Cat In A White Tie And Tails

Follows the dumb, desperate marriage to whatever lowlife will take a fallen woman to wife. Enter the lazy, worthless, haranguing Cliff Effinger. At least Miss Matt Mama gives poor Mr. Matt a false surname, her one act of defiance, changing that into something new, not the old Polish “maiden” name, not Effinger’s, but something unique and Devine. Mr. Matt grows up with such lousy father figures except for the parish priest that he becomes one. Maybe his interior kit thinks he can redeem his mother’s “mistake.”

Me, I find life tough enough as a former homeless street dude. I cannot see adding on all this additional angst, but humans have over the centuries invented whole systems designed to make most things miserable.

Mr. Matt is a good priest; he has to be a perfect “father,” after all, but he finally wakes up and smells the candles and realizes he cannot make up for anyone else’s past. So he gets himself cashiered out as a civilian, but tells no one he wants to track down the Evil Effinger, who has long since left his mother for the dubious attractions of the criminal life in Las Vegas.

It could be Mr. Matt is primed to leave a lot of Mr. Cliff Effinger’s skin on the asphalt. Whatever, he has an epiphany and puts the brakes on his revenge, but some other dudes take out the miserable cur. Murder, they wrote. The rest is a long slow dance to reconnect with his mother and encourage her to bury the past and grow strong in the new soil that has accrued over it during all these years.

Which is working great until Mr. Matt once again uses his tracking skills to find out his real father is not dead on foreign soil, as his mother was told by the guy’s family lawyers long ago, but alive and well and rich and unhappily married in his old hometown, Chicago.

I guess this is a “what if Romeo and Juliet had lived” story, and it looks like acts four and five are still coming. With my Miss Temple in the midst of all this, I cannot let her do it alone, but perhaps I must let her do a teeny tiny bit of it solo.

Although the family dinner tomorrow is sure to be a slaughter of more than the main course—I am violently against any but vegetarian fare for humans, given they have the unfair double advantage of opposable thumbs and automatic weapons—I decide that while our current crew is out for Sunday dinner I will find reason to hang out at Mr. Matt Mother’s homestead and see if I can catch whoever is spiking the place with billets-doux of a threatening nature.

Chapter 15

Prodigal Cat