The phone rang. I stopped writing, set the pencil on the score paper for the current number in the ballet, and rose with great effort from my writing table. By the time I had limped to the phone, the machine had picked up. I grabbed the receiver and said “Hello?” All I could hear was my voice on the machine “This is 212 . . .”
“Hold on,” I yelled into the receiver as I began to press buttons on the answering machine to turn it off. Nothing did the trick. I think it’s Annabelle’s fault for climbing all over the machine and the printer every day. Finally in disgust I hung the phone.
“Damn it!” I yelled in frustration.
“What’s wrong?” Annabelle asked. She looked up from her Backstage, which covered my computer table.
“This rotten answering machine. It’s supposed to turn off when I pick up the phone.”
“It’s because you buy shoddy items,” she said as she casually turned a page.
“This is a very good item, Missy. I think you’ve destroyed it.”
The phone rang. I picked it up. “Hello?” I said, trying to sound the least bit fraught.
“Hello, Mr. Moore,” a familiar voice said. “I enjoyed your battle with the answering machine.” He laughed.
“Detective Kibble! I haven’t heard your voice in months.”
“Years actually, I think. I don’t think we’ve spoken since the pandemic began.”
“It can’t be that long; is it?”
“I do not recall seeing you between 2020 and now.”
“Well, I’m going to check on that. I’ll ask Annabelle. She’s quite fond of you.” I looked over at Annabelle who was fast asleep on top of her Backstage. “And – uh, the pandemic? I hope you and those you love came through it all right.”
“Most of us did. My uncle died; he was one of the early ones.”
“I’m so sorry. I lost a cousin. I was very fond of him.”
“It wasn’t a good period to be a civil servant, but our precinct came through it pretty good.” We’ve got men still coming down with it.”
“My neighbor Jen came down with it in Italy. Sure ruined a good vacation! The cats and I hunkered down, and I only went out for doctor’s appointments – and I had surgery for cancer.” I laughed. “Can you top that?”
“Cancer? Really? I’m so sorry.”
“It was a tumor on my kidney, and they got it all. Now I’m waiting for a hip replacement. I’m falling apart.”
“Oh, jeez. You’re depressing the crap out of me.”
“I’m sorry. Enough of this social chitchat. Tell me why you called.”
“I wondered if you knew about these water balloon attacks on 82nd Street.”
I burst into laughter. “Water balloons? Really? I haven’t thought about those in years! Not since college.”
“There have been reports now for . . . three attacks over the past four weeks. No one’s been injured, but several people were really soaked, and they were not happy. We don’t know if it’s coming from 202 or 206 West 82.”
“You know, my building was originally 202 and 204; I think they were stuck together in the 1960s. My apartment straddles both addresses.”
“Interesting,” Detective Kibble replied. I could tell from his voice he wasn’t interested in my tales of New York real estate. “Well, I thought you might have heard about this water balloon thrower since you’re home quite a lot.”
“I haven’t heard a thing about this. Honest. Let me ask about.”
“Thank you, Mr. Moore. I hope I will be seeing you soon.”
“We’ll be talking soon. I’ll let you know if I hear anything.”
“Thanks so much. Oh, how are your cats? They haven’t been down to visit.”
“The cats are crazier than ever, you know. Well, I’ve got to get back to work. I haven’t had much work in three years, so I’m happy to be busy.”
“I understand. Let me know if you hear anything. Bye bye now.”
“Thanks for calling.” I hung up the phone.
“Who was that?” Annabelle asked. She rose from her nap.
“Your favorite policeman: Detective Kibble.”
“Thatch and I like him. He likes you, Daddy.”
“Annabelle, I’m seventy-six, and he’s, what?, maybe forty? I’m too old for him, but . . . you’ll like this, Missy. He needs our help with a mystery.”
“A mystery?” Thatch sat up on my bed where was napping. “I like that!”
“What is it?” Annabelle asked me.
“I’ll tell you in a minute. I gotta pee first.”
I grabbed my cane and lurched off to the bathroom. After finishing my reason for being there, I flushed the toilet. Instead of flushing, the water rose up to the top of the bowl and poured over onto the floor. The water didn’t run long, but there I stood in a large puddle surrounding the toilet. I looked around at the damage – soaked rug, and all the cleaning supplies, waste can, and litter box sat in the spreading puddle.
