Mark stood in the kitchen, updating his things-to-pack list and barked at his mother-in-law on the telephone. “Listen, Katy.” Desperation pushed him past what to call Dragonlady at this point. “You can tell me where she is or I take an eight-by-ten glossy of her to every hotel in Mexico.”
“Really?”
Katy’s sarcasm drew the word out, as if he were a third grader planning a trip to the moon.
“Yes, really. With or without your help, I’m doing this. I’m going after Mandy and, frankly, anything you have to say against it is a waste of time.”
“Excellent.” She stamped her approval with a quick exhalation. Apparently, Ben’s brush with death hadn’t curbed her nicotine habit.
“What?”
“I couldn’t be more pleased. She’s staying at the Palacio del Grande in a little town called Laguna Madre.”
Mark’s hand shook as he wrote the address and phone number on his little yellow pad. An address. A real live location for his wife.
“You should be able to find it rather easily,” Katy said. “I’m glad to see you’re taking some initiative. There may be hope for you yet.”
It was the nicest thing she’d said to him since he’d married her daughter.
“Oh,” Katy added. “Say hello to your mother for me.” She hung up, without good-byes or further comment.
Odd. Mark hadn’t thought Katy and his mother were on the “say hello” level of friendship. He chalked it up to progress and crossed Call Katy off his list. Next up, packing.
He selected jeans, T-shirts, running shoes and shorts for the warmer weather. He added another bag with a few surprise essentials. Some things Amanda had left behind.
Saving the most dreaded duty for last, Mark swept up an unsuspecting Mr. Chesters and stuffed him in the traveling box. Mr. Chesters’ claws, sharp as his reflexes, drew instant red lines on Mark’s forearm. Trapped in the cage, the cat moaned, demonic and low. Not a pleasant sound. Mark washed his hands in the kitchen sink, the welts already rising in allergic reaction.
In the driveway, he loaded his luggage in the back of the Toyota, saying a prayer as he clicked the latch closed. Please make it to Mandy. Get me to Mexico. He opened the back door for Mr. Chesters’ cage when he heard a caravan making its way down Mesquite Street.
The send-off committee, no doubt rustled up by Joe Don, Ervin and Jimmy. They pulled to a stop, a bunched-up caterpillar of trucks and cars.
Mrs. Zimmerman, at her weekly seniors’ meeting, would be absolutely sick she missed all the action.
The women-Peggy, Missy and Courtney-emerged with a basket of boxes and little floral things, tied with a large bow.
Courtney retied the ribbon to a plumper formation. “For Amanda,” she said. “Just some beauty supplies and such. It’s the best we could do on last-minute notice.”
Peggy hefted a container into Mark’s hands. “This is for my honeygirl.”
Inside were homemade treats, a candle and a stuffed bear.
“Tell her we love her,” Peggy said. “Tell her to come on home.”
“There’s trail mix in here, in case you get hungry.” Missy Underwood handed him a grocery bag. “And things for the road. Wipies, a phone card, bottled water. You let me and Jimmy know-”
Jimmy put his arm around his wife, affirming her sentiment with the gesture.
“I will.” Mark placed the supplies and gifts in the backseat, careful not to squish the bow.
Dale Ochs hopped down from his gigantic truck and landed on stacked ostrich boots. He shook hands with Joe Don and Ervin. Sauntering up to the Toyota, he kicked the tires with a pointed toe. “She roadworthy?”
“I think so.” Mark crossed his arms.
“She’s dropping some transmission fluid,” Jimmy reminded Mark. “Should make it okay, but keep an eye on your levels. Make sure you cap ’em off.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Good.” Dale nodded, as if satisfied. Like he’d done the work himself, or at least commissioned the others. “Listen.” Tugging Mark’s elbow, the deacon led him closer to the house. “Ervin and I had a little talk. I’ve got something for you, on behalf of the board.”
“Yes?” Mark hated Dale tugging him anywhere.
Dale handed over an envelope, then stuck his thumbs in his jeans pockets.
For an instant, Mark feared the worst, opening it in front of others. A crazy thought that Ervin had changed his mind. Humiliation to go. You’re fired. Have fun in Mexico. God bless and Godspeed.
Instead, it was a neat stack of cash. God bless, indeed.
“Traveling money.” Dale bowed his chest out, his strong nose shining in the afternoon sun. “It’s from the special-needs fund. And we figured if ever there was a special need, well, you might just qualify.”
The board chairman grinned, and for the first time, Mark saw his humanity.
“Thanks.” Mark shook Dale’s hand. On instinct, he added, “Hey, Dale, let me ask you something. You know how swamped Ervin is. While I’m gone, we’ll need your help to hold down the fort. What do you say?”
“Absolutely.” Dale nodded vigorously before Mark finished talking. “You have my full support.”
The man seemed to grow two inches, stacked boots or not. “Great. When I get back, we can talk about putting you over some of my responsibilities, if you’d like.”
A glint in Dale’s eye told Mark he’d struck gold.
“Things like next year’s carnival. Organizing committees. Building our finances.” Busywork, Mark thought to himself. My headaches, Dale’s specialty.
The man was nearly aquiver with excitement. Dale the Watch-dog, sniffing out injustice and ineptitude, on behalf of Mark Reynolds. “You can count on me.”
Joe Don rambled up, his legs bowed out like a wishbone. “Seen the Weather Channel anytime today?”
