Cat In A White Tie And Tails

“Listen, folks. We got your damn cat. We do not like your damn cat. We will call every hour to see if you got what you know we want. We will chop off an inch of your damn cat’s tail each time we call if you do not come across with the, uh, stuff we want. You know what we mean. Then we will start on the legs. So, uh, cough it up, and we will have an exchange where you can leave … er, what we want and collect what is left of your cat.”

There is silence as Lefty shuts off the cell phone.

“That was not very professional,” Shifty rebukes him.

“Whadda mean, ‘professional’? We do not even know what the Vegas bunch wants. They have left us in the dark looking stupid.”

I could point out that is not very hard, but hold my tongue in case they get an itch to chop it off in sections.

“And I do not know about all that cat-chopping you have committed us to. They have nasty, infected claws, you know. We could get rabies.”

“I was just saying that. You gotta threaten the hostage, and not with something namby-pamby. You gonna eat the whole sausage roll?”

Chapter 19

Tail End

Riding back from Sunday dinner in the Camry’s backseat, Temple felt both well fed and well feted.

Apparently, she was too darn cute to be considered the femme fatale who stole Father Matt. She passed the religion test when she sweetly told Uncle Stach that she was considering three wedding ceremonies, his, hers, and theirs and that St. Stanislaus Cathedral near downtown was her first choice. The Old World architecture was breathtaking, glowing golden paintings and arches and vivid stained glass.

Matt had taken Temple, Mira, and Krys there for Mass that morning. Temple had attended Mass with him at Our Lady of Guadalupe in Las Vegas, but she’d been impressed to realize that a formal church wedding would bring Matt full circle in both his faith and his future.

Also, walking down that long impressive aisle as a bride would be so British royalty. Her parents were extremely open-minded about sex and religion except for the first one when it pertained to their baby daughter. So the open-minded Unitarians would sop up the traditions and her mother would sop up her hankie because every mother of an only daughter really wants her daughter to have a white-gown pomp-and-ceremony wedding day.

A freeway had cut close to the cathedral, leveling the old Polish neighborhood. A statue of the New World’s Our Lady of Guadalupe in her vivid blue cloak gleamed amid all the gold-flecked Old World icons of Madonna and Child. This must have been where Matt’s parents had met, Temple thought, eyeing the tiers of flickering votive candles, although no one was talking about that.

So Temple wasn’t surprised when they drove out into the suburbs to Uncle Stach and Aunt Wanda’s house, which was filled with Zabinskis large and small. Nothing marred the Thanksgiving-festive dinner, starting with barszcz, beet soup. The whole family enjoyed spelling out their consonant-heavy words for Temple’s benefit, and Krys was particularly articulate on intoning the full form of her name, K-r-y-s-t-y-n-a.

Matt leaned near to tell Temple that Krys had used to “hate” her Old World name spelling.

Every kind and color of kielbasa were available, sausages colored from beige to yam golden to oxblood red brown. Given the large contingent of cousins both older and younger than Matt, there were various meats from breaded pork to Americanized turkey with giblets and gravy, boiled potatoes and noodles and lots of cream and poppy seed pastries for dessert, along with wine.

The long after-dinner recovery time showcased Krys’s slow burn at Temple’s easy adoption by her demanding family. She flirted furiously with Matt’s younger male cousins, of which he had enough to make up a new Fontana brothers gang. She drank way too much beer. And she declined driving home with them at 6 P.M., saying she was having too good a time. She would be along later. Maybe.