Kitty's Saga Chapter Three: Welcoming Gestures

Over the weekend, Kitty made several bus trips back to her now-abandoned apartment, partly to collect what little she owned and partly to escape the awkward silences between her and Sandy.

Friday had been a whirlwind of changes, and Kitty had not completely absorbed any of them.

Sandy explained that, in exchange for staying at the house, Kitty would need to help with the household chores. That included working in the garden when the weather allowed, preparing light meals, doing the laundry, keeping the house reasonably clean, and making a trip to the grocery store once a week. Sandy could stand for only so long before she needed to lie down, and there were certain things she simply could not manage anymore. None of this particularly bothered Kitty.

She had spent most of her life playing a kind of Cinderella to Pam. Cleaning somebody else's house in exchange for a room of her own hardly sounded like exploitation to her.

Then Sandy showed Kitty the room.

Kitty nearly swooned.

It had its own bathroom.

It had a closet.

Most miraculous of all, it had a bed.

The bed was only a twin, and its old mattress sagged slightly in the middle beneath flannel sheets and a faded patchwork quilt. To Sandy, the room was modest. Almost embarrassingly so.

To Kitty, it was pure glory.

She would not have to sleep on the floor.

She would not have to sleep beside anyone else.

She would not have to arrange herself around somebody else's belongings or wake because another person had stepped over her in the dark.

She had a door.

She had a closet.

She had a bed.

Kitty stood in the middle of the room imagining her secondhand clothes hanging inside that closet instead of being wadded into grocery bags, and for one glorious moment she felt as though she had somehow stumbled into wealth.

Sandy did not waste much time on sentimentality. She expected Kitty to begin working immediately.

Even Kitty was surprised by how few questions Sandy asked.

Was Kitty still in school?

Did she have references?

Could she legally fill out employment paperwork?

Where were her parents?

Did anyone know where she was?

None of it came up.

Perhaps Sandy did not want to know.

Kitty certainly did not want to tell her.

And so, by some unspoken agreement between them, they proceeded as though nothing about their arrangement was unusual.

Kitty's first proper morning on the job began Monday.

Breakfast was to be served at seven: scrambled eggs on toast and decaffeinated coffee.

Fortunately, Kitty knew a handful of cooking basics. She had learned some of them years earlier, around the time she started middle school, after making the mistake of telling a school counselor that she wanted to take a CPR class.

The counselor had looked over Kitty's record and circumstances and informed her, with breathtaking bluntness, that her future would most likely involve being a waitress at best. She suggested Kitty concentrate on home economics courses instead.

Kitty had cried over that conversation every day for a week.

Afterward, she stopped telling people what she wanted to become.

There seemed little point in handing someone your dreams when all they intended to do was explain why you did not deserve them.

Still, Kitty had learned to cook.

And on Monday morning, those unwanted lessons produced perfectly respectable scrambled eggs.

She woke early enough to eat her own breakfast before beginning Sandy's. At precisely seven, Kitty carried the plate and coffee to the kitchen table.

Sandy sat down.

She took a bite.

"This is good."

Kitty smiled uncertainly. "Thank you."

"Don't you want to eat?"

"I already did."

"Oh."

Silence settled between them.

Neither seemed to know what Kitty was supposed to be.

Was she a companion who happened to help around the house?

An employee?

A servant?

A guest?

Some strange combination of all four?

Sandy shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Kitty sensed it immediately.

"I should start the laundry."

Before Sandy could answer, Kitty disappeared.

Laundry, at least, had rules.

Dirty things went in. Clean things came out.

Something was reassuring about that.

Kitty secretly slipped her own clothes into the household loads. They had gone far too long without a proper washing. Her old apartment building had possessed exactly one washing machine for forty-odd tenants, and getting access to it had sometimes required more strategy than Kitty believed laundry deserved.

By the end of the morning, her clothes smelled like detergent.

Her clothes were hanging in a closet.

