“Okay, fine,” said Gran after giving the proposition some more thought. “But on one condition—or two, actually.”
“Name them,” said Odelia.
“First, I get to take Scarlett along with me.”
“Done.”
“And second, I want the cats. All four of them.”
“What do you need the cats for?” asked Uncle Alec.
“For protection, what do you think?” Gran snapped. “If this place is what I think it is, I’m going to need someone to watch my back.”
“I’ll watch your back,” said Scarlett.
“And who’s going to watch yours?” Gran returned. “No, I need my cats. Take it or leave it.”
Harriet, who had been too stunned for speech, now piped up,“Hey, don’t we get a say in this!”
But unfortunately it seemed like the deal was done, and we had suddenly become part of a package deal that included Scarlett and all four of us moving into a retirement home for the foreseeable future.
Brutus, who had showed remarkable restraint until this moment, now grumbled,“Kill two birds with one stone, my tush. More like kill four cats with one stone!”
5
And so the day arrived when we were expected to move into the Happy Home for the Elderly, though I can’t say that it was actually a happy day. Gran still seemed to feel she had somehow been railroaded into accepting Odelia’s proposal, and of course the four of us were less than happy to have to trade our own happy little home for this much bigger and presumably much unhappier home for the time being!
“I just hope Gran will protect us,” said Dooley as the taxi drew up in front of the building.
“Gran isn’t supposed to protect us, Dooley,” said Harriet. “We are supposed to protect her!”
“This is a nightmare,” said Brutus. “I knew I should never have left New York. When Chase was suspended he should have just hung in there instead of accepting this lousy proposal from your Uncle Alec.”
“If Chase had hung in there, as you so aptly put it,” said Harriet icily, “you would never have come to Hampton Cove, and then we would never have met. Is that what you’re saying, sugar plum?”
Brutus hastened to dissuade her from the notion that this was what he actually meant, but the harm was done, and his next words put the seal on our general sense of doom and gloom.
“Let’s hope at least they’ve got a pet flap in this place.”
We all gulped. If there was no pet flap, and the place locked down for the night, there would be no escape for us. And that meant no cat choir. And no more pleasant rambles through town.“It’s prison, isn’t it, Max?” asked Dooley. “We’ve been sentenced to maximum security prison for a crime we didn’t commit.”
“What crime?!” Harriet cried.
“Exactly my point,” said Dooley.
“Let’s just wait and see what happens,” I said, trying to instill a modicum of common sense into the conversation. “Maybe this place isn’t as bad as we think.”
“It’s probably worse,” Brutus muttered.
Oddly enough, our conversation was mimicked by our humans.
“We’re not getting out of here alive,” Gran complained. “This is the end. I can feel it in my bones. My not-so-old bones. They’ll carry us out of here in a coffin.”
“Oh, stop it, you silly woman,” said Scarlett. “It’s going to be fun!”
“Fun! You call this fun?”
“Just think of it as a holiday in a luxury retreat,” said Scarlett, as so often the epitome of optimism. “All expenses paid. And who knows? Maybe we’ll meet some great people and become friends. We might even get lucky,” she added with a wink.
“Never!” said Gran. “I’m gonna steer clear of the inmates as much as I can.” She leaned in and dropped her voice to a whisper. “You never know if they won’t shank us!”
“What’s shank mean, Max?” asked Dooley, who was quietly trembling now.
“It’s a prison term,” said Brutus. “It’s a self-made knife prisoners use to settle scores.”
“We’re all going to die!” Dooley cried.
Okay, so maybe not exactly the most auspicious of beginnings, but look at the bright side: things could only get better. Right?
The room Sara Brooks had managed to arrange for us was a spacious one. It didn’t have a pet flap, but it did have a window, and unlike the picture my treacherous mind had conjured up, the window didn’t have bars. It could even open, and we could slip in and out as much as we liked. Though Gran implored us not to. We needed to watch out for shanks!
The man who carried our luggage from the taxi—Odelia had bowed out of driving us over here just in case someone recognized her—was a nursing assistant named Desmond Palka. I would like to say he was a nice man, but unfortunately he wasn’t. He looked like the Incredible Hulk, only instead of green he was pink, and instead of a nice full head of hair he proudly boasted a shiny bald dome.
He was also not very friendly, and seemed to communicate mostly in grunts.
“What’s this?” he asked when he was handed a bulky litter box.
“For the cats,” Gran explained. “We’ve got four of them.”
“Can’t they do their business outside like normal cats?”
Clearly the guy was not a cat person!