All stories › Humor › Found Tortoise, Very Calm › Episode 1
The Laundry Basket
Episode 1 of 3 of Found Tortoise, Very Calm by Tara Kincaid · free to read
The laundry basket cracked on the third stair.
I carried her the rest of the way with both arms under the bottom. Priscilla opened the apartment door before I got to it. She had heard the stairs complaining.
“Why is our laundry in the hallway?” she said.
“I needed the basket.”
She looked into it. The tortoise looked back. She was as wide as a car tire, sandy brown, with front legs like two old catcher’s mitts.
“No,” Priscilla said.
“She was walking down the middle of our street. Right on the yellow line. A pickup was following her at one mile an hour with its hazards on.”
“So you put her in our laundry basket.”
“The pickup guy helped me lift.”
Priscilla had a rule about pets. The rule was that we discussed pets first. We had been discussing a cat for two years.
“We are not keeping a tortoise,” she said.
“I’m not keeping her. I’m holding her. I’ll post her on the neighborhood board tonight.”
“And people come here?”
“No. I’ll meet them at the coffee shop on the corner. Saturday morning. I’m not giving our address to a stranger who loses tortoises.”
I set the basket on the kitchen tile. The tortoise climbed out over the cracked side and walked straight into the refrigerator. Then she kept walking into it, patiently, as if it would eventually give.
Priscilla sighed, which I took as permission, and cut up a strawberry.
“If she’s spending the night, she eats,” she said.
I put the strawberry in front of her. The tortoise stopped and considered it. Then she pushed it away with one front foot, like a bill she didn’t recognize.
She ignored the romaine too. So I took a flashlight to the back lot behind our building, where nothing had ever been sprayed, and pulled a fistful of dandelions and grass. She ate all of it in under a minute.
That night I posted. Found: large tortoise, very calm. Owner can meet me at the coffee shop on the corner, Saturday at nine. I will be the man with the tortoise.
On Friday I drove her to the vet with a seat belt across the basket.
The vet tipped her up on her side on a padded table.
“Sulcata,” she said. “Female. Flat underneath, short tail. Sixty-one pounds.”
“How old?”
“People count the rings. The rings lie. Twenty, maybe thirty. They live seventy years, easy. Some pass a hundred. She could have seventy years left.” She patted the shell. “She’ll probably outlive you.”
I was thirty-four. When I told Priscilla, she did the math faster than I had.
“So she could be with us until you’re a hundred and four,” she said.
The vet ran a scanner wand along the left back leg, where chips usually go, and then over every inch of her.
“Chips can migrate, so I check everywhere,” she said. “Nothing. Want me to put one in?”
“She’s not mine to chip.”
She wrote that down, which I chose to take as respect.
“She needs heat,” she said. “A basking spot near a hundred degrees, the rest of her space in the eighties, and a UVB bulb. They don’t hibernate. Nights are going into the forties next week, and cold just makes them sick. Grass, hay, weeds. No fruit.”
“She wouldn’t touch a strawberry.”
“Then somebody raised her right. Most of the ones I see have been on fruit salad since birth. She doesn’t even know a strawberry is food. And keep her inside. Sulcatas dig. Give her a yard and she’d be under somebody’s deck by morning.”
By Friday night our bathroom was eighty-five degrees, with a heat lamp on a stand at the far end, over a flat paving stone and well clear of the bed of hay where the bath mat used to be.
Priscilla showered at the gym.
Saturday was in the sixties. The vet had said an hour of that wouldn’t hurt her, so I put a towel over the basket and carried her to the corner. The laundry was still in the hallway.
The coffee shop let me have a patio table as long as she stayed in the basket. The barista leaned over to look.
“What’s her name?”
“She doesn’t have one.”
My cup said Tortoise.
At nine-twenty a man in a windbreaker walked up holding his phone out like a badge.
“Rocco,” he said.
He was Omar Ortega, and he had photos. Rocco on a patio. Rocco with his face in a slice of watermelon, pink to the eyes. Every one of them looked exactly like the tortoise in my basket.
Every tortoise, it turned out, looked exactly like the tortoise in my basket.
“Nine days he’s been gone,” Omar said. His eyes were wet. “The kids made posters.”
I almost handed him the basket right there.
“The vet says she’s a girl,” I said.
“Rocco’s a boy. Our vet said so.” He wiped his face. “And he’s chipped. Have them scan again.”
“She scanned everywhere.”
“Then her scanner’s broken. I’ll bring the records next week.”
That night, two new replies came in on the board. Two more people who wanted Saturday at nine.
Neither of them called her Rocco.