the view from the cherry tree by willo davis roberts

The car horn was just old Max, and now he was coming around the side of the house toward the back door. He’d never seen one, but he’d heard about it. Like the old lady would start yelling, and maybe she’d froth at the mouth when she had her fit. He waited, hoping something would happen. When he looked back, the curtains were still flapping, but Sonny was gone. And then Rob missed the action because out front a car horn sounded and he let it distract him for just a second. The muscles bunched under the black pelt as he prepared to attack the curtains. Sonny crouched at the end of the limb, his tail twitching, then still. He’d never actually seen it happen, and he couldn’t think of a better place to see it than with Mrs. somebody was always “having fits,” or about to. The old lady would have fits if Sonny landed in her dining room. Rob knew perfectly well that he ought to stop him. Sonny made the leap from lawn to limb in one long bound, sitting below Rob in the cherry tree for a moment, then inching out toward the blowing curtains in Mrs. Calloway hated cats, and Rob was supposed to keep Sonny away from her place, but what sense did that make? You couldn’t police a cat all the time. Rob watched with interest as the cat approached the corner of the Calloway house. Sonny was twenty-two pounds of the meanest cat in the country. The furniture was all old and funny looking, too, very dark and depressing.Īs he sat with his back against a big limb, eating cherries and spitting out the pits, he saw Sonny creeping across the lawn toward Mrs. He couldn’t tell if it was dusty, but he imagined it smelled funny, the way the old lady herself did. Calloway’s rug was dark red, which ought to have been pretty, but it wasn’t. Now he didn’t believe that anymore, but he wouldn’t have gone inside her house for anything. When he was little, he’d believed the stories the older kids told, about how she caught kids and ate them, like the witch in Hansel and Gretel.

Calloway for nine of his eleven years, but he’d never been inside her house.

The day was warm enough for even Old Lady Calloway to open her windows, and the slight breeze stirred the heavy lace curtains so that he caught glimpses of the inside. All anybody talked about these days was the wedding, like there was a law, or something, that made other subjects forbidden. He couldn’t understand what they were saying because they were all talking at once, but he knew, anyway. Calloway’s dining room that he was looking behind him, at home, female voices came through the open windows. Calloway’s house right up against it, as a matter of fact, and one of the numerous causes of problems with their neighbor. It was the Mallorys’ tree, but it was closest to Mrs. From his perch in the cherry tree Rob Mallory could see into the houses on either side.

The view from the cherry tree by willo davis roberts