Enjoy!
*****
The Blackberry
By Judith Cullen
© 2014
The knock at the
front door was insistent. “Fix the door
bell.” Cara grumbled as she hustled around piles of
She swung the door
open, reminding herself to smile, and met the worried face of Sheila from
across the circle. “Oh God,” Cara
thought, “we’ve only been here a week, what’s gone wrong already? Had Kiley
been too friendly and chattering? Has
Sprinkles been picking fights with other pets?” Kiley had thought the cat
looked like chocolate ice cream with Halloween sprinkles all over it. Despite
the feline’s fanciful name, it had a notoriously scrappy disposition outside
the immediate family.
“Have you seen
Kuja?” Sheila burst out before “hello” could be uttered. Cara blinked, trying to think who or what
“Kuja” could be.
“Good Morning,
Sheila. I’m sorry, who . . .”
“Kuja. Our Yorkie.
He was here in the yard the day you moved in.”
Cara remembered the
little rat-like terrier that kept getting underfoot, and finally settled on vigorously
pacing the fence, barking at something in the bramble-filled empty lot next
door. Sheila had come over with a
welcoming plate of cookies and a thinly veiled consumptive curiosity. Kuja had been right on her heels and stayed
in orbit until Sheila had finally allowed Cara to get back to working with the
movers, keeping an eye on Kiley, and nervously checking on Sprinkles who had
spent the afternoon howling from the confined safety of a cat carrier in the
car. Sheila had gone back across the
circle to her own house, her welcome wagon mission accomplished and her
curiosity at least partially satisfied.
“He’s been missing
since yesterday afternoon. He was over
here again, worrying your fence. I don’t
know what’s over there that bothers him.
I told Roger to go get him and bring him back over here before I left
for the Library Council, but you know how teenage boys are.”
Cara stopped herself
from saying that she didn’t really know what Sheila meant. Roger had been
really helpful on moving day, playing with Kiley and staying to help scoot things
around when the movers left. Deciding
that it was still early days in this neighborhood and it was best to proceed
diplomatically. So she settled on
nodding sympathetically.
“I’m sorry. I haven’t seen him.”
Sheila bit her lower
lip and sniffed back her clearly mounting distress.
“I know he can be
yappy and annoying, but I . . . “ She choked off the rest of the sentence and
Cara could not help but reach out to her.
“Let’s go take walk
through my yard and see if we can see any sign of him,” she found herself
saying. Sheila looked damply grateful and let herself be lead through the house
and out the kitchen door.
Cara let her concern
for Sheila override her embarrassment at the state of her new house. The yard needed a lot of work. When Cara looked with imagination, she
envisioned fruit trees dancing in the air and the winding beds of flowers and
plants colorfully winking at her. She
saw Kiley racing around, tumbling and laughing on a vibrant carpet of green,
and picking vegetables from a little kitchen garden that they planted together. What she actually saw with her everyday eyes
was a weed-choked browning lawn, a few scraggily bushes and a dried out fence
with blackberry canes clambering over and through it. And Sprinkles, she saw Sprinkles literally –
right now. The cat was in the backyard,
hissing at the fence.
“Sprinkles! Come away from there, you crazy thing!” She
clapped her hands loudly to break the cat’s focus.
The cat ignored her,
and Cara had to finally walk over to shoo her away from the blackberry. The cat glanced back at the fence menacingly
and at Cara disappointedly before marching into the kitchen.
“Sorry about
that.” Cara guided Sheila around the
yard and they pretended to look for the dog, but it was really only a gesture. There weren’t many places for him to hide in
the scrubby back yard. It had been clear from the moment they’d stepped out the
door that Kuja was not here.
Cara opened the side
gate and they walked back around to the front, calling out for the dog and
looking diligently in even the most obvious places. There was no sign of Kuja anywhere.
“I just don’t know
where he could have gone.” Sheila sniffed again and wiped her eyes, which were
finally succumbing to tears.
“I’m sure he’ll turn
up. Sometimes they just like to explore. I know both Kiley and I have been desperate
when Sprinkles has gone adventuring, but she always comes back. Kuja will come back too, soon.”
“I know it’s
silly. He’s just a dog but, you know,
they are like children – like family really.
You just don’t realize how much they mean to you until they are not
there.”
Cara walked the
grieving Sheila across the circle to her own door, listening and reassuring as
they went. Then she hustled back to her
own house, feeling exposed that she’d left it with the kitchen door standing
open. She found Sprinkles in front of
her food dish, munching.
“Do you know what
happened to Kuja?” Cara asked, wondering why she expected the cat to give her a
helpful response. Sprinkles just sat up
and looked at her with an air of utter superiority and impatience. She strode over to the still open kitchen
door, looked out, looked back at Cara and gave her a brief, bullet-like,
“mmaaaaar.” If Cara hadn’t known better
she would have sworn the sound had been laced with disgust. Sprinkles turned and looked out the door and
began a low, almost imperceptible growl at something outside.
“No more of that
today, little Miss.” Cara shut the door
and scooted the cat away from it. Kiley
would be home from Girl Scouts soon, and she wanted to be prepared. It had been hard to just drop her off with a
new troop and leave her with a people she’d only just met. She hoped that Kiley would come home bubbling
over with stories of the girls she had met and the things she had done.
This house was a new
beginning for them. In the first few
years of Kiley’s life, Frank had only been home a few months at a time before
he’d been lost in Afghanistan
in a helicopter crash. Kiley had barely
known him. It had taken several year’s
after his death for Cara to realize that what they needed was a fresh
beginning. She needed it. Working as a civilian on the military base
where Frank had been stationed only reminded her of her loss constantly. Watching others struggle with the realities
of military family life didn’t help either.
Everything about their old house, 10 minutes from base, had held
memories of him. It had all weighed her down as she struggled to raise
Kiley. She’d gotten support from her
family, who had lived nearby, but it just never felt like she was moving
forward. So she decided to find a new
house and a new job, and get some physical distance from the life she and Frank
had lead. They were only an hour away
from grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
Frank’s parents still would call on Skype every couple of weeks. Cara recognized that this was about her more
than it was about Kiley. Her bright
little daughter would grow and thrive wherever she was planted, she was certain. But she needed to take care of herself in
order to be the best Mother that she could be. Cara was determined to make this
move work for both of them.
To be continued . . . .
Acknowledgements:
Blackberry Image from http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=10376&picture=blackberries
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