Mimi Read Online Free PDF Page A

wall, as if he’d just slipped out of some bar for a pee. Poor old Santa—his day was done, adoration time over. I stumbled on toward the North Pole (represented by the lights at the end of the alley) until I heard a voice. Not Santa’s luckily, but a muffled miaow . A cat, out in weather like this?
    â€œAin’t a fit night out for man nor beast!” I said to him, and the cat miaowed louder. A W. C. Fields fan! I headed in his direction, as unthreateningly as possible, to see if the cat needed any help. The miaowing seemed to be coming from behind a snow-covered mound of trash, and it became more frantic the closer I got. I scraped the snow away and, under a pile of crumpled bikes and lost umbrellas, finally saw a small form moving around. I put out my hand to pat him, and he obligingly tried to reach it but was prevented by a bunch of spokes. Maybe he’d gone under the bikes for shelter in a blizzard, and they’d shifted under the weight of the snow, barring his exit. Anyway, what might have seemed a safe sleeping spot before the snowstorm had become a potential tomb. It was freezing out there! He couldn’t survive the night.
    Luckily, Pick-up Sticks was my ancient rainy-day specialty. I’d honed my skills by making Bee play it again and again when we were kids. (A talent that had proved handy in surgery too.) So I now carefully removed one knot of metal at a time, trying to prevent the whole structure collapsing onto the cat, who continued to cry out to me as I worked: he was a friendly little guy. When I finally got him out and placed him gently on a thin patch of snow, he limped right over to me and rubbed himself against my legs. A limp?! That did it. I couldn’t leave a fellow crip out in the cold. I’d search for his owners some other time—for now, he was coming home with me. And when I picked him up he clung to my shoulder like a baby, but weighed so little I had to keep checking he was still there beneath my thick glove.
    Back in the apartment, I put him in a sink full of warm soapy water to raise his core body temperature (and clean him of f ), an ordeal he tolerated pretty well, for a cat. What emerged was a handsome young fellow, with black, white and reddish fur.
    â€œWhat’s black and white and red all over?” I asked him. No answer. “A newspaper. Get with it, man!”
    In the kitchen I found him some milk and an old ham sandwich, which he politely ate. So easy to please! Then he investigated my whole place, every nook and cranny, undaunted by his limp. He was particularly taken with the scalloped window seat below the slanted window in the living room, instantly recognizing it as the longest cat bed in the world. He jumped up and paused to stand there on his back legs, front paws on the window sill, looking out at New York.
    I was about to lay down some newspapers in a closet, for him to use as a temporary cat-box, when I remembered an extremely bijou tray of 100% organic Irish peat-bog mulch, or some such thing, that Gertrude had lugged over at some point and dumped on my terrace intending me to grow tarragon or lemon thyme in it, maybe sorrel. Thanks to the gaudy phosphorescent swirls and curlicues around its rim, I was able to find it in the dark and brought it in. Bubbles, as I now called him since his bubble bath, instantly recognized the true purpose of Gertrude’s agricultural gift and scrabbled energetically in the dirt. He was clearly not feral. He was sophisticated, trusting, and accustomed to human contact and the demands of domesticity. But so thin —he must have been faring for himself on the streets of Manhattan for some time. And now he was sitting on my lap, licking my finger, and looking up at me with love. I hadn’t felt this good in years! Gertrude rarely licked me, and never liked me. Hell, she’d hardly even noticed me.
    I checked his legs for any sign of a wound that might cause the limp, but nothing seemed