Pops was quiet, sweet, and generous. He had taken Paulina to the zoo at least twice a summer since she was a little girl, and she had never gotten less than five hundred dollars for her birthday.
It was odd to her that her mother and her Pops had such a tenuous relationship that neither would talk about.
Mom had extra time to help take care of Pops, and she really didn’t, but here she was again, watching him age before her eyes, widowed from his second wife for ten years, nothing to look forward to.
They sat in the back of the sprawling ranch, Pops staring at the river gurgling past in the tree-lined ravine, occasionally a kid catching frogs or a group of older kids hiking.
“Anything I can do for you, Pops?”
“Nope. Got my Vernors and my Parliaments, I’m fine.”
Paulina said it like it was a fresh thought, but she had been considering it for a while:
“Pops, we should get you a cat to take care of.”
His head swiveled toward her as though it was on a hand truck in a warehouse.
“Oh hell no. Had a bad experience.”
“With a cat?”
He waved Paulina off, dismissed the thought with a gesture.
“You never told me you didn’t like cats,” she said softly.
He shifted in his recliner, grunted. He grunted a lot, always had.
“I like cats. Just don’t want one.”
“What kind of bad experience?”
“Your momma probably told you about it.”
Paulina shook her head, even though Pops had gone back to looking at the river.
“No, Pops, I don’t know the cat story.”
“She might have left out the cat part.”
Paulina smiled. “The cat part of what?”
Pops patted the arm of the recliner and Paulina walked over to sit on it.
“Sometimes my job required me to get..to get in...some situations.”
“Cavalier Flotations? What kind of situations? You guys made pool toys.”
Pops grunted and took a sip of Vernors from an unbreakable smoke green glass he had had a set of since Paulina could remember.
“Your momma never told you?”
“Told me what, Pops? She told me lots of stuff, but not about you and cats and...situations.”
“You never wondered why a company that made pool toys had fourteen trucks?”
“No, I only wondered why we never had a pool, and neither did you.”
Pops smiled, but it faded quickly. “I would have bought you...built you a pool. Your momma never would have stood for it though.”
Paulina bit her lip.
“Tell me why you don’t want a cat.”
“I had a cat once. Grimey. Fat stripey thing.”
Paulina ran her hand through her grandfather’s wispy hair.
“You loved him so much when he passed you couldn’t replace him?”
“We had a little agreement that went sour.”
“You and the cat?” Paulina asked, both amused and confused.
“Down at Cavalier. Well, not there, but about some business stuff. It...didn’t go well. I wound up taking a couple to the gut.”
“A couple what, Pops?”
“Your momma told you, I’m sure of it.”
“No, you tell me. Any stories of yours I wanna hear from you.”
Pops extended his left hand, stretched his arthritic fingers.
“Bullets.”
“You got shot?” Paulina stood and looked at her grandfather, picturing him sharing cotton candy with her at the zoo, teaching her about polar bears.
He nodded, quietly, like he was acknowledging that he had been to a Stones concert or maybe skydived.
“Some...some other folks did too. We had a guy...to fix us up. He was a dermatologist by trade.
And there were a few of us, some worse off than me.”
Now Paulina thought about all the trucks at Cavalier Flotations, only one that had Cavalier Flotations written on it. The barbed wire. It was in a bad neighborhood, over on the Highland Park border, but…
“Mom never told me you got shot.”
“Missed her college graduation. She was upset.”
“She wasn’t upset you got shot?”
“I suppose.”
“Why did you get shot?”
“Business deal went wrong. Some...lies...misunderstandings.”
Paulina walked in a circle, looked at her grandfather, reached for his hand and gently squeezed.
“I think we were talking about cats. Forget the past. Let’s get you a cat to keep you company.”
“Nope.”
“The business deal had something to do with cats?” Paulina paused, sucked in a breath, picked up Pops’ Vernors, and took a sip. “Oh god, they didn’t shoot your cat did they?”
“Oh hell no. We were in Delray, at a drywall warehouse. Anyway, our doc decided to get to me last because the other guys were worse. He gets the lead out, stitches me up, musta been tired, I dunno. Gives me some pills, sends me home.”
“And you didn’t go to a real hospital why?”
“Because some of their guys got shot too and well…”
“Pops, were you in the Purple Gang?”
“No, heck no, that was before my time.”
Paulina rubbed one of the age spots on Pops’ hand as though she could make it go away.
“I think I’m still missing the cat part.”
“Oh yeah. So I go home, got all kinda painkillers in me, sleep for I don’t know how long, wake up and I gotta pee something fierce. I take off the bandage because I gotta change it anyway, and just then Grimey jumped up on me. Blood and urine oozed out from between the sutures.”
Paulina clamped her hand over her mouth and gagged.
Pops reached for her arm.
“A bird might be nice. Something that talks.”
***
Photo by Donald Giannatti on Unsplash