Love Saves the Day

2



Prudence





LAURA AND THE STRANGE MAN BRING THE SMELL OF OUTSIDE IN WITH them. They also smell like each other. Not exactly like each other, because male humans smell different from female humans, but enough so I can tell they live together.

If Laura had come in by herself, I would greet her at the door with a loud demand for explanations. Although humans aren’t as good at understanding cat language as I am at understanding human language, a firm and direct meow usually prompts a response. For example, if Sarah hasn’t remembered to give me a cat treat, I’ll stand next to the kitchen counter and meow pointedly. This always makes Sarah either give me a treat or explain why she hasn’t by saying something like, Oh no! We’re out of treats! Let me run across the street and buy you some more. Sarah says this means I have her “trained.” Training is what humans have to do to dogs, because a dog doesn’t even know when to sit or lie down unless a human tells it to first. (The humans who keep dogs must be very patient and kind to burden themselves with such simple-minded creatures.) That’s not how I think of Sarah at all. It’s not that I train her, it’s just that sometimes I have to gently remind her.

But Laura is here with a man I don’t know, so I decide to wait under the couch until I’m sure coming out will be completely safe. Humans can be unpredictable. Sometimes they lunge at me and rub my fur the wrong way, or even (this is so demeaning) pick me up off the ground! So all I can do is watch and wait while Laura props the front door open with her foot to allow the man to enter in front of her, then kicks it shut behind her and turns the three locks.

A long time ago Sarah gave me a red collar with a little tag attached to it that Sarah says spells PRUDENCE in word-writing. Sometimes, if I move too quickly, the tag makes a jingly sound. So I creep very slowly to the edge of under-the-couch, where I can get a better look at the strange man with Laura.

He’s taller than she is, with light brown hair and dark blue eyes, and he’s skinnier than a lot of humans. What I can see most easily, though, are his feet and ankles. He’s wearing the kind of feet-shoes called “sneakers” (because they help humans sneak quietly, the way cats do), and they must be old because they’re covered in black smudges and dried mud, and there’s a little hole he probably hasn’t noticed yet just under his left big toe. He hasn’t been around any cats lately, because there isn’t any fur or cat-smell on his ankles—which is the first place a cat would rub her head to mark him with her scent. One of the laces from his sneakers dangles over the side of his foot. As I watch it wave in a tantalizing way while he walks, the temptation to attack it is almost irresistible. But I force myself to remain still, crouching so low that the fur of my belly brushes the floor and tickles my skin uncomfortably.

Laura is also wearing sneakers, except hers are all-white and look much newer. I can tell by the little bumps in the tops of her sneakers that her toes are curled up, which means Laura is tense. She smells tense, too. Even more tense than she usually smells when she comes to visit us. The man with light brown hair must be able to smell her tension, too, because he sets down his own boxes and puts his hands on her shoulders. Sarah always strokes my back when I’m upset about something, like when I think I have a fly cornered but it buzzes out of my reach, or when a car outside makes an unexpected boom! sound and frightens me. Laura seems to relax at the man’s touch, but when he asks, in a kind voice, “Are you okay?” her toes curl up again and she says, “I’m fine.” Then she pushes her fingers through her hair the way Sarah does. “Let’s just get this over with.”

“We could wait,” the man says. “I’m sure the super would understand if …”

But Laura is already shaking her head. “Thursday’s the first of the month,” she says. “If we wait we’ll have to take over the rent.”

My right ear turns forward so I can hear better when Laura says this. If Sarah’s not paying rent money to live here anymore, that means she’s decided to live someplace else. The anxious feeling in my belly gets stronger as I try to understand why Sarah would go and not tell me or take any of her favorite things with her. On TV, when two humans are living together and one of them decides to move away, first she tells her roommate why she has to leave (usually it’s either because of Her Career or The Man She Loves). The two roommates get angry and fight about it, until they start remembering all the fun they had together. Then they cry and hug each other and they’re friends again, and that’s when the second roommate, even though she’s sad to lose her friend, says she understands why the first roommate has to go and tells her she hopes she’ll be happy.

