they want to climb from shelf to shelf, seeking the lofty flatness of the top of each bookcase, or would they scurry in fear between the aisles? I also wondered what would happen when Oscar and April finally noticed that they had feline company—I could picture the kittens puffing out like blowfish, rising high on their toes, before backing away from the older gray tabbies…but then again, the lovebirds seemed to have eyes only for each other, so perhaps they might not notice the kittens at all. They certainly hadn’t noticed the Heinlein mice.…
Acting almost as one, the kittens suddenly wanted out of my arms, and jumped down before the lone bookcase positioned along the far narrow wall of the store, close to the back room where I kept the food and litter-pans, as well as whatever incoming books I hadn’t sorted yet. I seldom had customers wanting children’s books, so I routinely placed those titles in the back.… I supposed these books were the most highly-scented, especially since children are wont to try to eat and read at the same time, for Scooter and Mittens were all over the books, rubbing against them, standing up on their hind paws to smell the exposed spines of each book, then batting at them with their mitten feet. “No, no, bad kitties…don’t tear the books,” I said, and they actually stopped. As one, both of them sitting in place, merely staring at the books, before looking up at me with that ubiquitous “Who, us?” cat stare.
Yet, there was something eager about them, apart from mere kitten high spirits. As if they couldn’t wait to explore the bookstore—
“—a nice day,” Rik was telling the departing customers, as I hurried to the front of the store, taking backwards glances every couple of steps to make sure the kittens weren’t following me. They seemed content to sit near the lone children’s shelf.
“”Rik, I think they’d be better off locked in the back room, until you leave this afternoon. I’d hate to have them run out into traffic—”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that…they know they’re supposed to stay here. Jake as in and out of the apartment all this morning, and they stayed put there—”
“‘There’ isn’t here, though. And your apartment opens out into a hallway, right? That’s not like the street—”
“Not to worry…they’ll stay put,” Rik persisted, while cupping the head of my white and gray cat pencil holder with his be-ringed left hand—with every other word, his rings clanked against the ceramic head of the holder. Nerves?
“Well, I’d feel a lot better if they slept in the back, for the first couple of days at least,” I persisted. “Even if they are alley kittens, now that they’re here, they’re the store kitties, and I’d hate to think of anything bad happening to them so soon. Remember how sad all the regulars were when Chatty and Muffin passed on?”
“Not just the regulars.” Rik kept on clanking his rings on my poor ceramic cat, until I figured out a way to get him out from behind the counter. “Rik, come here…look down that aisle—”
The Hemingway kittens were both studying the spines of the children’s books before them, their heads moving in unison as they scanned the vertical titles one by one. Even if they weren’t littermates, they had to have spent time together before they were caught or bought or whatever Rik did to obtain them. Their behavior was so similar.…
“That is so adorable…and so strange,” I found myself whispering, as if I were in a library, and not my own store.
“They’re just smart,” Rik said a little too quickly, then added, “Probably trying to figure out which ones say ‘Food’…just kidding. I do wish I had a camera—”
“We do,” I said, remembering the disposable one we’d found in the back book racks last summer, with only a couple of frames of film exposed. No one had come in for it, and I’d almost forgotten it was sitting on a shelf behind the counter—
“Here, let me,” Rik whispered, taking the camera from me and slowly advancing the next frame forward, before crouching down and waiting for the instant flash to warm up, then clicked the button and snapped one shot…then, when the kittens didn’t move, he duck-walked closer to them, and took another picture.
I could just imagine what the picture would look like—two, perfectly posed kittens, their beautiful pointy ears at attention, as they seemed to peer at the books before them, while surrounded by the warm, worn wooden floor, the polished wooden book shelf, and the primary-bright colors of the narrow-spined children’s books…just the sort of picture one might submit to a cat food calendar contest.
Wanting to get a closer look at them, I stepped as lightly as I could in clumpy-lumpy boots down the aisle, but the magical image was gone as the two kittens turned their heads my way, and Scooter began to yawn. Luckily, Rik was able to capture the moment; the camera whizz-whirred and there was a bright, brief flash of white light. Mittens was frightened by the light and ran off toward the back room. Sensing that this might be a good time to shut Scooter up there, too, I reached down and scooped him up, telling him, “Your sister or whatever she is shouldn’t be scared…you tell her it’s all right to be photographed, ok?”
Scooter stared at me solemnly, as if mentally digesting my words.
But when I tried to walk into the back room, he reached out with both front paws and tried to hold onto the door frame, as if to prevent me from locking him up.
“See, he wants to stay out a while…don’t you Scooter?”
Scooter looked Rik’s way, then looked back at me, his green eyes glowing. Closing time wasn’t for another couple of hours, so I supposed I could watch him until Rik was getting ready to close the store—
Rik continued to take care of the last customers of the day as I carried Scooter around the store, talking to him softly as I showed him the sets of nesting cats (some with tiny solid-wood mouse centers) stationed on some of the shelves, and the framed cat pictures, some cut from those calendars featuring famous Impressionist or Pre-Raphaelite paintings reconfigured as cat portraits.
“Too bad none of these kitties look like you,” I told him, as I snuggled him under my chin, “But this one looks a little like poor old Chatty-cat”—he and I stopped before the cat-adapted “Isabella and the Pot of Basil” with its white-gowned-and-white-pawed tiger cat—“only she was all tiger-striped. Now if these two were gray and white, they could be Oscar and April,” I added, pausing before the feline version of “The Huguenot” Sir John Everett Millais certainly wouldn’t recognize as his own work. Scooter actually craned his head forward, and reached out one thumbed-paw to touch the head of the female “lover” in the print. Reflexively, I asked him, “So that’s April?”
Scooter let out a “purrumph!” and looked up at me, his bright eyes dancing in his white and black face.
Somewhat rattled by his facsimile of a reply to my words, I set off down another aisle, moving toward that framed Charles Wysocki print of the tiger cat lounging on the book shelf. Once we were standing before the walnut-framed art print, I whispered into Scooter’s furry neck, “You won’t find any of these titles on the shelves here…but I bet you wish you could read ‘A Tale of Two Kitties’ or ‘Delicious Field Mice I have Known’, hummm?” Scooter wiggled in my arms, making meowing noises, until I asked him, “You need the litter-pan? Or some food?” He immediately quieted down, then turned his head to look at me expectantly, as if to say, So, where’s the food you promised me?
Rik was right…Scooter (and probably the shy Mittens, too) was smart. The only problem was, how did Rik figure that out in such a short time?
Once I’d brought Scooter to the back room, and opened the metal popcorn canister where I stored the cats’ dry food, I realized that he and Mittens might not be able to chew the hard nuggets, so I ran a little warm water over them, to soften them up, before setting down the bowl of food on the floor. Scooter began lapping up the watery “broth” while Mittens more cautiously crawled out from behind some boxed books, staying low to the ground as she approached the food bowl, even as she moved her head sideways to get an occasional glimpse of me—once she realized that I wasn’t going to