Savas's Wildcat

The one who hated his guts.

Taking a plane would have been quicker. The hour flight from San Francisco to Orange County, even with all that standing around airports beforehand, would have got her to her grandmother’s bedside in far less time.

But Cat would need her car when she got to Balboa. Southern California wasn’t meant for those who depended on public transportation. And Gran had said her surgery wasn’t until tomorrow morning. So even though she hadn’t been able to leave until after work, Cat knew she’d be there in plenty of time.

Besides, it wasn’t a matter of life and death.

Yet.

The single renegade word snuck into her brain before she could stop it.

Don’t think like that, Cat admonished herself, sucking in air and trying to remain calm as she focused on the freeway. Gran wasn’t dying. She had fallen. She had broken her hip.

Lots of people got broken hips and recovered. They bounced back as good as new.

But most of them weren’t eighty-five years old.

Which was another nasty thought that got in under her radar.

“Gran’s a young eighty-five,” Cat said out loud, as if doing so would make it truer. Exactly what a “young eighty-five” meant, she didn’t know. But it sounded right.

And she knew she couldn’t bear the thought of losing her grandmother.

Normally she never even thought about that sort of thing. Ordinarily Gran seemed just the same as she had always been—no different—or older—than when Cat had come to live with her twenty-one years ago. Margaret Newell had always been a strong, resilient healthy woman. She’d had to be to take on an angry, miserable orphaned seven-year-old.

She still was resiliant. Cat reminded herself. She just had a broken hip.

“She’ll be fine,” she said, speaking aloud again. “Absolutely fine.”

But even though she said it firmly, she feared things might be changing. Time was not on her grandmother’s side. And someday, like it or not, ready or not, time would run out.

But usually she didn’t have to think about it. She didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want Gran’s mortality thrust front and center in her life right now.

Or ever.

She was momentarily distracted by a pinging sound in the engine of her fifteen-year-old Chevy that she didn’t think should be there. She didn’t ordinarily depend on her car as her first choice of transportation. Foolish, perhaps, but in San Francisco, she didn’t need to. The bus or Adam, her fiancé, took her wherever she needed to go.

Of course she had intended to get new tires before she came down to see Gran at Easter. But Easter was still a month away. So she hadn’t got them yet. Besides, she was hoping Adam would come down with her. Then she might be able to put off getting them even longer.

But, in reality, Cat knew she should have got them last week. She should have been prepared. When your only living relative reached eighty-five years, you should always be prepared for anything. But “anything” seemed to imply “dying.” And there she was back at the grimmest of possibilities again.

Damn it! She slapped her palms in frustration against the steering wheel.

“Don’t die,” she exhorted her grandmother now, though only Huxtable and Bascombe, her two cats fast asleep in the backseat, were there to hear her. They both slept right through her exhortation.

“You’ll be fine,” Cat went on as if her grandmother was listening. She infused her voice with all the enthusiasm she could muster. The cats ignored that, too. They ignored pretty much everything she did or said that didn’t have to do with cans of cat food.

“It’s no big deal, Gran,” she went on firmly. But her voice wobbled and she knew she wouldn’t convince anyone—especially no-nonsense Maggie Newell.

But she said them again. Practiced them all the way to Southern California because if she sounded convincing, then they would both eventually come to believe it. That was how it worked.

“You can make it happen,” Gran had told her long years ago, “if you sound convincing.”

And Cat knew for a fact it was true. She remembered those months after her parents had been killed and she had come to live with Gran and Walter. She’d been devastated, angry, a ball of seven-year-old misery. She’d hated everyone and she was sure she’d never be happy again.

Gran had sympathized, but had insisted that she try to look on the bright side.

“What bright side?” Cat had wanted to know.

“You have a grandmother and grandfather who love you more than anything in the world,” Gran had told her with absolute conviction.

Cat hadn’t been all that sure. It might be true, but it hadn’t seemed like much compared to the love she’d lost at her parents’ death. Still, she knew Gran had to be hurting, too. If Cat had lost her parents, Gran had lost her only daughter and her son-in-law. Plus she’d suddenly been saddled with an opinionated, argumentative child just when she and Walter were getting ready to retire and do what they wanted to do.

Still, Cat had wrapped her arms around her chest and huddled into a small tight cocoon of misery, resisting when Gran had slid her arms around her skinny shoulders and said, “Let’s sing.”

“Sing?” Cat had been appalled.

Gran had nodded, still smiling and wiping away the tear streaks on her own cheeks. “There’s a great deal to be learned from musical comedies,” she said firmly.

Cat hadn’t known what a musical comedy was. She’d sat, resisting, stiff as a board. But Gran had persisted. She didn’t have a good voice, but she had all the enthusiasm in the world.

She sang “Whistle a happy tune,” and then she sang “Put on a Happy Face.” She had smiled into Cat’s unhappy one and kissed her nose. Then she’d sung “Belly Up to the Bar, Boys.”

It was so absurd that even feeling miserable, Cat had giggled. And Gran had hugged her tighter, and then the dam inside her broke, and she remembered how she had by turns sobbed and laughed in her grandmother’s arms. They’d sobbed and laughed together. And Cat could still feel the solid comforting warmth of her grandmother’s arms around her that day. She longed to put her own arms around her grandmother now.

“It will be fine,” she had told her grandmother on the phone that afternoon, refusing to let her voice crack. “We won’t only sing. We’ll dance,” she vowed. “You’ll be dancing in no time.”

In her mind’s eye she could see Gran dancing now. It made her smile—and blink away unshed tears. There. That was better.

Gran was right: you had to sound convincing to be believed—especially by yourself.

It did work. Cat knew it worked. At least in cases of misery—and in cases where the outcome was up to her.

If theme songs weren’t one hundred percent foolproof it was because one time she’d been a fool and dared to believe in something she had no control over. Warbling “Whistle a Happy Tune” had got her through making new friends at her new school and in the Girl Scout troop. “Climb every Mountain” had helped her through swimming lessons and eighth grade speech. “Put on a Happy Face” had forced her to smile through teenage angst.

And if “Some Enchanted Evening” had failed her, it wasn’t because there was something wrong with the song. There had been something wrong with the man.

She’d loved. But her love had not been returned. So she’d learned her lesson.

That was all behind her now. Now she had Adam who really did want to marry her, who smiled indulgently and shook his head and called her “Little Mary Sunshine,” though sometimes she wasn’t entirely sure he thought her sunshiny attitude was a good thing.

Adam was a banker, a very serious banker. Cat didn’t mind serious. She didn’t mind that he was a banker. It meant he was trustworthy. Dependable. The right sort of man to start a family with.

And more than anything Cat wanted a family.

She flexed her shoulders and tried to ease the kinks out of them. Bascombe mewed and poked his head between the two front seats. She wondered if he sensed that they were coming home. He’d been born on Balboa Island, had spent the first two years of his life there. They were south of Los Angeles at last, heading toward Newport and the beach. It was past one in the morning now and she was tired. Her only stop had been for gas in King City. Now she yawned so widely that she heard her jaw crack.

“Almost home,” she told Baz. But the moment she said the words her stomach clenched, because once again the memories came flooding back, reminding her of the days she’d thought that Gran’s old house would become her home again, that she’d marry and raise a family there.