Then I began to curse.
So, there I stood, yelling at the top of my lungs every four -letter word known to man and a few new ones. I would have made Ethel Merman proud. Annabelle, Thatch, and Stella ran into the bathroom and stopped short at the first wet paw.
“Daddy!” Annabelle exclaimed from the doorway, “you’re all wet!”
“Just my shoes, Annabelle, but I am not happy at the moment. Not at all,” I yelled. “Damn it all to hell!”
“Your face is getting red!” Thatch called. “Are you okay?”
“No, Thatch, I am not.”
I began to toss every towel I could reach onto the floor to sop up the water. I reached for my cane and wandered out into the foyer. Three cats surrounded me.
“What are you going to do?” Annabelle asked.
“I am going to call the apartment management and tell them I need a plumber as soon as possible.”
After my call was made, I returned to the bathroom to plan my options. I decided that my first move was to pick up the soaking rug and towels and take them to the laundry. I lowered myself to my knees and crawled onto the wet floor. I grabbed the edge of the carpet and pulled it toward me. I tried to arrange the soaking towels onto it in a neat layer so that I could roll everything up into the rug. After accomplishing this, I tried to pick up the bundle. It was too heavy; the water had added tons to the weight, and I could not lift it. Even worse, I had backed myself into a corner and I had no means of support to lift myself out of the mire. As I tried to put the soaking bundle into the large bag on my walker, I knocked the walker over. It went down behind me, trapping me between the bathroom door and the foyer.
I panicked. I was so fraught between my physical condition, the situation I was in, and the mess I would have to clean up in the next few days that I lost it. I began to scream, repeating the stream of words I had uttered about thirty minutes earlier.
Knowing they were no help at all, three cats panicked and began screaming as well. There was a knock at the door. Still screaming, they abandoned me and ran off to their office in the linen closet.
“Larry? Hello!” the voice called. “Hello? Are you all right?”
“Who is it?” I asked.
“It’s Pixie,” the voice called. “I heard you yelling. Can I help you?”
Pixie is the wonderful neighbor below me. We’ve been neighbors for nearly forty years, and I’m very fond of her.
“Come in. The door’s open!” I called. “I’m stuck.”
I heard the door open and then the sounds of the walker being righted.
“What happened here?” she asked me.
Freed from the fallen walker, I crawled backward into the foyer. As I tried to explain everything, I lost it. I began to weep.
“I can’t do this alone! Oh, God, I am so scared. I don’t want to go into assisted living!” I cried.
She held me as I cried, saying “Nonsense” to all my fears. When I calmed down, she said, “So where do we start?”
“I’m fine now,” I told her. “I can take care of it.”
“What were you doing to do first?” she asked.
“Take all these wet things to the basement and wash them.”
“Okay. Let’s do laundry.”
She picked up the wet bundle of rug and towels, set it5 into the walker’s tote bag, and I went into the bathroom and pulled the laundry supplies. When we got to the basement, Pixie threw everything into a washer while I tossed the garbage ast the bottom of the bag into the various trash bins. On the elevator ride up, she told me about the play she was rehearsing.
“That’s wonderful!” I said. “I must warn you that I won’t be coming to see it, but I’m hoping it’s a big success for you.”
“You can’t make it?”
“No, darlin’, I refuse to do theatre and crowds with this walker.”
“I understand.” She walked me back to my apartment. “What do we do next?” she asked.
“I finish the laundry, give the cats their treat, then lie down and watch TV until bedtime. I don’t think I need to bother you any more tonight.”
“You sure?”
“Yes. I’m really grateful you helped me out. Thank you.”
“Okay. I’ll be downstairs learning lines. Call me if you need me.”
“I’ll be fine now.”
After Pixie left, the cats ran out of the linen closet. I told them what they had missed.
“Well, we could have helped you with your laundry!” Annabelle told me.
Visions of three cats climbing in and out of the washers and dryers or begging for rides in the laundry carts while I tried to do laundry and assure myself that none them ended up in a washer with the laundry rolled like a horror film before my eyes.
