Love Saves the Day

3



Prudence





THE HUMAN WORD FOR SOMEONE WHO MOVES FROM ONE COUNTRY to another is immigrant. I moved from Lower East Side to Upper West Side, which is obviously all the way on the opposite side of the world. And if it’s on the other side of the world, then it must be a whole different country. This means I’m an immigrant, too. (Sarah used to talk about the immigrants in Lower East Side who had to move away because apartments got expensive, just like I had to.)

TV says that immigrants sometimes get homesick. I’ve been here sixteen days so far, and I was sick for the first five of them. That’s how long it took just to get used to how different the food is in Upper West Side. I was nervous about everything being so different, and having different food, too, was more than I could bear. I heard Josh tell Laura that they should buy me something “better” than the “cheap” food Sarah used to feed me. (Oh, I loved that food! I wish Sarah was here to tell Josh to buy me the food I like.) He brought something home in a can and told Laura it was “organic.” That’s a word humans use to describe food that comes from a farm instead of a factory. Except the food came in a can, and cans only come from factories, so how could it be in a can and be organic?

Trying to figure out what exactly was in my food that smelled so different from the good food I’m used to made my stomach sick and nervous. The only time I came out of the closet in the upstairs bedroom (which is where they put all the Sarah-boxes) was when I had to throw up. This made Josh worry and tell Laura that maybe they should take me to the Bad Place, which only made my stomach clench tighter. But Laura went out and bought a can of the food I’m used to and mixed some of it with Josh’s new food. Even though it wasn’t as good as just my regular food by itself would have been, at least it smelled familiar enough for me to eat without feeling nervous.

Now Laura mixes some of my old food with the new food every morning, except each day there’s more of the new and less of the old. I think Laura’s trying to trick me into not noticing, so that one day soon she can put down just the new food and none of the food I like. As if that would fool a cat!

When I lived with Sarah, my first feeding of the day was always a happy time. I would stand next to her at the kitchen counter and meow for her to hurry up (humans tend to dawdle when they’re feeding cats) while she emptied the food into my special Prudence-bowl. Then I’d run in excited circles in front of her feet while she carried the bowl to the kitchen table where I could eat it.

I can’t do the same thing with Laura, though. For one thing, Laura is never in a happy mood when she comes into this room with all the Sarah-boxes to put my food down. She doesn’t like it here, in a way that has nothing to do with my living in here most of the time. I can tell by the way the tiny hairs on her arms rise slightly when she enters, or just walks past the doorway. And even if I wanted to run around in circles (which I don’t), the floor in here is so crowded from the Sarah-boxes that there isn’t room for me to run without bumping into things.

Also I can’t eat in front of Laura the way I did with Sarah, because I don’t want Laura to know too much about my eating habits. For example, I have to drink three laps of water for every five bites of food. When I lived outside, I learned that water that’s been standing still for a long time usually tastes bad. Now I like to rattle my water bowl with my right paw before I drink from it, so I can see the water move and keep it tasting fresh. Sarah understood this and only filled my water bowl up halfway. But Laura fills it all the way to the top, so some of it sloshes onto the dark, polished floor and leaves light spots on the wood when it dries. Laura’s mouth presses into a straight line when she sees those spots, and I think she’d be mad if she saw me sloshing the water bowl on purpose. Yesterday she brought home a blue rubber mat with ridiculous cartoon drawings of smiling cats all over it (is this what Laura thinks cats are supposed to look like?), and she put it under my food and water bowls so nothing spills onto the floor anymore. Probably it would have been easier to just stop filling the water bowl so high, but even if I had a way of suggesting this to her, I doubt she’d listen. Laura has to do things her own way, Sarah always says. I guess I should be grateful she still lets me eat in here, with all of Sarah’s and my old things around me, instead of insisting I eat someplace else. I don’t think I’d be able to force much down without having safe, familiar smells around me.

I haven’t been getting enough sleep, which also makes me feel less healthy and alert than I used to. Sleeping is usually one of my favorite things to do, and this is something humans would be wise to learn from cats. Humans never seem to get enough sleep, and Laura and Josh haven’t napped once since I’ve been here! (The last few months I lived with Sarah, she was smart enough to follow my example and started napping with me more frequently.) But sleeping is harder for me now, because every time I wake up I get confused about where I am and why everything smells different. I have to remember all over again that I live with Laura and Josh now instead of Sarah, and when I remember it hurts from my chest all the way down to my stomach. It’s gotten so I’m afraid to fall asleep because it hurts so much to wake up.

