Dewey's Nine Lives (27 page)

I also knew Kristie could tell a funny story. I expected her to make me laugh. And she did. What I didn’t expect was for it to touch me so deeply. I knew Kristie’s life hadn’t been perfect. She’d had hard times. Who doesn’t? That’s life. As Kristie told me: “It was an awe-some journey. I wouldn’t be where I am today without going through all this so I count it as a blessing, obviously.” I do, too. I count it a blessing to have known her. I love Kristie and Kellie and their mother to the bottom of my heart. Their presence upgraded my life to first class, even if my washing machine didn’t spin and my car broke down. But Kristie’s story still surprised me. I expected her to be smart, but I guess I never expected her to be wise. I mean, the girl’s only thirty-five. What’s she trying to pull?

So, Kristie, let me step aside, for once, and let you tell your tale in your own words. How many stories have been in this book so far? Six? Seven? It’s time for my coffee break anyway.

 

 

I’ve been blessed. That’s what I always say. I’m so blessed, in fact, that I put a list of my blessings in my Christmas card every year. It looks like this:

I’m blessed that my kids love worms and bugs, since I do, too. I’m blessed that they eat tomatoes and beans straight from my garden, and dig up baby carrots, and bite right into peppers, because I did that, too. I’m blessed that Sioux City is cold enough in the winter for snow forts and hot enough in the summer to throw up a temporary swimming pool in the backyard. I’m blessed that my kids are constantly grass stained and hate to wear shoes, even though my daughter has Fred Flintstone feet just like my husband. (I wonder how that’s going to look in high heels.)

I’m blessed that Lucas is the kindest, most empathetic kid I’ve ever met. I’m blessed that my middle boy, D.J., is so strong-willed that he refused to use his real name, which is Dawson, and everybody said fine. “Why didn’t you name me Bruce Wayne or Cowboy D.J.?” he used to whine. He was in a Batman/cowboy phase; he dressed like one or the other every day for three years. I had no trouble pushing Batman through the supermarket in a shopping cart, but I finally had to get his kindergarten teacher to tell him cowboys weren’t allowed in school. My three-year-old daughter, Reagan, meanwhile, is a mermaid. She wears orange hair from the dollar store and three-size-too-big tap shoes from the Goodwill and calls my husband Eric (his real name is Steven), since that’s the prince from
The Little Mermaid
. “My prince is home!” she yells every evening when he walks in the door. And then they dance. Reagan never dances with me. “Sorry, Mommy,” she says, “you’re Ursula.” (Ursula’s the sea witch). But I’m still blessed, because she’s eight years younger than D.J., and I thought the next time I heard the patter of baby feet I’d be a grandmother.

I’m blessed with Steven, the man of my dreams. We’ve been married for thirteen years, and I still get butterflies in my tummy when I am getting ready to go on a date. Alone. With a boy. Hee Hee. And when he takes me out, he lets me order “the usual”: a grilled cheese sandwich with crinkle fries. He never tries to change me. He just laughs and says, “You’re a cheap date, honey.” And I say, “Lucky for you.”

I’m blessed because I have a nice house. Because I have a purposeful job, mentoring fifty-two kids with learning disabilities from age sixteen to twenty-four. A job where I can use my experiences to help people I care about, and where their courage and warmth helps me, too. I’m blessed because when my dog Molly died at seventeen, I cried so hard I thought I never wanted another animal. But some of the kids I mentor volunteer at the Siouxland Humane Society, and they introduced me to another dog, and now I have Princess to jog with every morning.

I’m blessed because last fall I ran the Sioux City marathon, and I did it the right way. I even gained weight
on purpose
to compete in the over-150-pound category, where I finished third. Which was amazing! But that wasn’t why I was blessed. I was blessed because every two miles my husband, sister, and even my dad were there to hand me water and cheer me on, and each time they were crying because they were so proud of me, because they knew how hard I had worked and how far I had come.

Where did I come from? How did I get here? Those aren’t questions I’ve often asked. I’m blessed by God. Every time I hear my three-year-old pray, I’m reminded of that. But it took hard work, too. I always knew that, because I’m the one who did the work. It wasn’t until I started thinking about this book, though, that I realized that maybe Robert Frost was right. Maybe there are two roads that diverge in the yellow woods of our lives, and I . . .