Roommates have to tell each other before they move away. I’m almost certain it’s the Law.


Laura has a way of moving that says she knows exactly where she’s going and wishes she’d gotten there earlier. That’s the way she tries to walk into our bedroom, but she doesn’t quite succeed. Her steps are the smallest bit slower than usual, and if she were something I was stalking, I’d probably think this was a good time to pounce. She tells the man that she’ll take care of the bedroom and he should start on the kitchen. She hands him some old newspapers, and at first I think maybe they’re going to play one of my favorite games, where Sarah crumples up newspaper and throws it for me to chase so I can practice my mice-fighting. But instead the man is using it to wrap up our dishes and glasses before putting them into the boxes. He even wraps up the big ceramic bowl that lives on the little table next to the front door. That’s the bowl I like to sleep in when my body tells me it’s almost time for Sarah to come home, so I can be right there at the door when she walks in. Once, when I was especially excited to see Sarah, I jumped out of the bowl so fast that it fell on the floor and broke. The sudden crashing sound drove me all the way into the bedroom and under the bed, where I stayed twitching my fur for a long time. But Sarah was very patient and calm as she glued the bowl back together. There were cracks in it after that, but Sarah said that was okay, because cracks are how the light gets in.

Laura and the man work silently, except when Laura tells him that the Army is coming over later to pick up our furniture and kitchen things and some of Sarah’s clothing. I don’t know what the Army is going to do with a bed that smells like me and Sarah sleeping together under the covers on cold nights. Or a couch that smells like the time I accidentally spilled a glass of milk all over it (it was the glass’s fault; it was pretending to be shorter than it really was), and I got so startled because the milk splashed on me so suddenly, and because I thought maybe Sarah would yell at me, but she only scooped me up and pressed her cheek to the top of my head and said, Poor Prudence! Then she hugged me tighter and said, Oh, Prudence, life would be so boring if you weren’t here. (Which was so obvious she didn’t need to point it out.)

I don’t understand what use the Army could have for those things, but there’s a lot happening right now that I don’t understand. Sarah once knew a man who lost his cat and everything else he’d ever had, all on the same day. After that, Sarah said, he didn’t want to live anymore. Maybe Sarah left because she knew Laura was going to come here with this man to take all our beautiful things away and she couldn’t stand to see that happen. And now it occurs to me for the first time that if Sarah is going away, along with all our furniture and everything else we need, I might have to go away, too.

I crouch down lower under-the-couch and wish Sarah would come back and explain things. She could have told me before she left, even if the reasons why she had to leave were frightening or confusing. She knows, more than any other human, how much I understand.

Cats always understand things. That’s why we make such good roommates.


Laura and the man with light brown hair are in opposite sides of the apartment, which means I can only watch one of them at a time. Even though my whiskers will let me follow the general movements of whichever one of them is behind me, I can’t decide who I should follow with my eyes. Then Laura finds the floorboard in the bedroom that sounds like a human voice crying out when you step on it the wrong way. This brings my attention instantly to her. The doorway to the bedroom is exactly opposite the right arm of the couch, and by creeping all the way to the edge of the space underneath the couch, I can see into the bedroom and watch Laura work.

She and Sarah don’t look exactly alike, but enough so you can tell Laura must have come from one of Sarah’s litters. Their hair is the same color and length. Laura’s not quite as tall as Sarah, but she’s stretchier, and when she stands on her tiptoes to reach something on a top shelf she can reach as high as Sarah can. Her eyes are lighter than Sarah’s and not as round, and her jaw is more square-shaped, and the makeup she usually wears when she comes over makes these differences more obvious. Laura isn’t wearing any makeup today, which is unusual. The skin under her eyes is darker than normal, which makes her eyes look almost as dark blue as Sarah’s, and her skin is so pale that it’s even lighter than Sarah’s. She and Sarah have the exact same hands, though—surprisingly big for such slender humans, with long fingers.

