The Cat Ate My Brother-In-Law

Here’s a math problem for you:

If I was my second husband’s third wife and I was 20 years younger than him, how much did his devoutly Catholic family hate me?

The answer: A lot.

Dave was one of eight or nine children — really, after the fourth, who’s counting? He was closest to his sister, "Cindy", who actually looked like a female version of my husband, which was confusing, and who might have been a nun at one point. When my memory fails me, I tend to make things up. But nun feels right.

Cindy was married to "John", my brother-in-law.

John didn’t talk a lot, not that I interacted with him an enormous amount. Dave’s family lived in Michigan, a state to which, prior to marrying Dave, I had never been, despite its proximity to Ohio.

You know when you’ve crossed the border into Michigan because the asphalt highway turns to dirt.

I didn’t know this about Michigan. I knew Michigan was full of football-obsessed people who hated OSU, but I assumed the state was nonetheless almost exactly like mine, e.g. it had paved roads. I mean, it’s one inch away on the map. How different could it be?

Michigan is extremely different from Ohio. It’s more than the aforementioned dirt roads. It’s the foreboding pine forests. It’s the constant references to the UP (“upper peninsula”) which is basically Canada, and to the hideous (I’m just guessing here) movie Escanaba in da Moonlight starring (and I use that term loosely) Jeff Daniels.

And the state of Michigan is essentially one long coastline. As far as I can tell, the entire state is within a half-hour’s drive of water. There is no tillable soil in Michigan. It’s all sand. Just when you think you’re going to see a field or some cows grazing or something normal like that, you drive into some kind of swamp full of blasted trees like you’re journeying to Mordor.

And then the next thing you know, you’re in Ludington, where everybody hated me.

John, my brother-in-law, didn’t talk a lot. Maybe he was on board with the whole “We hate Bev” thing, or maybe he just didn’t talk a lot. I never interacted with him enough to find out.

One weekend we visited Ludington and decided to spend the night at Cindy and John’s house, mostly because it was high tourist season and it was impossible to find a motel room. My husband was a K-9 officer, so we were always attached to two or three German Shepherds, which also made lodgings problematic.

Sometime around 2:00 in the morning, we heard John banging and slamming things in the kitchen. Dave had warned me that John had “issues”. Whether mental or pharmaceutical or both, I never found out.

But this set the scene for when, many months later, John went off the deep end and threatened his family with a gun. They moved out, leaving John to his own devices alone in the house.

At some point, John died.

The next time we visited Cindy, she had moved back into the house. She showed us where they had found John, dead in his recliner.

Dead for a really long time.

John and Cindy had a cat that stayed with John after Cindy left. In fact, the cat was central to the drama Dave and I heard on the night we first visited. John, in some kind of medicated daze, had been trying to find cat food to feed the cat.

If life was a novel, this would be called “foreshadowing.”

Cindy waved vaguely at where the recliner had been and said, “They replaced the flooring and all of the carpeting because the cat had thrown up here and there from…you know.”

Needless to say, I was FASCINATED. It was like a real-life 20/20 episode. I expected Stone Phillips to walk in any minute.

I had SO MANY QUESTIONS that I couldn’t ask because Dave’s eyes were boring into me and I knew that was code for “Do not say the weird things you’re thinking.”

For example, when Cindy said “they replaced the flooring,” who was “they”? Did she have to call a special cleaning company like in Sunshine Cleaning? How common are those companies, really? Does insurance cover the cost?

When you sold the house, would you have to disclose that someone died in it and was eaten by the cat?

If not, how do you explain that just this square of floorboards is completely new? Small fire? Water damage from an aquarium? Termites?

After this very limited tour of the renovated premises, we sat down to chat or whatever it is you do in other people’s houses.

The minute I sat down, the cat showed up.

Now, I guess I thought that after “the incident”, a normal person wouldn’t keep the cat. But look at the family in Pet Sematary. People apparently give cats a lot more leeway than I, personally, am willing to give.

The cat headed straight for me. I don’t even like cats, but suddenly I was the Cat Whisperer. She jumped into my lap and started purring loudly.

Of course I petted her. I’m not a monster.

Dave’s eyes were in overdrive.

Maybe there was no awkward silence. Maybe I just went temporarily deaf as the cat started to lick my arm as if to say, “Needs salt.”

I gently picked her up and placed her on the floor, resisting the urge to run screaming out into Lake Michigan.

It wasn’t the cat’s fault. It definitely wasn’t Cindy’s fault, or my husband’s fault, or his family-who-hated-me’s fault. It was sort of John’s fault, but maybe not. I didn’t really know any of them that well, and I never would. Not even my husband.

And I definitely was never going to know the cat.