I married my cat.

And that has made all the difference.

If you want an explanation of that, and I hope you do, then we probably need to go back to the beginning, which in this case is 1984, when I was a dirty snot-covered (and proud of it!) nine-year-old kid living in Worthington, Minnesota, a pretty little town on a lake. I was a tomboy, I guess you could say, because I loved gardening with my dad and digging for worms and racing beetles in the palms of my hands. When my mom told me pigtails looked nice, I cut my hair off in the middle of the night and hid it in my jewelry box. I loved sugar, so I would sneak into the pantry and drink all the Hershey’s chocolate syrup straight out of the can. Then I’d walk around with chocolate sauce smeared all over my face, denying my crime. You know, that kid. Never worried about a thing.

But in the summer of 1983, Grandpa got sick with colon cancer. He was a big man from a very small town, Whittemore, Iowa, where he owned a meat locker, and to me he was about a hundred feet tall. He was very outspoken, and he had huge raw hands from cutting meat all his life. When my mom and older sister and I moved to Whittemore to take care of him, I was excited because it was like a vacation. And Grandpa was a hero to me. I still remember skating down the street every day to the diner, plopping into my seat, and saying, “I’ll have the usual, please”—grilled cheese with crinkle fries, of course—and feeling like I was some kind of grown-up. But the cancer cut Grandpa down so quickly that he started to wither before my eyes. I could see, even as a child, his big hands trembled. They couldn’t hold me anymore. My mom was strong-willed. She always said, “I have big shoulders. I can handle anything.” When my grandpa stopped fighting, I saw her fear for the first time.

When I got home to Minnesota two weeks later, I found out my cat had died. I’d left Puff at home with my dad in Worthington, but when we came back after the funeral, he told me Puff had died. I looked at him and nodded. Then I went to my room and cried. I was nine years old. What else could I do?

A few days later, another cat showed up at our side door. She was a calico, and she had the wildest mix of colors I have ever seen. No stripes or patterns, just a crazy quilt that made her look like a bunch of parts of different cats stitched together. Her ears were missing, like maybe they had frozen off. Her tail was a stump. She was ugly and beat up and undesirable in every way . . . so obviously I started feeding her. I gave her milk and a name and even a few dinner scraps I managed to slide into my pockets. So of course she kept coming back.

“Kristie,” my dad finally said after noticing Bowser hanging around the side door, “why are you feeding that cat?”

“Gwampa sent me dis cat,” I told him. I had a little kid lisp back then; I was all “wed woses are pwetty” in those days. But I puffed myself up and said, “Gwampa wants me to have dis cat, Daddy.”

Typical for a nine-year-old, right? A little parental manipulation? Maybe, but I believed it to be true. And I still do. If there’s a void that someone should fill, but they aren’t, God sends an animal. Bowser was sent. And Grandpa had something to do with it.

My dad was a lot like me. Or maybe I was a lot like him, at least when it came to nature. He was a farm boy. He loved to be outside, loved to garden, loved animals. I was the kid who held beetles in her hand and stuck worms up her nose to scare her Care Bears-loving sister. My mom took my sister’s side; she was not an animal lover
.
My dad understood. Plus, he might have been a little guilty about Puff. I don’t think he expected me to take the cat’s death so hard.

Whatever the reason, it was pretty easy to convince my dad to let me keep Bowser. He put a heat lamp in the garage for her, because the Minnesota winter was brutally cold (the heat lamp was the only way to keep her water from freezing, even in the garage), and Bowser was not, under any circumstances, on Mom’s orders, coming into the house. After the heat lamp was in place, Dad moved the old dresser, where he kept his tools, underneath it and put a cardboard box and a blanket on top. A few weeks later, Bowser had kittens, which surprised us both. She gave birth to them outside, right underneath my bedroom window
.
You aren’t supposed to move newborn kittens, but my dad decided to transport them from the window well to the box in the garage. After all, we had a cat condo, penthouse floor. Why would they want to roll in the dirt?