Sometimes, though, I get fooled for a few moments, and that’s the hardest of all. Like right now. It’s early in the morning, before anybody’s left for work, and I’m in the back of the closet having just opened my eyes. I smell the can of my old food opening and see a woman with Sarah’s hair bending over my bowl. Good morning, Sarah, I meow. Sarah looks up in surprise, and when her hair slides back from her face I see it isn’t Sarah at all. It’s Laura who’s looking at me, wondering why I just meowed when I’ve been quiet most of the time since I’ve been here. It was Laura’s hair, so much like Sarah’s, that tricked me.

Besides her voice when she sang, just about my favorite thing about Sarah was her hair. I loved to rub my face against it and bury my nose in it. I could spend hours batting at it with my front paws, or watching Sarah twisting it in and out of ponytails, or noticing the way each strand sparkled and turned a slightly different color from the other strands in the sunlight that came through our windows. Once I was sitting behind Sarah’s head on the back of our couch with my nose and mouth nestled in her hair, and I chewed off a big mouthful. Sarah got mad (although she couldn’t help laughing when she saw me sitting there with a chunk of her hair in my mouth as if it were a mouse I was carrying back to my den). I don’t know why I did it, exactly, except I was thinking how nice it would be if I could have some of Sarah’s hair to take with me to my little cave in the back of our closet.

One of the times when Anise came over to our apartment, she cut Sarah’s hair for her. Anise’s hair always looks different every time she comes over. Sometimes it’s very short and straight, and other times it’s long and curly. Sometimes she even puts streaks of different colors in her hair, like green or pink.

Anise always tells Sarah that she’s been wearing her hair the same way for thirty years—long and straight—and that she should change it now and then “just for fun.” (What’s fun about change?!) This one time, though, she actually talked Sarah into it. Anise sat her down in one of our kitchen chairs with a towel around her neck, and attacked Sarah’s head with scissors until her hair was much, much shorter. While Anise worked they talked and laughed about The Old Days, when they were young and too poor to afford new clothes or professional haircuts, so Anise made their clothes and cut their hair for them.

I was miserable when I saw Sarah’s beautiful hair falling in sad little clumps to the floor, and for the first time I didn’t like Anise very much. But Laura’s reaction was even worse. When she came over three Sundays later and Sarah opened the door, Laura’s face froze. Her eyes widened and got shinier than normal. “Your hair!” she cried. “What happened to it?”

“You don’t like it.” Sarah made this a statement instead of a question.

“No, I just …” One hand moved up from Laura’s side as if she was going to touch the side of Sarah’s head, although it stopped before it got there. “I’m surprised, is all,” Laura finally said. “What made you decide to do something so radical?”

“I was ready for a change. Do you like it?” Sarah almost looked shy. “Anise did it for me.”

Laura made a sound like a snort. “That’s Anise,” she said. “You can always count on her for the little things.” She emphasized the word little.

Laura’s hair looks and smells like Sarah’s, although she spends more time straightening it in the mornings with a loud hair dryer than Sarah ever did. Laura cares about hair a lot. That must be why she got so upset when Anise cut Sarah’s off.

Sarah let her hair grow back long and never tried cutting it short again after that. When Laura visited, her eyes would travel to the top of Sarah’s head and down the length of Sarah’s hair while Sarah chattered at her. I think she was waiting for Laura to notice and say something about it. But Laura never did.


Laura doesn’t usually linger in this room, but sometimes—like now—she’ll spend long, quiet minutes after she feeds me looking out the windows, watching a flock of pigeons on the rooftop of the building across the street. You can see these same pigeons from the tall living room windows downstairs that go from the floor to the ceiling and make up two whole walls of the room. The pigeons are the same color as coffee when you add cream to it, which is an unusual color for pigeons. Other than that, though, I don’t see what’s so interesting about them. But Laura can’t seem to move her eyes away. She even winds a single strand of hair around one finger, the way Sarah always does when she’s thinking deeply about something.

I’ve tried watching the pigeons also, to see what Laura finds so fascinating, but all the pigeons ever do is fly around in big circles for an absurdly long time, and then come back to land on the rooftop. Naturally I hadn’t really expected to see much because pigeons aren’t even as smart as dogs, if you can believe it.