Laura’s hands are shaking a little now, but they still manage to make precisely folded and ordered stacks of things. She pulls Sarah’s clothes from our closet with the kind of efficiency I use when burying something in my litterbox. From the clothes Sarah wears to the office, Laura creates a tidy, four-cornered pile. She uses a fat black pen to put word-writing on one of the brown boxes, which she then fills with Sarah’s work and everyday clothes. Sarah’s other clothes, the ones with shiny stones and fringes and feathers that I used to think were birds, go into a less tidy pile, and then Laura puts the pile of bird-clothes into a garbage bag.

Sarah doesn’t wear the bird-clothes often, but I can tell (at least, I thought I could tell) that they matter to her like everything else in our apartment does. It’s important to keep your past organized, Sarah likes to say.

One night three months ago, Sarah was on the phone with Anise and kept using the word remember a lot, like when she said, Remember the first time I came to hear you guys play Monty Python’s? That place was such a pit! or Remember the night that crazy woman chased us down Fourteenth Street with a knife? And we had to beg that cabbie to get us out of there even though we didn’t have any money?

That didn’t sound funny to me, but Sarah laughed until she couldn’t breathe. I’d only heard Sarah laugh that long and loud when I had one of my very rare clumsy moments. Like the time I tried to run straight through a closed window (how was I supposed to know that you could see through something but not necessarily run through it?), or once when I reached up to a paper plate on the kitchen table to try a tiny bit of the food on it, but instead the plate and all its food fell on my head. (I still say that was Sarah’s fault; she should never have left a plate of food on the edge of the table like that.)

After Sarah hung up with Anise, she pulled a bunch of boxes and bags from the big closet in the living room. She took some black disks off the shelves and the apartment filled with music while the two of us looked through the matchbook toys. (Actually Sarah looked through them and I batted them around, because what good are toys if you don’t play with them?) She kept saying things like, I completely forgot about this place! or, This was the very first club that ever let me spin, and I had to do it for free. It was so much harder for girl DJs. She showed me newspapers and magazines so old they don’t make them anymore, full of word-writing (which I can’t understand, but Sarah read some of it to me) about the music she used to listen to and the places she used to go to hear it. Then Sarah went into the bedroom and put on the outfits she hasn’t worn since she as young.

She was so happy while she looked at herself in the mirror in those clothes! Except that after a while her face turned a light pink, and finally she shook her head and murmured the word stupid under her breath. Then she changed back into her regular nighttime clothes, silenced the black disks, and tidied up the apartment before getting into bed.

The best thing about all that old stuff isn’t that it helps Sarah organize the past. The best thing is that it smells like the two of us, here together in this apartment. And now all those clothes and everything else in our closet is disappearing into that bag and those boxes. I twitch the fur on my back to try to stay calm.

Maybe if I get to go with the bag and boxes, the things in them will still smell like me. But unless Sarah comes back, little by little the Sarah-smell will disappear from them. And then one day there won’t be anything left in the whole world that smells like the two of us together.


By now the bedroom looks empty, the bed naked the way it is on laundry-doing days when I help Sarah dress it in fresh sheets by running from corner to corner of the mattress to make sure the sheets don’t go anyplace they’re not supposed to. Laura is holding one of the Army boxes, to carry it into the living room, when the sound of a door slamming in an apartment upstairs startles her and makes her drop it. “Dammit!” she mutters under her breath. Water rushes to fill her eyes, and she wipes it away impatiently with the sleeve of her sweater.

“Laur? Are you all right?” the man with light brown hair calls from the kitchen.

“I’m okay, Josh,” she calls back. Her voice sounds shaky, and she takes a deep breath. “I hate these old walk-ups,” she adds. “You can hear everything.”

I realize now that I’ve heard about this man. The last time Anise visited us was seven months ago, and Sarah told her then that Laura was getting married to someone named Josh. Anise seemed surprised Laura was getting married at all, and Sarah said she was surprised at first, too, but that Josh was a Good Man. Anise said Laura’s marrying a Good Man was pretty miraculous, all things considered. Then they started talking about the man Sarah used to be married to, and I fell asleep eventually when I realized nobody was saying Prudence.