Marshmallow, I must admit, wasn’t the best kitten in the litter. In fact, he was probably the worst. He was the runt. He was shy. His hair was poofy, like he was rocking one of the bad perms floating around my small-town Minnesota elementary school in the fall of 1984. He was almost pure white. Almost, I say, because unfortunately his fur had a yellowish undercoat that made him look stained. Think of a sheep. Then think of a sheep floating in a giant ball of static. Or think of a dandelion with its white seed fronds sticking straight out, ready to fly. That was Marshmallow.

As part of the condo project, my dad ran a board from the dresser to the ground. Bowser would stand at the bottom and coax her kittens down one at a time, like a momma bird teaching her babies to fly. Marshmallow was always last. He would stand at the top of the plank with his eyes bugging out, shaking with fear. His mother would meow. His brothers and sisters would get bored and start fighting each other. Marshmallow would just stand there shaking.

“Come on, Mawshmawow,” I’d coax him. “Wun down. Just wun down. It’s easy.”

Finally, he’d take one tiny step, then sort of collapse and slide-tumble in slow motion down the board to the floor. “That’s okay, Mawshmawow,” I’d tell him. “You’ll wun tomowow.”

But when it was time to give the kittens away, Marshmallow still wasn’t weaned, and he still hadn’t worked up the courage to walk (or wun). He was still sliding in slow motion from his drawer to the ground. So my parents let me keep him. I think they figured, in his condition, he wouldn’t last long.

“Don’t give that cat milk,” my dad said, when he saw me sneaking the carton out of the refrigerator. “He’ll get a taste for it, and that stuff is expensive.”

So, like a doting mother, I whipped up a substitute: water and flour. It sure looked like milk, but Marshmallow took one sniff and looked at me crooked.

“What’s wong, Mawshmawow? You don’t wike it? You need to dwink to get stwong, Mawshmawow. I need you.”

He never did drink that wet flour, but Marshmallow got strong. When the snow melted in the spring, he started following his mother around the yard. And I followed them. Pretty soon, we were crossing the road to the median near the golf course (in my little kid perspective, it was a forest), where we would turn over leaves and rocks to see what was underneath. “Look at this wowm, Mawshmawow,” I’d say, letting the worm crawl along my wrist and down my arm. “Look at this wock. Look at this buttafwy.”

That year, I was finally old enough to walk to school by myself. Marshmallow followed me to the corner, then watched as I disappeared down the block. When I came home, he was always waiting for me at the corner. “Mawshmawow!” I’d yell, running across the last yard. I didn’t care who saw me with Marshmallow. I was proud of him. When my grandmother, who often came for long visits, told me she saw him traipse down to the corner at exactly 2:30 every day, I was even more proud. “Mawshmawow waits faw me aftaw school,” I told my friends. I bet they thought that was cool, but I can’t remember for sure.

In the fall, I raked the leaves into a big pile and buried Marshmallow underneath them. He’d peak through an opening, wiggle his behind, then spring with his arms outstretched, like he was surprising me. Or hunting me. Marshmallow was a terrific hunter. I’d come careening down the sidewalk on my bike, and whenever I passed the pine tree he’d leap out of the shadows at my tires. I suppose I should have slowed down, since he could have been badly injured under the tires, but instead I just yelled, “Watch out Mawshmawow, coming fwough!!” and pedaled faster. Then I’d throw down my bike, bury my legs in the leaves, wiggle my little toes, and wait for Marshmallow to pounce on them. When we were finally worn out, we’d lay down on the ground next to each other. I’d lay there for a full minute, staring at the sky. The peaceful, quiet sky. Then, all of a sudden, Marshmallow would pounce on my face.

“Why do you have scratches near your eyes?” my teachers asked me.

“That’s my cat Mashmawow,” I’d say. “He thinks my eyelashes are spidahs.”

“Be careful, Kristie,” they said. “He could hurt you.”

Marshmallow hurt me? No way.

The next year, when Marshmallow was two, his mother, Bowser, was hit by a car. It happened, just like with Puff, when I was out of town. I was distraught. Bowser was my cat. She was Marshmallow’s mommy. My grandpa had sent her to me because I was alone. And I loved her. I insisted we bury her underneath my window, where she had given birth to Marshmallow and those other long-forgotten kittens.