“Goodness. I thought my babies were heavy, didn’t I, Silky?” Arlene asked the cat she still cradled in her arms, an astonishingly so-ugly-he-was-cute cat who closed his eyes in ecstasy as his mistress nuzzled his huge, delicate ear with the bulbous tip of her nose.
That’s me in twenty more years, with whatever cats I have after Bruiser and Mouth are dead, Anna told herself as she looked around at Arlene Campbell’s living room. It reminded her so much of the living room in the house she and Ma used to share that Anna found herself unable to speak, almost unable to think.
There was the same hodge-podge of styles in the unrelated knickknacks; dented, stained, and marred end tables; curio shelves and plant stands; and ratty limp curtains that spoke of castoffs and found things, of a decorati