“Well, you three couldn’t have lifted that wet mess of towels and rug into the walker’s bag, so you’d be no help at all. I love you for offering to help. I’m going down the the basement to wait for the laundry to finish washing and drying.”
“We want to come too, don’t we?” Thatch said.
Shoot me, I thought. Instead, I said, “Okay, let’s go. Everybody ready?”
Stella ran to the door. Annabelle and Thatch followed her. As I dragged myself up from my computer chair, Annabelle turned to me and yelled, “We’re waiting, slow-poke!”
Put the bullet right here, I thought.
It took me three days to clean up the bathroom.
It hadn’t been thoroughly cleaned since May, 2020. After my cancer surgery in June 2020, I wasn’t good for anything. I was never a great housekeeper, but after the surgery, my loss of balance, and the need for a walker to move about, I was downright lousy: roaches ran wild throughout the apartment, I was no longer capable of moving objects such as books or storage cartons about the apartment, and to the disgust of Annabelle and Thatch, we lived in what I liked to call “genteel squalor.”
Every task I once could accomplish in an hour now took me two to three hours. I once could vacuum the entire apartment in fifteen minutes; now it took a minimum of forty-five minutes. I prayed to win the lottery so I could hire a full-time housekeeper and a sherpa to come in twice a week to file books and music, to run errands from buying a new watchband to making a grocery run. Sadly, I haven’t won the lottery, but I did determine that tackling the bathroom would be a three-day job before I could replace the vacuumed rug and towels.
The first day was the day after the toilet overflowed. I had to wait for the water to dry up before I could tackle the wet litter and sweep the floor. I spent the day instead removing all of the items sitting on the floor or living under the bathroom sink – Ajax scrubbing powder, Pine-Sol, sponges, scrubbing brushes, laundry supplies – and washing them off in the bathtub. I also located my toilet plunger and unclogged the toilet. I never heard from the building management.
The second day, the floor was completely dry. I moved the litter box into the kitchen, threw out the old litter mat, and thoroughly scrubbed the floor of one-half of the bathroom. I then vacuumed the area thoroughly and mopped it with a heavy load of Pine-Sol disinfectant. When the area was dry, I set down a new litter mat and moved the litter box back to the bathroom.
On the third day, after fighting the impulse to go no further, I gave the same treatment to the other half of the bathroom. After two days of crawling over sharp-edged kitty litter, my knees needed serious medical treatment, but, once I had put the rug and towels in place, I was ecstatic over the result and extremely happy that I had persevered.
“Well, Missy, what do you think of the bathroom?” I asked her.
“I like our new litter mat.”
“I love it!” Thatch enthused. “I did hate having to use the litter box in the kitchen.”
“Well, it was only in the kitchen about three hours a day,” I said.
“But it’s the kitchen! How uncouth,” said Miss Annabelle, the cat who never ever buries her poop.
“Well, now that this mess is over, I need to help Detective Kibble with his water balloon vandals. Are you three ready to help me? We could call it ‘The Case of the 82nd Street Terrorists’.”
“Maybe later,” Annabelle stated. “First we have another project to finish up. Let’s go to our office, Thatch. Stella, you coming?”
I watched three unenthusiastic cats vanish into the linen closet. Frankly, I was puzzled. They love a good mystery, and they love being helpful around the apartment building. Okay, I thought, I can ask about these water balloon attacks without them.
Every neighbor I saw told me they had either seen an attack or had heard about them. MaryAnne was leaving the building when a water balloon landed on the sidewalk next to her and her shoes got wet. Chris saw one land on the head of a businessman walking down 82nd Street. His head and shoulders were soaked, and he dropped his briefcase. I reported the information I gleaned to Detective Kibble for his dossier.
Quite elated over my three-day bathroom cleaning, I decided that I would tackle another project. My choice was the cats’ toy box. It was a mess, half the toys were broken and could be tossed out. So, I lowered myself onto the floor and began to sort the mess.
“What are you doing with that toy box?” Annabelle asked me.
“I’m cleaning it out. It’s a complete mess.”
“You don’t need to bother. We’ll clean it out, won’t we, Thatch?”
“Yes! It’s our box.”