The room is silent while Laura watches the pigeons and I crouch in the closet waiting for her to leave. Upper West Side is quiet in ways that Lower East Side never was. In Sarah’s and my apartment, when the windows were open, I could hear squirrels and large bugs turning in the earth, birds singing while they nested in trees. People would walk along the sidewalk, their voices talking into tiny phones and the sounds drifting up to the third floor where Sarah and I lived. Cars drove past with music flying out of their rolled-down windows to announce that they had arrived. Like the way the man who lives in the lobby of this apartment building calls Laura and Josh to announce when their pizza or Chinese food is on its way upstairs. In Lower East Side, even when our windows were closed, you could always hear people talking in other apartments or water moving through pipes in the wall. Sometimes I would hear loud crack! sounds without being able to tell where they came from. It used to startle me until Sarah explained that it was just our building “settling.”

There are neighbors and cars and birds here in Upper West Side, too, but the street is so far below us that you can’t hear any of its sounds. I never hear people talking or playing their televisions loudly in their own apartments next to this one. Most days, after Laura and Josh have left for work, the only thing I hear is the jingle of the Prudence-tags on my red collar as I walk from room to room. Sometimes, if I’ve been sitting still for a while, I meow loudly and send the sound of it echoing from the walls and ceilings, just to make sure I haven’t gone deaf.

Sarah never liked it when things were too quiet. Maybe that’s why she played music and watched TV all the time. She would chatter and chatter at Laura whenever Laura came over to visit, afraid of the silence she would hear if she stopped because Laura never had much to say in return. Sarah told Anise once that Laura had built a wall around herself with silence. I used to imagine Sarah’s chatter going chip, chip, chip at this wall, even though I couldn’t see where the wall was. It must be different for Laura in Upper West Side, though, because she and Josh talk all the time.

Josh walks past the doorway now, in the nicer clothes and dark feet-shoes he wears to work. Laura’s own work clothes match each other a lot more than Sarah’s. Today she wears a black jacket and matching black pants with shiny high-heeled black shoes. The only thing that isn’t black is the white blouse she wears under her jacket.

Josh pauses when he sees Laura standing in front of the window and says, “Everything okay?”

“I’m fine.” Laura smiles a little and turns to face him. “Just daydreaming.”

Something about the way Josh’s eyes narrow and widen makes me think he notices more than most humans do. Whenever Laura’s talking to him, his eyes zip all over her face, and you can tell how interested he is in what she’s saying. It’s not like when Sarah’s eyes stayed focused anxiously on Laura’s face without moving, or when Laura would look off to the side while Sarah was talking to her. Sometimes, though, when Sarah would turn her eyes to watch me do something, Laura would look into her face with an expression that was hard to describe. The skin at her throat would tighten, as if she was about to say something. But by the time Sarah looked at her again, Laura’s face would be wearing its normal expression, and she would say something unimportant to Sarah like, This is good coffee.

Josh’s eyes leave Laura’s face now just long enough to look around the room once. “Where’s Prudence?”

“Hiding in the closet.” My tail swishes when I hear Laura describe what I’m doing as “hiding” instead of what it really is—waiting for her to leave already.

“She sure does love that closet,” Josh says.

“She just needs some time.” Laura plucks a strand of my fur from the sleeve of her jacket. “I don’t think she’s very comfortable yet. It doesn’t seem like she’s sleeping much.”

Josh walks toward Laura and brushes his hand gently across her cheek. “There’s a lot of that going around these days.”

Laura touches his hand with her own, but takes a small step back so he’s not touching her face anymore. “I’m fine,” she repeats. Then she looks down at the watch on her wrist and says, “We’re going to be late if we don’t get a move on.”

I listen to the sound of their feet-shoes going down the stairs and wonder how much longer I’ll have to live here before Sarah comes to take me back to Lower East Side.


Every morning, after Laura and Josh have left for work, I wander around the apartment trying to find a place where I can feel comfortable enough to settle into the kind of long, good sleep I need more and more desperately as the days go by. It’s hard to sleep well, though, when nothing smells the way it’s supposed to. Laura makes this problem worse because she’s always cleaning and wiping things down with foul sprays and polishes that smell the way humans think things like lemons and pine trees are supposed to smell when they grow naturally outdoors. She especially hates it when there are any crumbs or bits of food on the kitchen counters or floor. Crumbs are how you end up with roaches and mice, Laura says (although she really doesn’t have to worry about that while I’m here), and I remember Sarah saying how they always had to be careful about that in the apartment they lived in together when Laura was a child.

