“Take it easy, Kate, take it easy. You don’t have to let anyone into your apartment. About the inheritance, well, I’ll have to look into that.” Over his shoulder Pop signals to me to go home and get Mom.
I go home and explain the situation to Mom, and she comes back with me. One photographer and a couple of reporters are still hanging around, and the guy snaps a picture of me and Mom at the door. Mom scoots on up. Bad as I feel, I still get a charge out of getting my picture taken for a paper.
“Hey, kid,” one of the reporters shoves in front of me, “about this Miss Carmichael. Does she act pretty strange, like talking to herself on the street and stuff?”
I see the story he’s trying to build up. While it’s true in a way, if you really know Kate it’s not. Anyway, I’m against it. I say, “Nah. She’s all right. She’s just sort of scared of people, and she likes cats.”
“How many cats she got?”
There have been up to a dozen on a busy day, but again I play it down. “She’s got a mother cat with kittens. Sometimes a stray or two. Don’t get sucked in by all that jazz these dumb kids around here’ll give you.”
“She gets all that money, you think she’ll buy a big house, set up a home for stray cats?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. She doesn’t want the money anyway. She just wants to be let alone.”
“Doesn’t want the money!” the photographer chips in. “Boy, she must be really nuts! I’m going back to the office.”
The reporter says he’s going to wait and talk to my pop, and I go on upstairs to see what’s doing.