“Ha!” I said scornfully. “You babies never clean up your messes. Look at this catnip mouse! Where’s the rest of it?” I pitched it into the waste basket. “What’s this?” I held up an opened pack of balloons.
“Are those yours, Thatch?” Annabelle asked him.
“Uh . . .no. I thought they were yours, Annabelle.”
My patience was wearing thin while Annabelle and Thatch denied any knowledge of the possessor of these balloons. “I asked you, whose balloons are these?”
“Well, if they don’t belong to Thatch, I don’t know whose balloons they might be. They’re not mine.”
“Confess it, Annabelle!” Thatch shouted.
“Stella!” Annabelle called. “Are these your balloons by any chance?”
“OMG,” I muttered. “Don’t tell me you two are the water balloon terrorists.”
“Caught!” Thatch gasped.
“We were just playing, Daddy,” Annabelle said sheepishly.
“It was fun!” Thatch said with too much happiness.
“Not to the people you hit,” I said sternly, “Oh, Lord! Do I have to turn you three over to Detective Kibble? He will not be happy.”
Annabelle grabbed my knee.
“Don’t tell him, Daddy! Pretty little girls can’t go to prison . . . do you think it might increase my chances of stardoms?”
“It was all Annabelle’s fault, Daddy,” Thatch cried. “I’m a baby! I can’t go to jail!” He began to wail. “Don’t send me up the river!” And then he wet the floor
And there I was, between Scylla and Charybdis with two wet knees.. Did I confess to Detective Kibble that my three delinquent cats were the 82nd Street terrorists and throw them to the mercy of the law or did I say nothing?
I’m a coward. Still on my knees, I watched Thatch and Annabelle plead for mercy. Stella copied their actions and mewed loudly as well.
“Okay, okay,” I said. The loud lamentation and wailing continued, “Okay! Listen to me! Shut up, please!” The cacophony ceased.
“What?” Annabelle asked.
“I won’t tell the detective what I know, if . . .”
“If what?” Thatch asked.
“If you never do this again. Ever. You hear me? No more water balloons, okay?”
“Oh, no!” Annabelle moaned. “It was such fun!”
“No more balloons, Missy. Understand?”
“Oh, I guess so.”
“I’m going to throw these balloons out, and this will be the end of it.”
I stood up, took the aper towel off the tea cart, wiped my knees, and then dropped back to the floor to wipe up Thatch’s accident.
Rats, I thought. I need the Lysol spray. Instead, I said, “I need to finish up the mess I began, so would you all go lay while I finish this cleanup?”
“Thank you, Daddy,” Annabelle said. “We’ll visit pebble and Oyster on the fire escape.”
A week later, I had to see my ophthalmologist for a cataract surgery checkup. As I stepped out of the car in front of my apartment building, I heard a familiar voice call my name. I looked up from the walker. It was Detective Kibble. It was really, really nice to see that three years of pandemic had done nothing to destroy his handsome features.
“Hello, Detective!” I said. “It’s nice to see you. What are you doing so far from the precinct?”
He laughed. “So far? It’s only a block away. I was getting some lunch at the corner bodega, and I thought I recognized you. I just wanted to say hello.”
“Well, thank you. It’s nice to see you, too. Are you working on another big case?”
“Actually, it’s been quiet lately. There’s been no more water balloon attacks, and no serious muggings. All I’m dealing with at the moment is a break-in on 85th Street.”
“I hope things stay calm. I’d hate . . . well, I don’t want to keep you from your lunch.”
“Do you need any help[ getting into the building?”
“No, thanks. I appreciate the offer, but I’ve got my comings and goings and wrestling with the walker down to a fine art. I’ll be okay.”
“If you’re sure . . .”
“I am. Enjoy your lunch.”
I watched him turn and head back to the corner. As he walked away, I gave his body a thorough checking. Body by God, I thought. Or Michelangelo. Still, no matter what Annabelle claimed, I had learned years before not to confuse kindness and friendliness with romantic interest.
I reached into my pocket for my keys, turned the walker to the front door, and began to lurch toward it. Just before I stepped under the fire escape over the front door, a water balloon landed on my cap and exploded.
©2023, Larry Moore
Annabelle & Thatch 