Cat In A Quicksilver Caper

“That did seem like a lot of kids for Protestants in Minnesota, but my oldest brothers were already in high school when I came along and seemed more like . . . cousins or young uncles. Come to think of it, somebody did once suggest to me that my family was so large because my parents wanted a girl.”

“That may have been part of it, but who wouldn’t have wanted you?” Kit smiled fondly as she stroked Temple’s blond hair. “You were adorable. I was almost ready to escape back to New York with baby you. Yeah, I think Karen really, really wanted a girl. Because she was the older sister and she always thought they hadn’t raised me right. But then you turned out to love all the things I had. Theater. Writing. Fascinating guys who aren’t about to settle down to nine-to-five jobs and backyard barbecues. With lutefisk yet. Life isn’t fair.”

“Oh.” Temple had never seen her family like that, through the opposite end of a telescope, far and wee, as a whole unit of time and distance and many different personalities. She was that little red dot, there, on the fringes of the four boisterous older brothers and her harried parents. Like a little red wagon left out in the rain.

She was supposed to be Kit, only doing the right Minnesota thing: staying in the home state, marrying and having kids, driving a minivan, and not worrying about dead men hanging from bungee cords. Or what her magician boyfriend was really up to, or whether she should marry an ex-priest at a Las Vegas wedding chapel, maybe even with Elvis officiating. . . .

“Oh,” Temple said. “So that’s it. That’s the vague something I always felt. I was a disappointment.”

“Not to me, kiddo.” Kit chimed mug brims with her. “Just don’t go all Carpool Mom on me now. I was out until four. So? I don’t ask what your ex-live-in does when he comes creeping in at three A.M., do I?”

Temple felt her face flushing, not a good complement to ice-cool blond hair.

“Listen,” Kit said, “I am very carefully not prying into your love life, although your landlady has told me ‘The Tale of the Bed’ one floor up in lavish detail.”

“Things are a little . . . unsettled lately,” Temple confessed.

“No kidding.”

“So . . . what about your love life?”

Kit lifted her cup in a toast. “Viva Fontana!”

“What? All of them?”

“I’m flattered by your question, but no, alas. I’m not as young as I used to be. Aldo and I have been doing the town.”

“Aldo?” Temple rapidly pulled up a mental image of a lineup of Fontana brothers. They had such an impact en masse: tall, dark, handsome guys in pale designer suits with an air of concealed Berettas and expensive cologne possibly named Vendetta. Nine in all, not counting their brother Nicky, the clan’s white sheep, who owned the Crystal Phoenix Hotel and Casino. They had always treated Temple like a kitten among a litter of adolescent Dobermans, protective and playful and ever so careful to see that she never got hurt.

They were like fairy-tale brothers, she realized. Not rough or teasing and distant like her four real brothers, but courtly and happy and good to have on her side and really cool to be seen with. Now her own aunt Kit was poaching on one of her idealized foster family.

“Isn’t the age difference—?” Temple began.

“Math was never your strong suit, right?” Kit asked.

“No,” Temple said meekly.

“Figure it out. Ten brothers. Even a Mafia matron could hardly crank ’em out faster than one every eighteen months to two years. The eldest Fontanas are pushing fifty.”

“No!” Temple felt a cherished assumption melt like cardboard in the rain.

“Well, forty-five anyway,” her aunt temporized in the face of Temple’s horror. “Cheer up. That’s mid-life, a stage that lasts a whole lot longer these days. Anyway, I’m not exactly robbing the cradle.”

“Oh.” That meant her aunt was sleeping with a Fontana. “But you must be—”

“Don’t go there, kid, or I’ll call your mother on you.”

Sixty, Temple was thinking. Her mother was way past sixty, like sixty-three. Kit was either there or almost there. She was cool, yes, and didn’t act her age. Just like the Fontanas.

Oh.

“So what’s going on with you?” Kit asked, pouring more coffee.

Kit’s eyes were wide open now. She had a pretty square face with strong, camera-loving features: sharp jaw, small nose, high cheekbones, deep-set eyes. She looked, with her attractively faded reddish hair tousled and her glasses off, maybe . . . forty-something.

More like Temple’s big sister than her aunt.

“Not much lately,” Temple admitted after sipping straight black bitter coffee. She was too listless for some reason this afternoon to rustle up the fake sugar and watery milk that usually adulterated her morning coffee. “Max and I don’t seem able to coordinate our schedules these days.”

“Maybe more than bad timing is the problem. What about Mr. New Bed upstairs?”

Temple groaned. “I don’t know.”