A Star

She looked down at the umbrella dangling from my left wrist and asked, “Is it going to rain?” It was a silly question because everybody knows that it never rains in California in the summer. I told her that it was for the sun, not for the rain. She looked perplexed and then slightly vexed.

Her last name was “Star”, and she was renting the house in which we’d just completed a month of cat-sitting. My husband and I were temporarily residing in a sprawling Bay Area home for the cost of scooping out a litter box on a daily basis and forcing allergy pills down one cat’s throat daily. It was a good deal for us, less so for the cat

The Star and her husband were forking over thousands of dollars for their summer there in addition to doing cat duty. They had something or other to do with Stanford University and surely she felt smart enough to know that an umbrella on a sunny California day did not mean rain. To her, I was just a delivery person who was diverting her from the process of moving into her temporary home and embarrassing her with my parasol.

To end her discomfort, I offered her the key that I’d just walked a little over 40 minutes in the cruel sun to deliver. She took it from my hand with a terse smile that showed a sense of relief that this brief social altercation would soon be over and then she bid me farewell. The door was closed nearly in my face and I turned to walk home. At the end of the walk, when the shade ran out, I opened my black umbrella and emerged into the light of the star-less day.