The end of chapter one in Suzy Soro's unreleased book.
Where we last left off, Suzy met George, a retired pitcher for the Kansas City Royals. Italian through and through, he captured her heart when they had bit parts in a Robert Redford movie.
George's wife had cancer and after her death, he and Suzy talked on the phone all the time. For the next month, she was his confidant and eventually, they had phone sex. Then the real thing.
Suzy had convinced George to get the children a kitten to help them get over their mother's death. He did. Two months after she and George broke up, Figgy called Suzy to tell the kitten had died on the front lawn ...
All the Bad Sex I’ve Had, a very, very, very long book (Part 4)
After we talked about the dead cat I hung up with Figgy and thought about the day after George and I finally spent the night together. We lay in bed all the next morning and talked. He worried that he hadn't been a good enough husband; that Patty hadn't ever been happy, that he might not have given her everything she'd ever wanted. I told him that he was probably the most wonderful husband who had ever lived and that I was positive Patty had been happy. I had only met her twice but she had seemed happy and isn't this what you're supposed to say to someone who is inconsolable? I think that's when I fell in love with George, on that morning, mainly because he had loved someone else so much.
We had left the hotel and gone to his house while the kids were at school. I was overwhelmed at first. Did he look around the house and still see his wife? Were there pictures on the wall or clothes in the closet that belonged to her? Could I move something without him saying, "Please don't touch that." I walked around his beautiful house like a tourist. Oohing and aahing and feeling like an interloper in Ozzie and Harriet's family. Only Harriet was dead and I was the whore of Babylon.
I was in the kitchen rinsing dishes while George waited behind me with a dish towel. The TV in the dining room was on a sports channel and George was watching it out of the corner of his eye and talking to me at the same time. All of a sudden the TV shut down, went dark. George walked over to it and picked up the remote. He clicked to another channel and it went on. Then another channel and it went on. But when he clicked back to the sports channel we were watching, it was still blank. George fingered the remote and lowered his head.
"I know who this is," he said. I stopped sponging off the counter as my mind drifted to another kitchen, three years earlier, all the way across the United States, in my father's condominium in Florida. Dad's fourth wife had just died and my sister and I had flown in to be with him. I had been sitting in the living room trying to wake up before I went to make coffee. I didn't especially like Dad's last wife but I really missed her in that moment, mainly because she always made the coffee. I got up and went into the kitchen and noticed that a little placard saying "I love you, Grandma" was missing from the entrance wall of the kitchen. The little plaque above it was still there and I wondered if Dad had removed the missing one to keep by his bed. I made the coffee and didn't think another thing about it until a few hours later, when Dad and I decided to go to the post office. As we walked down the long corridor that led to the front door, we passed the kitchen and I noticed the missing plaque was back.
"Did you put the plaque back?" I asked my father.
"What are you talking about?" he replied. I stopped and turned back towards the kitchen. I motioned for him to follow me.
"This bottom plaque here, did you put it back?" I asked, pointing to the piece of wood.
"I never moved it," my father said. I explained to him that I had been in the kitchen earlier and noticed it was missing and Dad looked at me like I was high. Even though that normally would have been a good guess back then, that was not the case. As the day progressed and I told my stepbrother and step-nieces the story, they looked at me in the same demented way. Later on that night, over at the Yacht Club, an even stranger phenomenon would occur that would permanently link me to crazy in their eyes, but at that moment, standing with my father gazing at the itinerant plaque, I knew I wasn't. Something was happening, as it often did around the dead and me, and I knew that crazy had nothing to do with it. All I knew was that the placard was missing and now it was back and there was something I was supposed to learn, or hear, or notice or pay attention to.
"Z, are you listening, I said I know who this is," George repeated.
"Who?" I asked, locking eyes with him.
"Patty."
And I knew, of course, that he was right.
So Bozo was dead. It brought me back to being in the living room with the children and taking pictures of them when Bozo was still a kitten, each one of them fighting over who got to hold the cat first. I had felt like I belonged with them in that house, in that moment in time. Even though they weren't my family, I felt like they were supposed to be.
Figgy hadn't known all the details of how the cat died, just the biggest one, which made me crazy. It was George's new girlfriend who had consoled the children. There was no one to console me.
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