Josh has made the kitchen empty, too, and everything that used to live there is in a box or a garbage bag. It doesn’t look like our kitchen anymore, and the only way you could tell a human and a cat ever used it is because my bag of dry food is still sitting on the counter. When Laura comes out to wipe down the counters with a spritzy bottle and paper towels, she looks at the food and then looks around the apartment, as if she’s trying to see where I am. But then she just pushes the food bag to one side and keeps cleaning.

I’ve never seen Laura look sad before, but today she seems sad. Her eyes fill up with water again as she moves into the living room, although she quickly blinks the water away. And the sadness is there in the way she talks, too. Usually Laura forms her opinions quickly and sticks to them, and you can tell, when she and Sarah disagree about something, how impatient she gets when Sarah hesitates and says, Well, maybe you’re right … I don’t know … And even though I always sympathize with Sarah, because she’s my Most Important Person, privately I agree with Laura that Sarah just needs to make up her mind. That’s part of the reason why Sarah and I get along so well, because I have strong opinions even when she doesn’t. Sarah always, for example, asks what I think about what she’s wearing before she goes out. If I like it, I stare at her with my eyes very big and put all my wisdom and approval into them. And if I don’t like it, I close my eyes slightly and turn my head off to the side, like maybe I’m just sleepy, but Sarah knows what that means. And she’ll say, You’re right, this skirt needs a different jacket, and change into something better before she leaves.

But when Laura tells Josh she guesses they should get started on the big closets in the living room, she almost sounds confused. Instead of saying, We should get started on the big closets in the living room, she asks, I guess we should get started on the big closets in the living room? Even saying I guess instead of just we should is more uncertainty than Laura usually shows.

I’m not sure what’s so confusing to her about this room. Everything in here seems ordinary to me. Maybe it looks and smells a little dustier than usual, with Sarah not having been here to clean for almost a week. My litterbox smells bad all the way from the bathroom and that’s embarrassing, especially when there’s a stranger here who doesn’t know how tidy I usually am.

But I don’t think it’s dust or the litterbox that’s making Laura hesitate. Then it comes to me: Laura feels the way I do. She didn’t expect Sarah to leave any more than I did, and now she’s confused and sad because she has to decide what to do with Sarah’s and my stuff. I’ve been waiting for her to say something about where Sarah went and why, but she’s been left behind by Sarah just like I have.

Realizing that even Laura didn’t know Sarah was leaving makes me feel for the first time that I really might never see Sarah again. It feels like my stomach is trying to squeeze all the way through the top of my throat. It feels worse than when humans used to shout at me on the streets, or the day I lost my littermates in that thunderstorm.

Now I want desperately to come out, to tell Laura that maybe Sarah will come back if only we don’t move all her things that smell familiar and make her recognize this as her home. But Laura hasn’t called to me the way Sarah would, or tried to introduce me to the strange human in the way it’s supposed to be done. Too much is unusual today already, and the thought of coming out from under-the-couch the wrong way, without anybody even saying, Prudence, come here and meet so-and-so, the way Sarah always does, makes my stomach squeeze even harder.

It’s Josh who first goes to the big closet and starts pulling things down. The shoe boxes of matchbook toys spill over his head. I expect him to be mad the way most humans would be if all those matchbooks fell on them, but he just says “D’oh!” and rubs his head in an exaggerated way, pretending the matchbook toys hurt him. From the way his eyes flick over to Laura I think he’s hoping she’ll laugh, because humans think it’s funny when things fall on other humans.

Laura smiles, but that’s all.

“Look at all these,” he says, crouching down to scoop up a handful of matchbooks. “Paradise Garage, Le Jardin, 8BC, Max’s Kansas City.” He puts them back in their box. “The writers I work with would kill to have spent five minutes at Max’s Kansas City.”

Laura has finally started on the other closet, the smaller one near the front door. She’s going through boxes of papers, some of which she puts into folders that disappear into a big brown box. The others go directly into a garbage bag. “Just throw all that into trash bags,” she tells Josh. “The Salvation Army won’t want it.”

Maybe the Army won’t want those things, but I do! How could Laura not even ask me what I want to do with my own (well, Sarah’s and my) things?

