Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo

Today I cleaned the cat’s room. “Room,” by which I mean the closet at the top of the stairs that holds the litter box, the vacuum cleaner, my guitar case, out-of-season clothes, picture frames I haven’t found a wall for, old daycare drawings of M’s, and lots else that I’ve forgotten, buried under piles of the passing years. I’d been wincing every time I walked past that closet, looking at the scattered litter and the spilled cat food, evidence of a pregnancy in which I was told to avoid cat care and the rest of the family dutifully chipped in, but without quite the regularity or thoroughness with which I used to do the job.

Earlier, the baby allowed herself to be transferred off my lap for a nap, and for the first thirty minutes I wandered aimlessly around, eating handfuls of nuts and trying to figure out how to be productive. J was off work and we chatted for a little while about how to grow marijuana from seed, not because we plan to, but because the topic might possibly fit into a novel I’m working on. We tried to remember the names of the main characters from Narcos; I ate more nuts. We Googled the amount of dry buds, in weight, one plant might produce, and still the baby slept on.

“Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo!” I said.

“That was it,” J said. As an afterthought: “You could grow two big plants in that closet upstairs.”