“Nope,” Mark said. “Don’t have cable.”
“Looks like a storm’s rolling in down south. One of those tropical depressions, set to hit the Mexican coast in a coupla days. Might be nothing, but it could get ugly.”
“I’ll be careful,” Mark promised.
“That cat don’t look too happy,” Ervin noted. He scratched behind Mr. Chesters’s ears, flattened through the square grid of the cage. The animal quit moaning for the briefest of seconds.
“It never does,” Mark agreed, sliding behind the wheel.
“Got everything you need?”
“Yep.” Mark met Ervin’s gaze. “Thanks for the money.”
“What money?” Ervin grinned and slapped the Toyota’s hood. “You best get going. Daylights a-burnin’!”
Mark honked the horn, an absurd chirpy sound, and left them waving in his yard.
HE DID NOT, it turned out, have everything he needed. When he pulled into the motel parking lot, he realized by Mr. Chesters’s increasing screams that he’d left the cat food next to the dryer in the garage. The special diet food for heinously cranky cats on their last feline lives.
The motel sign blinked a neon vacancy, and Mark stepped into the lobby.
A gum-smacking girl worked the counter, her eyes blackened under layers of eyeliner. She didn’t look up from her magazine.
“The sign says you have a vacancy?”
No answer.
“Could I get a room, please?”
“How many?” She stood, boredom battling irritation for control of her facial muscles.
“Just one room.”
She looked at him as if he were the stupidest person walking the planet. “How many people?” Her tongue piercing, a miniature dumbbell, dulled her speech.
“Oh. One. Plus a cat.”
She sat down again, propping a combat boot on a footstool. “No animals.”
“He’s in a carrier. I won’t let him out.”
“No animals,” she repeated, snapping her gum.
“What if I leave him in the car?”
She arched a penciled brow at him, still reading.
“Thanks for all your help.” The bell jingled overhead. He heard Mr. Chesters before he opened the car door, and then the yowls and the piercing stench of urine hit him all at once. The cat had sprayed the inside of his cage. Again.
“Fifty more miles, buddy,” he informed Mr. Chesters after checking the map. “And you better pray they have a motel, a Wal-Mart and a hose.”
An hour later, Mark crouched in the gas station parking lot, hosing out the plastic carrier. One thin strip of neon illuminated Gary’s Gas station and a CLOSED sign hung on the glass door. Silence reigned in the residential area around the station. Little houses, with rickety porches like loosened teeth, slept in the midnight hour.
When Mark finished, he released the cat from the backseat, where he’d curled into a baseball shape on top of Mark’s bag. “Let’s go, buddy.” He scooted the furry mass out the door.
“Mraaawl!” Mr. Chesters took a deep bite from the fleshy part of Mark’s left hand and pranced off to a nearby plot of grass.
“You ungrateful, godforsaken pile of…” Mark dug for Missy’s wipies. Wrapping one around his hand, he shouted at the cat, still picking its way among the green blades. “Now’s the time,” Mark ordered. “Not in the cage, not in the motel.”
Mr. Chesters mewled again. His yellow eyes reflected the neon sign.
“It’s fine, see.” Mark got down on his hands and knees, tapping the grass like the hair of a good child. “It’s a great place to go.”
Mr. Chesters squared his hind legs and lowered himself.
“Good boy,” Mark whispered, afraid of interrupting nature, yet sensing a gentle encouragement couldn’t hurt. “That’s a good boy.”
At the last second, the cat, instead of eliminating, leaped forward with all the force of his hind legs. Away from Mark’s reach and toward the back of the garage, where piles of tires had been stacked to the station’s roof. The cat’s tail snaked through black rubber, then waved a saucy good-bye and disappeared.
“Mr. Chesters?” Mark whispered, unbelieving. Abandoned by a cat. Alone in a town with no Wal-Mart and a closed gas station-and miles and miles away from Amanda.
He was tempted to leave the animal, to fend for himself at Gary’s Gas.
Take care of Mr. Chesters for me, Amanda had said. One of the last things she’d asked of him.
So, by all that was holy, he would. All the way to Mexico. “Mr. Chesters?” he called again, this time louder. He glanced at the houses, weighing safety against anger. He let his frustration rip.
“Mr. Chesters!” He shouted at the maze of tires, creeping toward the pile. “Heeeere, kitty, kitty.”
His voice sounded less like a loving pet owner and more like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
The tires shifted. The tower nearest Mark leaned to the left and he shoved it back. Too hard, unsettling a high-rise of hubcaps. The stacked wheels danced like a tin man, scraping and wiggling, then, in a shower of metal, clattered to the ground. But not before one particularly mobile piece bounced off rubber and hit him in the forehead.
The ensuing noise made a rebel symphony, with metallic pitches high and low and Mark’s furious shouts added to the mix.
“Mr. Chesters!” he bellowed, bracing the head wound with his palm.
The cat raced from the tires into a field behind Gary’s Gas. He darted past a clump of shrubs and out of sight.
“Mr. Chesters, come here!”
At a house nearest the station, a porch light blared on. The front door flew open, and Mark heard the unmistakable sound of a shotgun, cocked and ready.
The gun’s bearer could have been an extra from Deliverance. “I don’t know no Mr. Chesters, but you best quit that racket or I’ll quit it for you.”