Josh pauses when Laura says this, his hand in the middle of reaching up to pull things from the top shelf. He continues moving his hand in that direction, although he does it more slowly, the way you move to keep from startling a small animal. “You don’t want to throw it all away. Your mom wouldn’t have kept all this stuff if it didn’t mean something to her. Someday, when you’re ready, you’ll want to go back and look through it.”

Laura sounds exasperated, just like she does whenever Sarah objects to what Laura thinks is a perfectly logical plan. “Where would we even put it all?”

“There’s the spare bedroom,” Josh says in a quieter voice than the one he’s been using. “We could put everything there, temporarily at least.”

Laura’s face changes just enough to let me know she doesn’t like this idea. If it were Sarah’s idea, Laura would keep arguing until she made herself right. But now she mutters, “Fine,” and keeps going through papers. Josh puts the matchbook toys back in their shoe boxes, then puts the whole thing into one of the big brown boxes. They’re both quiet again, until Josh struggles with a buldgy paper bag all the way in the back of the big closet. Once he’s freed it he peers inside and says, “Oh, wow!” Pulling out some of Sarah’s old newspapers and magazines, he says, “Mixmaster, New York Rocker, the East Village Eye.” His eyes go up and a little to the left, which means he’s remembering something. “My sister used to go into the city with her friends and bring these back for me. I still haven’t forgiven my mother for deciding they were ‘trash’ one day and throwing them all out.”

Laura has been stacking up Sarah’s coats and jackets, which smell more like her than anything else. Why does she have to make everything of Sarah’s go away? Sarah once told me that if you remember someone, they’ll always be with you. But what if the opposite is true? What if getting rid of everything that reminds you of someone means they’ll never come back to be with you again? I feel the muscles around my face whiskers tighten and pull back again.

Laura doesn’t know this, of course. She turns to face Josh, and when she sees the bag he’s looking through, she squints and walks over to where he’s sitting on the floor. She picks up the bag and looks at the script-y word-writing on its side. Then she says, “Love Saves the Day.”

“Hm?” Josh says. He’s still flipping through the old newspapers.

“Love Saves the Day,” she repeats. “That’s where this bag is from. It was that vintage store on Seventh and Second.” Now Laura’s eyes slide up and left. Her voice sounds softer, the way Sarah’s does when she’s telling me about something nice that happened to her a long time ago. “My mother and I used to go there sometimes when I was a kid. We’d spend hours trying on ridiculous outfits and then go up the block to Gem Spa for egg creams.”

Josh grins up at her. “Do you have pictures?” I can tell he’s imagining Laura, except much smaller than she is now, wearing clothes like Sarah’s bird-clothes. He looks around the room. “I keep hoping to find your baby pictures, but I don’t see them anywhere.”

The black centers of Laura’s eyes widen a little and her face colors, which is how I know what she’s about to say will be at least partly untrue. “We lost them in a move.”

“Oh.” Josh sounds disappointed and unconvinced. But all he says is, “That’s a shame.” He looks toward the table next to the couch, where Sarah and I keep a lamp and some framed pictures that I’ve learned to maneuver through without knocking them over. Josh says, “Well, at least there’s a picture of your mom and her cat.” He looks around the room. “Hey, where is the cat?”

Laura’s head doesn’t move. “Hiding under the couch.”

I’m not “hiding”! I’m waiting! Of course, I could never expect a human to understand a subtle difference like that. Still, this is probably as close as Laura is going to come to requesting my presence for a proper introduction. So, partly to give Laura a chance to do things the right way, and partly to make it perfectly clear to these humans that I was not “hiding,” I crawl out from under-the-couch and announce myself with a curt mew. Then I begin an elaborate stretching-and-grooming ritual, as if to say, Oh, is somebody here? I didn’t even realize it because I was napping so deeply. I certainly wasn’t hiding, if that’s what you were thinking.

It’s easy to fool them, because humans have a much harder time detecting untruths than cats do.

“Well, hey, Prudence,” Josh says, turning to face me. “You look like a sweet girl. You’re a sweet girl, aren’t you?”

