugged, and went back to licking herself.

Anyway, I did the only thing that a normal person would do in such a situation. I took a photo of me hugging the strange cat and sent it to the Mont in a text message and told him I was adopting it.

As I expected, he went ballistic. I could practically hear him explode, all the way from Connecticut. WHERE DID YOU GET THAT CAT? YOU CANNOT KEEP THAT CAT!! WE ARE NOT GETTING ANOTHER CAT!!! DID YOU FEED THAT CAT!!!! DON’T FEED THAT CAT!!!!!

I had already long shooed the cat out and told it to return home by the time I sent a text message back. I’ve named him Pepe, I confabulated. You’ll like him when you visit.

When the Mont called (seconds later), I confessed that I was only teasing about adopting Pepe. The fact that I admitted to my prank while giggling wildly, however, only convinced him that I was fibbing about fibbing, and that I really did have a third cat sleeping under the roof with me. It probably didn’t help that I would take photos of Fred doing her usual stuff around the house and message them to him with captions like, Pepe learned where the litter box is pretty quickly, or Look how Pepe likes to drink from the toilet!

I figured that Pepe had to belong to one of the neighbors—he was obviously too well-kept to be a stray. Besides, he visited the house at pretty much the same time in the afternoons. That told me that someone was letting him out on a routine, and that he was simply making the rounds before returning back home for the coldest and darkest hours of the day. Sarah continued to assume that Pepe was Fred; Fred would growl at Pepe through the protection of the glass doors, but if I brought the cat in for a quick cuddle, she’d quickly lose interest and go back to the rough work of snoozing beneath the blankets.

By the time the Mont came home for the holiday, the weather had gotten so cold that I’d not seen Pepe for a couple of weeks. In my way of thinking, that was a good thing. I’m always distressed when I see house cats out in the dead of winter. The scene that followed, though, went a little something like this: The Mont walked into the house and dropped his bags. We embraced. Sarah meowed and demanded to be fed. Fred walked into the room, brushed up against him, and allowed herself to be petted. It was a happy family reunion.

“Where’s Pepe?” the Mont asked, half-joking, half suspicious.

“Honey,” I said, laughing in a way that was meant to imply how silly he was to take seriously any of my pranks.

Then I looked at the back door. A little tabby was peeking in.

It was a gift from God. Who am I to reject such comedy manna? “Well hey, Pepe!” I cooed, walking over to the sliding glass doors and opening them. Once I’d slid back the screen, Pepe trotted in, tail high and whiskers twitching. He rubbed against me, nodded at the other two cats in passing, ignored the Month, and then helped himself to the Friskies.

Well. The scene that followed was pretty much like the first text message exchange. WHERE DID THAT CAT COME FROM? DOES HE LIVE HERE?? HAVE YOU BEEN FEEDING THAT CAT??? DID YOU NOT HEAR ME SAY THAT WE ARE NOT GETTING ANOTHER CAT????

Honestly, there were fewer decibels when Lucy smuggled home a giant cheese in Ricky’s tuba.

Eventually, when I stopped snickering, I picked up Pepe and put him out, assuring The Mont that the cat did not live there, that I hadn’t seen the cat in two weeks, and that it was mere wild coincidence that it should show up thirty seconds after his arrival home and demand to be let in. Honestly. Coincidence. That’s all it was. Jeez, calm down.

Eventually he did. “Come on,” I told him, once his face was no longer the shade of a cherry-flavored Tootsie Pop. “Let’s take your stuff upstairs.”

Once we were upstairs and the bags had been thrown in the spare bedroom, we flopped down on our bed to relax and talk. I asked how his trip had been. He told me about the route he’d taken. We’d barely started talking when we heard a faint thud, followed by a faint meow.

I sat up. “Fred must be trying to attack Pepe through the glass door,” I said. But no, the sound wasn’t quite that. We heard another meow.

Then, like actors in a classic screwball flick, we both turned our heads slowly, simultaneously, to the window behind the bed. There was Pepe, staring at us through the second-story window. Not only staring at us. Pepe was affixed to the screen with all four paws and all his claws, legs sprawled in all four directions, looking all the world like one of those Garfield stuffed animals with suction cups on his feet, affixed to a car window.