Her bed was made.

It was astonishing how quickly ordinary things could begin to resemble a life.

Sandy had written out a list of chores for Kitty to complete each week. For the most part, Kitty managed them without difficulty. She dusted. She swept. She scrubbed. She did the laundry, prepared meals, and kept the kitchen clean.

She completed nearly everything on Sandy's list.

Everything, that was, except mow the lawn and weed the garden.

Sandy had apparently written the list without remembering that it was the dead of winter.

There was snow on the ground.

Kitty, nevertheless, was so determined to impress her that she asked where the lawnmower was.

Sandy led her around to the back of the house and opened a rusty shed.

Inside sat an ancient push mower that looked as though it had been there since Kitty was born.

"Oh," Kitty breathed.

She focused on it.

Kitty had never operated a lawnmower in her life. She had always lived in the city. Lawns were something other people had.

Sandy noticed her hesitation.

"My grandson used to do all this every few weeks before he went off to school."

Kitty's stomach tightened.

She could not admit she did not know how.

What if Sandy decided she was useless?

What if Sandy changed her mind?

What if Kitty lost the room?

So Kitty examined the mower with what she hoped resembled informed skepticism.

"I'm just not sure how to use this particular model."

It was a magnificent lie.

Kitty would not have known how to use any model.

Sandy looked at the mower, then at Kitty.

For her part, Sandy had a fear of her own. If the girl decided the work was too difficult and disappeared, Sandy would be alone again, unable to manage half the things she had once taken for granted.

She shrugged.

"My grandson will be back on his next school break. He can show you."

Kitty nodded, relieved.

Sandy nodded, equally relieved.

They walked back into the house, each privately convinced she had successfully protected her advantageous position over the other.

Neither understood yet how badly they needed the arrangement to work.

In the weeks that followed, Kitty settled into a routine.

Once she caught up on the neglected work around the house, she discovered there was surprisingly little to do. Sandy usually went to bed shortly after dinner, leaving Kitty with several hours to herself each evening.

Freedom, Kitty discovered, could be remarkably boring.

She was far too nervous to wander around the house as though it belonged to her. Some part of her remained convinced that if she became too comfortable, Sandy might notice and reconsider the whole arrangement.

So Kitty retreated to her room.

There was no television in the house and very little reading material. Her only entertainment consisted of the textbooks she had never returned after leaving school.

At night, she read them.

Sometimes she wondered what was happening in the classrooms without her.

Had anyone asked where she was?

Had one of her teachers noticed the empty desk?

Did any of the other students wonder what had happened to her?

For a while, Kitty entertained the comforting possibility that someone might be worried.

Then she considered what seemed more likely.

Nobody had noticed at all.

She tried not to dwell on that.

Instead, Kitty opened her notebook and marked down an important date.

Her eighteenth birthday.

Once she was eighteen, she would go see her social worker. She needed to figure out how to get her Social Security card and birth certificate. She needed identification. Eventually, she needed a real job. She needed money of her own. There were a hundred things standing between Kitty and the sort of life other people seemed to enter automatically.

But all of that was still a few weeks away.

For now, Kitty closed the notebook.

She crawled beneath the patchwork quilt and settled into the soft hollow of the old mattress. Beyond her window, snow drifted silently from the night sky, gathering on rooftops and lawns and parked cars until the whole suburban street seemed softened beneath it.

The houses were quiet.

The world was quiet.

No one was shouting.

No one was stepping over her.

No one was asking where she had been or telling her where she ought to go.

For once in her life, Kitty had a room with a door she could close.

Tomorrow could have its paperwork, its buses, its unanswered questions, and all the frightening business of becoming an adult without anyone to show her how.

Tonight, she was warm.

Tonight, she had a bed.

And as Kitty watched the snow settle over a neighborhood where no one knew enough to come looking for her, she decided that, for the moment, being lost was not the worst thing a person could be.