The condescension in his tone is unbearable. I fix him with an icy stare and swish my tail to remind him of his manners, and then I go back to cleaning my face with my left front paw. Josh slowly reaches out a hand toward the top of my head, but I stop him with a warning hiss. Talking to someone you haven’t been properly introduced to is rude, but touching someone you haven’t been properly introduced to is far worse. Laura laughs for the first time since she’s been here and says, “Don’t take it personally. Prudence isn’t a ‘people cat.’ ”

Josh and Laura watch as I begin cleaning behind my ear. Why are they paying such close attention to how I wash myself? Then Josh says, “I’m happy to have her come live with us, Laur, but if you wanted to find another home for her, I’d understand. Everybody would understand.”

Laura is silent for a moment as her eyes look into mine. I keep my face carefully expressionless, not wanting her to know how nervous I am thinking of all the unbearable change that would come from having to live in a new place with strangers. “It was important to my mother that Prudence stay with us,” Laura finally says. “She was very specific about it in her will.”

I think about the day I met Laura. I was still small then, and I’d only been living with Sarah for four weeks and three days. Sarah said, in the voice she only uses when she’s talking to me, “Prudence, this is my daughter, Laura.” Laura stiffened when I approached her the way I knew I was supposed to when Sarah spoke in that voice. She didn’t bend down to get closer to me, she didn’t move at all, but her eyes followed me. “I’m sure she’d like it if you pet her,” Sarah said, and although I dislike being touched by humans I don’t know well, Laura smelled enough like Sarah to make me think that maybe I’d also adopted her when I adopted Sarah. I rubbed against her ankles and even purred for her. Not as much as I purr for Sarah, but enough to let Laura know I accepted her.

She and Sarah shared a smile when they heard me purr, and I didn’t know back then how unusual it was to see the two of them smile at each other happily like that. Then Sarah said, “Animals have always liked you. I remember how crazy the Mandelbaums’ cat was about you.”

And just like that, Laura’s whole face changed. One time, when I was still very small, Sarah didn’t see me in front of her and she stepped on my tail. The pain of it spread all the way up my back. And the sharp suddenness of that pain made me angry, so angry I hissed and whapped out at Sarah with my claws. That’s what Laura’s face looked like in that moment. First there was a fast and terrible pain, and then there was anger, just as fast and terrible, at Sarah for causing it. Laura stopped smiling and her shoulders got stiffer.

“Honey,” Laura told Sarah. “The Mandelbaums’ cat was named Honey.” And then, using her voice the way I’d used my claws, Laura said, “I don’t even know why you want a cat, Mom. I didn’t think you cared about them all that much.”

Sarah’s face looked sad then, although she didn’t try to defend herself. She knew she had said the wrong thing, even though I could tell she hadn’t meant to.

I don’t want to go live with Laura. I don’t want to live anywhere with anybody except right here with Sarah. But if Sarah isn’t paying money to live here anymore, that means I can’t live here anymore, either. Apparently Sarah knew she was leaving and wanted me to live with Laura. Maybe she’s planning to come back and wants to be sure she knows exactly where to find me. That must be it!

The relief I feel as I realize this is wonderful—so wonderful it’s all I can do to keep from collapsing into a deep, luxurious nap as the tension leaves my body. Still, I can tell by the way Laura is looking at me that she’s thinking about what Josh just said, how he would understand if Laura wanted to send me to live somewhere else. I remember how happy her face was for a moment when she heard me purr that first day, and I think she must like cats more than she’s willing to say right now. (What’s not to like about living with a cat?)

So, ignoring Josh with his bad manners, I walk over to Laura and pat her leg with my paw, claws sheathed, the way I do when I want Sarah to pay attention. Then I rub my head against her ankles, to mark her with my scent and make her understand that she has no choice about whether or not to take me with her.

Laura doesn’t reach down to pet me, but she does sigh in a resigned-sounding way. The tightness in my stomach relaxes even more, and I rub my head harder against her legs.

