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hour for the children at the library. This is no different. Both our visits, after the cats and dogs were all settled down in the old people’s laps, when everyone was yawning and cozy, she told stories.
    â€œShe told the little milkmaid cat. You know, There was a little cat down Tibb’s Farm, not much more’n a kitten — a little dairy maid with a face so clean as a daisy but she wanted to know too much…. And all was elder there and there was a queer wind used to blow there… ”
    â€œBoring. Boring as hell. Probably the old people love that stuff.”
    But her look iced him right down to his claws.
    â€œAnd why do they need animals to visit them, if Wilma tells them stories? Isn’t that excitement enough? You don’t want to overtax those old folks.”
    She sighed.
    â€œGet her to read that story by Colette, the one where the cat gets pushed off the high-rise balcony, that ought to grab them.”
    She shivered and moved closer to him in the tall grass. They were quiet for a while, listening to the nighthawk and to the far pounding of the sea. But, thinking of Casa Capri, she felt like the little milkmaid cat. She wanted to know too much. She was certain, deep in her cat belly, that she was going to find, like the little milkmaid, that there was summat bad down there .
    She could hardly wait.

5
    Mae Rose had her good days, when she was able to walk slowly out onto the patio, holding on to the back of the chairs, when she could sit out there enjoying the flowers and the warm sun. But there were days when she was so shaky, when she looked back at herself from the mirror white as flour paste.
    Those days she felt vague and afraid, those days she was too weak to walk at all, and had to be helped not only from her bed and to get dressed, but even into her wheelchair. Those bad days, a nurse wheeled her into the social room and through it to the dining room and helped to feed her, and she felt 120 years old.
    But the times when she woke feeling strong and happy and ready for the day, she felt as good as she had at fifty. Those times she could even sew a little. Of course, she still made the doll clothes—that was nearly all she had left. All her life she’d made doll clothes, even when she was so busy working in wardrobe before the children were born. After the children came she’d left little theater, and that was when she hit on making a business of designing doll wardrobes. James had laughed at her—James had always patronized her—but she’d had a brochure printed up with pictures of her dressed dolls, and she sent carefully stitched samples of her little doll coats and dresses, too. It didn’t take long before she was making enough money from her exclusive toy-store customers to dress herself and their three girls and buy thelittle extras they wanted. James said she spoiled the children. James thought her impossibly childish just because she loved the little, pretty details of life. If that made her childish, she couldn’t help it. James said she would have fit better in the Victorian era, when a woman could be admired for choosing to deal only with the minute and the pretty.
    Well she’d raised three children, and not a lot of help from James. He had died when their oldest, Marisa, was only twelve. It wasn’t her fault that she hadn’t been able to deal with the passions of those children; they were James’s children, born and bred. When they got into their teens, and she was trying to raise them alone, it seemed impossible that the little beasts could be her own. The girls’ puberty had been a terrible time: she had suffered from too many sick headaches during those years.
    But the girls all got married off at last, and whatever went on in between she had wiped from memory. Now, of course, all three girls lived so far away that they could seldom visit, two on the East Coast with their husbands, and Marisa in Canada on a