Now, I’m not sure how Pepe managed to climb up on the den roof and make his way to that exact window. I’m still uncertain how he even knew we’d be on the other side. What I do know is that the look of utter disbelief on The Mont’s face at that moment is something I’m going to cherish for the rest of my life. “Well hey, Pepe!” I said brightly again, as if he attached himself to the second story window all the time. “Ready to come in again?”

The Mont watched, slack-jawed, as I opened the window and pulled up the screen. Pepe stepped over the sill and through the slats of the headboard as if we did that kind of thing all the time. Then he curled up on the blanket, squinched shut his eyes with affection, and purred.

I’m still slightly deaf in my left ear from the yelling that followed. Jeez. Honestly. It’s not like I paid the darn cat to do that. I don’t have the money for such comedy gold.

The Nascenza Conspiracy

Seven or eight years ago, I finished the manuscript of a book I called The Horns of Cassaforte. It was a young adult novel set in a fantasy world somewhat similar to renaissance Venice, where the families of ordinary craftsmen not only produced objects blessed with everyday magics, but played a major part in the country’s governance. The book grew in part out of the 9/11 tragedy, and partly out of my depression over the political landscape of the country at the time. I wanted to explore how the most ordinary person—Risa Divetri, seen by everyone as good for nothing— might react to a country that was being hijacked by political extremists striking at its most basic foundations.

Heavy stuff for a light fantasy novel, I know. When I finished writing, I knew I wanted to explore those themes even further, in two sequels. I didn’t really have any more notion of those novels in my head than the premises in their titles. The second book in the series I was thinking of as The Pirates of Cassaforte, in which an actor’s troupe would be stranded on a desert isle by pirates. The third was Pilgrims of Cassaforte, and would deal with a small group of citizens on a religious journey waylaid by terrorists.

The Horns of Cassaforte became The Glass Maker’s Daughter, of course. And The Pirates of Cassaforte finally found realization in The Buccaneer’s Apprentice. And now Pilgrims of Cassaforte is seeing the light of day as The Nascenza Conspiracy, which is available this week from Flux.

The Nascenza Conspiracy has as its protagonist Risa Divetri’s younger brother, Petro. As Risa has grown into a national hero, celebrated and feared in equal measure, Petro has been walled away in the insula—a boarding school of sorts for the country’s leading families. His sister’s notoriety has guaranteed that Petro has led anything but a typical student’s life, though. Either he’s scrutinized by his instructors for traces of her talents, scorned for being anything less than extraordinary, fawned upon for his connections, or beaten up for sticking out. For someone who simply wants to fade into the background until he’s ready to find his own path, it’s uncomfortable to have such a famous relative.

When the insula’s elder decides to send him on a religious pilgrimage to the holy site of Nascenza, Petro leaps at the chance to be out of the spotlight. And when his best friend comes up with a practical joke to swap identities, Petro is happy to leave behind the name of Divetri and become an ordinary citizen for a few blessed days.

The scheme goes awry in a remote village populated with political extremists, however. Petro’s friend is kidnapped, his bodyguards are killed, and he’s left seemingly alone in a countryside populated with murderers and traitors. When he determines to rescue his friend, he finds himself embroiled in a plot that threatens Cassaforte’s throne like no other before.

I know! Risa’s little brother, all grown up and stuff!

One of The Nascenza Conspiracy’s major themes has to do with the ways that political groups will use the tactics of fearmongering and internal terror in order to get their way. It’s a theme that grew directly out of the take-no-prisoners approach to political campaigning that I’d seen during the 2008 election and the aftermath in the years following. It seemed then as if anyone with a desire to invalidate Obama’s presidency used whatever means they could to spread fear about the inevitable dangers of an African-American president—logical or not. To me it seemed like living in absolute insanity—and I drew upon it for the book. Petro’s treading dangerous ground with a party of extremists willing to do anything, and sacrifice anyone, in the name of political insanity, simply because they weren’t able to get their own way. If only real life could be settled with as much satisfaction as a fantasy novel, eh?

Oh, but the book’s real draw? Two teenaged boys making nut jokes for an entire page and a half. You won’t want to miss that.

The Nascenza Conspiracy is available from Amazon and BarnesandNoble.com, or check to see if your local independent bookstore has it in stock or will order it for you. You can also buy it for your Kindle.

If you read the book and enjoy it, won't you consider putting your review for it on the usual sites?