Josh may never have had a cat to teach him proper manners, but spending only a few minutes with me has already made him smarter. He doesn’t say anything, but when he hears Laura sigh he can tell as plainly as I can that it’s been settled.


The sun is getting lower and the apartment is almost empty. The closets have been cleared out, the rugs rolled up so the Army can take them when they come for the furniture. The posters on the wall that I used to love batting in different directions have been taken out of their glass frames and rolled up so they fit into the boxes of things that are coming with us. It looks and smells so different that, already, it’s getting harder for me to remember the life Sarah and I had together here. My plastic carrier is waiting by the door, and even though I usually hate getting into it (because the only time Sarah puts me in it is when she’s taking me to the Bad Place), I crawl in now voluntarily. I know I’m not going to the Bad Place today. And, besides, it’s almost the only thing left here that smells like Sarah and me at the same time.

When Laura and Josh rolled up the rugs, they found the old squeaky toys Sarah used to bring back for me when I first came to live here. She always said how bad she felt that I had to be alone while she was out working, and she wanted to make sure I had something to play with and to make sounds for me when I was by myself. She never understood that I liked having my own quiet space and being alone sometimes. Maybe that was because Sarah never really liked being alone.

Those toys weren’t as interesting to me as the matchbook toys or the newspapers Sarah crumpled up (it’s no fun to play with things you think you have to play with; it’s much more fun to play with stuff you just find), and I lost track of where they were a long time ago. But I remember how happy it made me when Sarah first brought them home. That was how I knew, even though she was never good at keeping to feeding schedules or things like that, that she was thinking about me even when she wasn’t here to see me. Just like I thought about her even when she was gone. It meant I was right that day when I decided to adopt her.

I’m still angry with Sarah for leaving me without saying good-bye. Mostly, though, I just hope I get to see her again someday. She’s the only human I’ve ever loved.


The only things still unpacked in the whole apartment are Sarah’s collection of black disks and the special table she plays them on. Josh washes his hands before he touches them, and from the way he approaches I can tell how badly he’s wanted to look through the black disks since he first walked in. I don’t like it, because those are Sarah’s black disks and even I’m not allowed to touch them. But Sarah doesn’t live here anymore. She must have had her reasons for leaving them, and that must mean that wherever she’s living now, she still gets to hear music.

“I can’t believe how many there are,” Josh says to Laura. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a vinyl collection this big.”

“I never noticed how big it was, either,” Laura says. “She must have kept more than I realized after she sold the record store.”

“There’s such a range.” The way Josh sounds makes me wonder if maybe not all humans have a wall of black disks like Sarah does. From behind the metal bars of my carrier I can see Josh in pieces, the way I used to see the world in pieces when I’d crouch beneath our big window and look up through the fire escape bars. He sits down cross-legged in front of the records. “Look at all this.”

“My mother was mostly into dance music,” Laura says. “But her roommate was in a punk band and the two of them swapped records a lot.”

Josh grins. “I guess that explains why she’s got the Dictators’ Go Girl Crazy! shelved next to Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes.”

“Let’s pack them up. We can look through them later at home,” Laura says. When Josh hesitates, she turns her mouth up at the corners and says, “Scout’s honor.”

Josh nods. Then he says, “Oh!” He stands and walks over to an open brown box and pulls something from it. “I didn’t wrap this because I thought you might want it for the apartment.”

Laura walks over to see what Josh is holding. It looks like one of the framed photographs that used to live on the table next to the couch.

“How old was she here?” Josh asks. “She looks so young.”

Laura takes the picture from his hand. “She was nineteen. This was right before she had me.”

“She was beautiful.” Josh looks at Laura and smiles. “Like you.”

“No,” Laura says. “I’ll never be as beautiful as my mother was.”

At first I think she’s doing this thing called modesty, which is when humans pretend not to be as special or good at something as they know they really are. (This is something a cat would never do.) But there’s too much sadness in her smile when she adds, “When I was little, I always used to think how lucky I was to have the prettiest mommy.”

“Our kids will feel that way about you someday.” When Laura doesn’t respond, Josh puts his arm around her shoulders and says, in a gentler tone, “They will, Laur. I promise.”

