How to Wash a Cat Read Free Page B

tender, juicy chicken and rice. Below us, Oscar’s antiques collection glimmered in the faintly lit showroom.
    Unlike most of the Jackson Square antiques shops, which carried items from a wide range of time frames and geographic locations, the Green Vase’s collection was narrowly focused on pieces from the Gold Rush era. Within this specific genre, however, Uncle Oscar had accumulated far more than the typical antiques fare. Artifacts from almost every aspect of life were strewn throughout the store.
    For example, Oscar had an extensive collection of teeth. Successful miners had been anxious to show off the results of their labors, and gold teeth had been a favored vanity. Dentists had been called on to sacrifice countless healthy teeth in order to make space for gold replacements. Some unfortunate chops had been stripped of every last bit of enamel so that their owner could showcase a solid gold smile. Oscar’s display of gold teeth was complemented by a wide array of painful-looking dental instruments as well as a Gold Rush-era dental chair.
    San Franciscans had incorporated gold into every possible form of self-ornamentation: watches, cufflinks, pins, rings, seals, compasses, and chains. Gold-headed canes had been extremely popular (and useful to many given the backbreaking labor involved in mining). Gold inlays had been embedded into revolvers, knife handles, saddles, plates, dishes, and even a somewhat out of tune fiddle. The Green Vase had it all.
    The peaceful silence of the dinner table was broken by a loud clanging.
    “Blast!” Oscar jumped up and lumbered grouchily towards the phone.
    The cats were licking up the last drops of chicken broth from their tiny bowls on the floor. Isabella looked up politely; Rupert kept slurping.
    Oscar appeared to recognize the voice on the other end of the line, but I didn’t pick up much more than that from his side of the conversation.
    “Uh-huh.” There was a long pause. Then another, somewhat more interested, “Hmm, uh-huh.”
    The tip of Oscar’s index finger thoughtfully stroked the stubble on his chin. “Okay, I’ll see you first thing tomorrow.” And he hung up. He was still lost in thought when he rejoined us at the table.
    One of Oscar’s construction buddies, I figured, and helped myself to another drumstick.
    Part of Oscar’s success in the antiques world derived from his network of contacts within the local construction industry. Downtown San Francisco was undergoing a rapid building boom, and new high-rise office and residential projects were rapidly changing the skyline. To steady the structures through coming earthquakes, strict building codes mandated that the construction be fortified by metal pilings drilled deep into the earth. Each scalping pit provided the opportunity to unearth more Gold Rush-era artifacts.
    Prior to the discovery of gold in the inland hills, the Golden Gate—the name given to the natural opening of the bay long before the famous bridge was built—had sheltered only a sparsely inhabited cove called Yerba Buena. The name change to San Francisco happened around the same time as the first gold discovery, and the newly named city nearly burst at the seams with the subsequent mass migration.
    From an antiques perspective, San Francisco’s explosive and unscripted growth during the late 1800s had left a trove of underground treasures. Situated on the tip end of a peninsula, the city had quickly exhausted the nearby supply of naturally occurring land, and the booming metropolis began swiftly sprawling out into the bay on a foundation of hastily constructed landfill. As a result, several blocks of the downtown area were built up on land that had originally been under several feet of water.
    In the days before railroads spiderwebbed across the continent, there were only two ways to reach the gold fields of Northern California—stage or other cloven-hoofed transport across a hostile interior, or cramped, disease-ridden ocean passage. In