Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 76456 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 382(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76456 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 382(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
“Selfish,” Cesare cut to the chase.
“Pretty much, yes. I’m sure it was hard enough to cart one kid along with them on all their adventures. And Vega was older than me. And accustomed to the traveling and new towns, new houses, new friends, new schools. I wasn’t like that.”
“So you stayed with your grandmother.”
“Yes.”
“And the filth came back,” he concluded.
“It doubled. Then quadrupled. Because, eventually, it stopped being junk she brought home, and started being cats. Whole litters of kittens, pregnant mama cats. She never fixed them or tried to find them new homes, so they just kept reproducing. I swear they were on every surface, inside every piece of furniture, in the very walls.”
I’d liked cats before.
I’d always wanted one.
A pretty black cat with green eyes that reminded me of one that I used to watch on cartoons when I was little.
My mother claimed she already had enough mouths to feed, so I’d never gotten one.
But as my grandmother’s house filled up with them, and the stench from unemptied litter boxes filled the house, I became certain that I would never want another animal again in my whole life.”
“Did no one ever call animal control or the township on the living conditions?” Cesare asked.
“My grandmother had been careful about keeping the mess inside of the house. I don’t know why no one cared about the cats. Maybe they just thought she was feeding strays, since they all came and went as they pleased.
“And I didn’t really even know anything about health codes or calling child services. I think I would have called if I did,” I admitted, not liking how that made me sound, but I’d been so miserable.
“How’d you eat?” Cesare asked.
“What?”
“If the kitchen was filthy and not functioning, how did you eat?” he asked.
The only food that was ever around was junk. Potato chips, cold SpaghettiOs from the can, snack bars, candy bars.
The only “real” food I got was from school when my grandmother remembered to give me money for lunch tickets. Which, well, wasn’t often.
“I used to go to the library a lot back then, just to be away from the mess and the smell, and I would look at the magazines full of recipes and dream about what that food might taste like. I’d never had an asparagus spear or knew what a croissant tasted like, or even just leafy salad greens. I became obsessed with the idea of eating healthy one day.”
“And living in a clean, well-organized home,” Cesare concluded.
“Yes,” I said, nodding, looking around.
“You did good,” he told me, making my heart squeeze a bit in my chest. “So what happened as you got older?” he asked.
“I got a lot of after-school jobs,” I told him. “Babysitting, gift wrapping around the holidays, picking weeds from people’s gardens. Anything I could do to make a little money that I could use to take my clothes to the laundromat instead of washing them in a bucket. And get myself some food. It wasn’t like what I saw in the magazines, but it was better than chips and candy bars.”
“And then?” Cesare prompted.
“And then my grandmother got sick,” I told him.
I’d been in the homestretch.
Just a few weeks away from graduating high school. I had a small stash of cash that I swore to myself I was going to use to get a car, and get the hell out of that house. Even if I had to live and sleep in that car. Anything was better than being in that house another day.
“Sick with what?”
“I don’t really know. She was a very private person, so she didn’t let me come into the doctor with her or anything like that. I just know she got slowly weaker and coughed a lot. Before long, she was back in that bed all the time like she’d been when first grieving my grandfather.”
“Why did you stay?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I felt obligated, I guess. It wasn’t her fault she went so off the rails when my grandfather died. As I took care of her, it also gave me a chance to start working on the house,” I told him.
I’d been both thrilled and disgusted to set to that task.
I’d reached out to a bunch of shelters, explaining the cat overpopulation issue, getting them to take them in to rehome them.
Then, the cleaning began.
Just garbage at first.
Bag after bag. The house filled up with swollen black bags that I had to put out slowly over time in the weekly trash pick up.
Then once the trash was gone, I started selling and donating all the junk that accumulated.
The cleaning came next.
The deep cleaning.
The years worth of mold, dust, hair, and animal waste along with a lot of carcasses of rats that the cats had, luckily, kept a bit more under control when they’d shown up.