It seems like a nice thing for him to say. Especially since it’s hard for me to judge human beauty (anything stripped of its fur and forced to walk on its hind legs looks naked and awkward to me). It doesn’t seem like there’s any reason for Laura’s eyes to fill with water again because of what Josh said. But they do.

I think Josh wants to give Laura privacy to make the water go away, even though she swallows hard a few times and blinks it back before it can fall. He goes over to the black disks again, takes one out, and puts it on Sarah’s special table. Music fills the apartment one more time. It’s so much like the kind of thing Sarah would do that, for the first time, I think maybe I could get to like Josh. He even sings along with the music, the way Sarah sometimes used to.

Love is the message, love, love is, love is the …





Most of the big brown boxes stay in the apartment for the Army to come and take them. The rest are carried down by Laura and Josh to the giant metal box on wheels that’s attached to the car. Laura carries the garbage bags down the outside hallway to Trash Room. She leaves the front door open when she does this, and through the open door I hear her footsteps pause on her way back from Trash Room. Then I hear her go back and pull one of the garbage bags out. Her footsteps get faraway sounding, like she’s taking the bag outside, and I guess she’s adding it to the boxes we’re bringing.

I stay in my carrier the whole time. I have to. Laura has closed and locked it, which is just plain rude because didn’t I get in here of my own free will? Is there any good reason to treat me like some stupid dog trying to run out of a kennel? I think humans don’t even realize how much they insult cats’ dignity sometimes. But I don’t have long to be angry about this, because Laura quickly comes back inside and picks up my carrier. I catch one last glimpse of the apartment through its bars and wonder if I’ll ever live here again.

Laura takes me outside, and I have to close my eyes halfway because the sun is getting so bright as it comes through the crisscrossed bars of my carrier. She climbs into the car and settles my carrier on her lap, and Josh gets into the car through the other door, so he can sit behind the big round thing that makes the car go.

I’ve never been in a car before. The feeling of it isn’t so bad once I get used to the sensation of something other than legs moving me forward. It’s even soothing me into drowsiness, and I have to fight to keep my eyes open, because I don’t want to miss anything. I had no idea how much I’d never seen before until now, watching everything that moves past the windows of the car.

The farther away we get the wider the streets are, until I’m positive we’re not in Lower East Side anymore. Some of the streets are so wide I can’t believe they’re real. And the buildings! I can’t even see the tops of all of them, although I stretch my neck as high up as my carrier will allow me. I never saw buildings this tall in Lower East Side. In some of their windows I see other cats, lounging in the late-day sunlight or batting at curtains that try to block their views. I wonder if they’ll get to live in their apartments forever, or if maybe one day they’ll have to move away like I am because their humans stop coming home. I wish I could ask them. Maybe one of them knows what you’re supposed to do to make a human return after she’s left you.

Josh tells Laura he’s going to take the West Side Highway. We drive past a wide river, which holds more water than I ever imagined seeing in real life. There are boats on the water, and people in other kinds of strange, smaller machines that let them move on top of the water as if they were running on it. (I’ve always felt sorry for humans because they have to get all the way into water to get clean, but here are these humans doing it for no good reason!) The sidewalks near the river are a swarm of humans holding food, shopping bags, or the hands of smaller humans. One of them is throwing bread crumbs to an enormous flock of pigeons and—oh! How wonderful it would be to jump into the middle of that flock and show those silly birds who’s boss!

Laura rolls down the car window on our side, and all kinds of smells come rushing to my nose. The mixture of aromas makes me think of the time before Sarah, when I lived outside with my littermates. I can smell other cars, and birds, and humans sweating in their coats, and the scent of new, fresh dirt. It’s that time of year when the cold starts to go away, so I can smell flowers, too, and other things I can’t name because I’m too overwhelmed. I wish I could stay where we are long enough to identify every single thing I smell and give it its proper name.

And if I did get to stay here—right here on this very spot—I would never have to go to Laura and Josh’s apartment. I would never have to start the life I’m going to have to live, at least for now, without Sarah in it.