“You don’t look like no ‘tectives on TV, Granny,” Ben had announced at his first opportunity to comment on my new career. He’d stuck one pudgy digit up his nose and pointed another one at me accusingly. “None o’ them gots white hair.”
“Stick around for a few seasons, kid. They will,” I’d answered.
What the hell. I was used to skepticism. Any veteran mother that isn’t has her goddamned ears stuffed with kumquats.
Swearing was a habit I’d picked up when Fred was alive. One day I got the impression that Fred hadn’t been listening to me for a while. Say, twenty years. So I thought I’d try a little verbal variety to see if he’d notice. At first, it was just an experiment. Then, you know, it became a challenge; tomorrow he’ll notice, I’d think. There toward the end, though, I didn’t want him to break his record. But I didn’t cheat. And Fred Caliban went to his grave believing I was the same sweet girl he’d married. Since I’d never actually been sweet, either, except in Fred’s imagination, you can see how alert he was.
It’s no wonder I’d wanted a change when Fred died. See, I had this epiphany in the women’s john at McAlpin’s Department Store in downtown Cincinnati. But that’s another story—maybe I’ll tell you when I know you better. What I wanted was THE change, but I figured I’d better make my own change, since Mother Nature, like most mothers I know, was overextended and running behind.
I loved my kids as much as the next mother, but three kids and thirty-eight years of marriage didn’t seem like much to show for more than half a century. Oh, the kids came out okay, I guess, even though now that they were grown up mid could tell me what to do they could be regular pains in the ass. Sharon was a successful stockbroker who had negotiated a merger with a male stockbroker as practical and unimaginative as she was, and they had produced one grandchild, Benjamin, the hair color critic. As the oldest of my offspring, Sharon claimed the privileges of seniority when it came to giving me advice. My second child, Jason, was some kind of business executive, on his third marriage and his fourth kid. You might’ve thought his own mistakes disqualified him from telling other people what to do, but he was Sharon’s ally. Then there was Franny, my favorite, who was off somewhere attending school. I lost track the fourth time she switched colleges and majors. She was the original boomerang kid: she always came home to her mother when she couldn’t think of anything else to do. The myth of the eternal return, which Franny had tried to explain to me when she was an anthropology major at Michigan, was no myth as far as I was concerned.
Then there was my better half, Fred, as dull and familiar as the Council on Dental Therapeutics statement on the Crest toothpaste tube. My generation of women didn’t think much about divorce, once the initial postwar flurry died down. We didn’t expect marriage to be different with anybody else short of Rock Hudson, who was even less available than we knew. It never occurred to us to live on our own. With what? Besides, the women’s magazines were crammed with advertisements featuring lonely spinsters of thirty whose lives had been ruined because of halitosis or body odor; we were supposed to be lucky.
So with Fred gone I’d wanted a big change, and I’m not talking facelift and hair color. I wanted a new career. I’d read those articles about looking at your housekeeping skills from the perspective of work experience—accounting, management, personnel super-vision, maintenance. I reassessed all my skills and surveyed the reading I’d been doing for the past twenty years. That’s how I came up with the idea of Cat Caliban Investigations, a private inquiry agency.