If You Were Here

“Yes, ma’am, Mr. Bauer.”

“You know Mr. Bauer is a cat, right? Not a person?” Then I’m suddenly consumed with dread. “Is he okay?”

“So you confirm he does live here?” demands Officer Younger.

“Yes. Do you have him? Has anything happened to him?” I worry that not only might Agent Jack Bauer be hurt, but that someone could have had an accident avoiding him. We live up on a bluff and the roads back here are winding. One wrong turn and someone could find himself down a ravine or in the lake.¹⁴¹

The younger one flips open a notepad before he continues. “We’ve had a complaint about your cat. He was seen at eighteen hundred hours urinating on a neighborhood lawn.”

“He got out a couple of hours ago and I was tied up and couldn’t chase after him. But how would you know that? Wait. Someone called you guys? Because a cat peed outside? Are you kidding me? Is this a joke?”

“Vandalism is no joking matter, ma’am,” says the older cop.

And that’s when I snap.

Or go all Swayze.¹⁴²

I can’t stop what comes out of me next. “Do I seriously pay thousands of dollars in property taxes so you two can harass me about my cat getting outside? Is that where my money is going? I’m sorry; is it illegal for creatures to relieve themselves in this town? Are you going to buy all the squirrels tiny little diapers? Gonna give the chipmunks catheters? Hey, wait. A bird crapped on my windshield! Better call nine-one-one! I think that’s a hate crime! I’m not kidding; this is singularly the dumbest goddamned—”

“Language, ma’am,” says Officer Older.

Rage bubbles up inside me. “Forgive me. What I meant to say is that this is singularly the dumbest gosh-darned thing I’ve ever heard. You tell Lululemon and Citizen Cane and Elbow Patches or anyone else in this neighborhood who has you two rent-a-cops in their pocket that I will not be harassed any longer! I live here! I’m not leaving! But you? You are wasting my time, you’re wasting taxpayers’ time, and I’m about to commit my own hate crime if you don’t get out of my way so I can use the bathroom.”

I stare them down so hard that Officer Younger finally says, “We’ll get Mr. Bauer for you.” Then he goes to the backseat and plucks one seriously confused kitten out of it before handing him to me.

“What, no shackles?” I demand.

As they begin to back away, the older one says, “One more thing, ma’am?”

“What?!”

“You really can’t keep your bathtub on the front porch.”

After Mac and Luke convince the police not to Taser me, they all turn into fast friends over a conversation about their sidearms. The cops impart some wisdom on how to properly seat a toilet on a wax seal, and only then do we finally get something accomplished. Now, like Agent Jack Bauer, I shall whiz indoors exclusively.

Right before I go to bed, I finally think to check my messages. I have an increasingly panicked string of texts from Kara beginning at five fifty p.m., ending with the final one that says simply:

where were u?

Shit.

Chapter Seventeen. SPANISH TILE

“It’s a jungle out there.”

“You got that right,” Mac agrees from behind his American Rifleman’s annual “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” edition.

I come up to him at the table and bend his magazine down. “No, it’s a jungle out there.” I point out the window. “You promised me you were going to take care of the yard.”

He sips his coffee before returning to his reading. “I will, as soon as I finish fixing the light.”

Instead of letting any of the fight grenades in these statements explode and have the shrapnel ruin yet another day, I simply walk away. I’m tired of being angry. Yet I’m not sure which frustrates me more — the yard or the goddamned light.

A couple of weeks ago we had to discontinue the landscaping service because we can’t afford to keep paying ninety dollars a week for a little mowing and some light weed whacking. A lot of our property is woods, so our place doesn’t require nearly as much upkeep as one might think.¹⁴³ We have some flowering perennials out front, and I’ve done a fine job¹⁴⁴ of keeping them up myself. When I get blocked in my writing, it’s nice to go outside and take my frustrations out on the weeds.

Given my current level of frustration, those beds are impeccable.

However, we do have lawn on the side and in the back of the house, and it’s almost up to Daisy’s shoulders now. The grass doesn’t look like single blades anymore so much as short stalks of wheat and corn. One more good rainstorm and the yard might swallow her whole. As is, I can barely get her out there. I’ve been quietly resenting the yard for a while now, especially since the novelty wore off for the dogs. Sometimes I think they’d be happier back in the city, because the smells there were so much more interesting.

Mac’s been promising to run the mower, but it rained most of last week and he didn’t get the chance. Then he was supposed to do it a couple of days ago, but that’s when the light on the garage blew out. I asked him to change it because the fixture is below the peak of the roof between the two garage doors and he’s better on a ladder than I am. I’m not afraid of heights so much as I am particularly susceptible to gravity.

Mac agreed to change the light before tackling the yard, and I estimated this project would take, what? Eight minutes start to finish if he actually put the ladder away and six if he didn’t.

But no.

Nothing is that simple in this goddamned house.

“The four-packs of floodlight bulbs are in the hall closet,” I told him.

“I’m not using a regular bulb out there,” he replied. “I’m installing an EcoSmart LED light. I figure if I’m going to all that trouble of replacing it, I want a bulb that’s long-lasting. I’ve got to go to Home Depot to pick one up.”

“Can’t you just save yourself a trip and stick in a regular bulb and take that time to cut the lawn?” I asked, mentally adding at least an hour and a half to the task, since he’d involved the Depot.¹⁴⁵

“Being able to see the garage is a priority. I’ll be back in a few minutes,” he said.

Two hours later, Mac arrived home and was, ostensibly, ready to tackle the task at hand. However, I had to wait another fifteen minutes while he “strapped on his bags,” because God knows you can’t change a lightbulb without donning thirty pounds of tool belt. There’s got to be a joke about how many do-it-yourselfers it takes to change a lightbulb, but my sense of humor was such that I probably wouldn’t have appreciated it had I heard it.

When he was finally ready to climb the ladder, I positioned myself at the bottom, primed to hand him stuff as needed. While he removed the glass around the lantern and unscrewed the old bulb, I inspected the new one. That thing didn’t look like the regular kind of bulb you’d see popping up in thought bubbles over cartoon characters’ heads when they got bright ideas about how to best roadrunners and wascally wabbits. Instead the bulb had a flat glass surface in the middle that was surrounded by what appeared to be white plastic gills or spokes. Odd.

“What’s so special about this?” I asked.

“This bulb is extra bright and environmentally friendly, and it’s guaranteed to last five years. According to the manufacturer, it should save us two hundred dollars over its life span. That’s why it costs a little more,” Mac told me.

My ears instantly pricked up. “How much more?”

“A lot more,” he admitted.

I did not care for the sound of that. “How much?”

Mac appeared to be very interested in the fixture when he answered me. “Forty-five dollars.”