Free Nine Lives Last Forever by Rebecca M. Hale Page B

was time for their supper.
    I crossed the showroom, stepping carefully around the furry bodies that eagerly herded me toward the stairs.
    Dilla’s package rested in my coat pocket. Wrapped up in brown kraft paper, it was a familiar book-sized rectangular shape. I patted the outside of the pocket, silently pondering as I started up the steps to the kitchen.
    “Wrao,” Isabella chirped impatiently, swatting insistently at my tired legs. She raced up a few steps and turned to glower down at me as I lumbered slowly up the ascent. Rupert brought up the rear, urging me along from the steps below, occasionally shoving his head against the back of my knee.
    To the consternation of my starving feline companions, I stopped halfway up the stairs and pulled Dilla’s package out of my pocket. Turning it over in my hands, I couldn’t help thinking how similar the shape was to Harold’s green Mark Twain book. I tested the pieces of tape that secured the folded flaps of the wrapping, but they were firmly attached to the kraft paper.
    “Hmm,” I sighed, wondering if I should open it.
    “Wa-oourrrr!” Isabella demanded fiercely.
    “Yes, of course,” I replied. “Right away.”
    I skipped up the remaining steps to the kitchen. Isabella paced back and forth in front of the cupboard that held the cat food, making sure I knew where I was supposed to go next.
    Four eager eyes fixed on me while I pried open the plastic lid of a container and poured out a meal’s worth of dry food into each cat’s bowl. Satisfied munching sounds filled the kitchen as I sat down at the table and dropped Dilla’s package on its surface.
    I leaned back in my chair, glancing at the room around me. While I’d done a lot of work on the Green Vase showroom since Oscar’s departure, the two floors of the upstairs apartment remained much the way he’d left it.
    The living quarters were vintage Uncle Oscar—which is to say the only maintenance that had been done over the course of the last fifty or so years involved the application of the cheapest available materials unrestricted in any way by building codes or construction guidelines. The kitchen was probably the best example of Oscar’s creative handiwork.
    From my seat at the table, I could count at least a half a dozen different patterns of wallpaper. Despite the liberal use of staples and tape to tamp the patterned sheets down, each one curled outward along its exposed edges.
    There wasn’t a square corner in the entire kitchen. The leaning walls somehow managed to meet up with the room’s low ceiling, which sagged in places as if something large and bulging were sitting on it from above. On the upper half of one of the walls, a warped wooden board provided a shaky shelf for my uncle’s large collection of cookbooks.
    An ancient dishwasher commanded the space next to the sink. I had long since given up trying to use it. Every attempt had resulted in a nearly unstoppable eruption of foamy soapy water that spilled down its front and out across the uneven tiles of the kitchen floor.
    My uncle’s well-used wooden table dominated the center of the room. The grains in the table’s wood planking had swelled and softened over its many years of service, providing a smooth, if not altogether flat, surface.
    It was here where Dilla’s brown paper package lay, tempting me to open it.
    Smacking her lips to catch a crumb from her whiskers, Isabella sat back from her food bowl and gazed up at the table. Her immediate hunger satiated, she was now ready to investigate the package. Her sleek orange-tipped tail pointed into the air as she sauntered over to me, expressing her interest in the item that had so frustratingly delayed her supper.
    She reached the table and hopped up onto the chair beside me. Her sharp blue eyes studied the package intently as she sniffed it with the pulsing pink cushion of her nose.
    “I think, maybe, I should open it,” I suggested. My arms crossed over my chest as I stared down at