Nicole M. Taylor - No Faith in Cats

A wild plant containing a toxin called tremetol. Poisoning usually occurs indirectly, after a person drinks milk or eats meat from cattle that have grazed upon the plant.

I f you want to get persnickety about it, Benjis birthday was on Wednesdaybut who goes to a party on a Wednesday? No, Saturday worked better for everything.

Its a lot to keep track of, planning a party. Everyone pretends its soooo easy, like any idiot could do it, but theres really a lot of moving parts. For example: Sundaysespecially Sunday eveningsare, on average, the busiest times for an emergency room. Saturdays are calm in comparison.

That meant Benji would be sure to get the attention he deserved.

Id even started to research which hospital he was likely to be routed to, based on average patient load and proximity and there were really only a couple of options. Rich people only went to hospitals of a certain caliber, and just as Benji would never have stayed in a Motel 6, he wasnt going to be sent to the overstuffed county hospital either.

I initially forgot these things because I wasnt a rich personI was just married to one. Soon, though, Id have money all my own and Id have to know all of this like an instinct.

Benji and I were married for almost exactly two years, but I knew everything I needed to know about him long before we walked down the aisle (or, stood in line at the county courthouse). Id been with my first husband when I met Benji and his sister Clara at an art auction. Jakobmy first husbands name was Jakobalready knew them, of course. The Fraye siblings, the last heirs. Both of them had the good kind of plastic surgery, the kind that Jakob had to tell me about because I couldnt tell just from looking at them.

Benji was rich, but not the sort of rich where you had a company or made up some kind of crazy invention. He was rich because his father had been rich, who had been rich because his father had been rich. And all this meant that he wasnt nearly as rich as he might have been, if hed been born a generation earlier.

Jakob, who was the sort of rich that comes from founding a company, explained to me how that was the way money always goes. Thats why, he said, well teach our kids better. Theyll know the value of a dollar.

As if I was ever going to push his kids out my down-below!

I hadnt been meaning to jump ship when I met Benji, but I have always been impatient. My mother used to chide me for it all the time, and I think it is my great flaw. I got ahead of myself, got a little bit careless and... well, it all worked out in the end, so I cant really say that I regret it, but I do think about it from time to time, about how it might have gone differently.

With Benji, though, I was focused and in control. Id made a plan and I was sticking to it! I think my mama wouldve been proud of me; she wouldve said that I was growing and coming into my own as a woman.

Its incredible, how often she comes into my mind. I think about her every day, wondering what she wouldve done in my situation, wondering how she wouldve felt about me, wondering if shed like me as I am now. I suppose a girl never really leaves her raising behind, no matter how far she goes.

I remember the first time I saw an apartment building. It was on TV and I was eight years old. It looked about as real to me as Cinderellas castle. (Later, I found out that Cinderellas castle really does exist, sort of, but no one really lives there. Lots of real people live in apartments.)

And now look at me!

My home (well, Benjis home) was a fourteen-room mansion with a long, tapering pool that overlooked the whole city. I liked to go out there at night, after Benji had already gone to sleep. I never learned how to swim, so Id cling real tight to the far end of the pool, concrete pricking at my bare arms. Id look down and see the electric-lit hills melting into one another like cats sleeping all in a huddle. I liked to imagine that someone could be living down there, maybe in some shitty little apartment next to a Mexican grocery store or a gas station and that they were looking up at our home, a white protrusion impossibly far above them. Maybe they even tried to picture someone like me in their minds, someone beautiful and remote.

I have always been beautiful. I was the kind of kid people would have stopped on the street to compliment, except that we almost never went out in public. Still, I could see just from looking at my siblings and my parents that I was something special.

Mommie had told me as much, too. Shed warned me that the way I looked was not a gift from God but challenge from the Devil.

The enemy is always waiting, just waiting for us to stumble, shed said. He made you beautiful so it would be easier for you to fall into the sin of pride. You have to guard your heart against it.

Mommie had told me it was my burden, one of many, and it wasnt until long after she was dead that I realized beauty is also a tool.

Everyone likes beautiful people, especially rich people. You can tell, because its the first thing anyone tries to buy when they get a little bit of money.

That was how I got Benji! It was true what Jakob said about Benjis family fortune steadily draining away over the years, but while it may not have made Benji particularly frugal, it did make him gun-shy in certain ways. He didnt have no ex-wives, no kids (at least not any that were willing to prove it in court). Benji meant to keep that fraction of a fortune he had left, and he lorded over it like a dragon on his treasure-pile. But he was getting oldand nobody can escape