I crawl in and out of the Sarah-boxes, looking for a way to get comfortable among the smells I know. I press my cheeks on the things in the boxes, rubbing Sarah’s smell into me and my smell into the Sarah-things, but the boxes are too full for me to find a place to lie down and sleep. Yesterday I tried burrowing into the big Love Saves the Day bag that was lying on its side in one of the Sarah-boxes. I thought that, since it already smells like Sarah’s and my apartment, if I could dig all the way into it I could surround myself with that wonderful Sarah-and-me-together smell, as if it were a cave.

It took a while to drag all the newspapers and magazines out of the bag to make enough room for me to squeeze in. But once I got all the papers out, I realized there was something made of cold metal—completely uncomfortable to lie against—at the bottom of the bag. Even using my “extra” toes, I couldn’t pry it out. When Josh came home and saw all the old newspapers scattered on the floor, he chuckled and said, “Looks like somebody had a good time today.” I don’t know what made him think that (I’d had anything but “a good time”), but he must have liked that idea because he was smiling while he put the newspapers and magazines back together. It took him longer than it needed to, since he was reading them while he straightened everything out. He stuffed the magazines and newspapers back into the Love Saves the Day bag, then took the bag into Home Office, which is the room right next to this one. I guess that’s sensible. There are already lots of magazines in that room anyway, because Josh works for a company that makes magazines.

Now I creep slowly into Home Office, listening for footsteps—just to be sure—even though I already heard Laura and Josh leave for the day. Home Office is far too crowded with what Josh calls “memorabilia” and what Laura calls “junk” (although she smiles teasingly whenever she says this) to be a truly comfortable room for me. But there is a wonderful heated cat bed that rests on the desk in front of a small TV screen. Attached to the bed is a toy mouse on a leash, which just goes to show how little humans like Josh know about mice. In the first place the toy mouse looks nothing at all like a real mouse, and in the second place no mouse would ever let a human put a leash on it, because even mice are smarter than dogs.

Josh likes to use this cat bed as a scratching post, exercising his fingers on it without stopping for hours on end. They make a clackety-clack noise and not the clawing sounds that usually come from a scratching post. If he sees me sleeping on it—using it the right way—he chases me off so he can take over and use it the wrong way. So now I come in here to nap lightly for brief stretches during the day while he’s gone. The first few times Josh saw me sleeping here, he told me that my having to stay off it was a “rule.” If I weren’t so tired from not sleeping enough, I probably would have thought Josh giving me “rules” was funny. All cats are born knowing that there’s no point in paying attention to unreasonable rules made by humans. Besides, what humans don’t know won’t hurt them.

I’m able to sleep for a little while, but everything still smells too foreign for me to relax very much. I step carefully from the cat bed to the desk, from the desk to the chair in front of it, and then leap from the chair to the floor. Then I make my way back to the room Laura feeds me in. The room with all the Sarah-boxes.


Laura might not like coming into this room very much, but I do have to admit that she’s very good at keeping to a schedule—much better than Sarah. She feeds me at the same time every morning except on Sundays, which is the only day when Laura doesn’t go to her office. She works in a law office like Sarah, and Laura must do something even more important than typing because the humans in her office need her to do her work just about every second she’s awake. When she comes home at night she brings big stacks of paper with her so she can do even more work here in the apartment. She wears glasses while she reads her work papers, and probably she wears the glasses in her office, too. There are always faint pink marks on the sides of her nose from where they press into her skin.

Laura’s workdays are much longer than Sarah’s ever were, and it’s usually long after dark before she comes home to give me my nighttime feeding. Most nights Josh goes out with friends from his own work, but even so he still gets home before Laura. Sometimes he tells her that he wishes she could come home earlier, and Laura explains how her clients’ businesses would fall apart if she didn’t do as much work as she does, and then her bosses would give her even less work in the future. Getting less work sounds just fine to me, but Laura obviously thinks this would be a bad thing. It seems like the more work some humans do, the more work they have to do, which doesn’t make any sense. But very little of the way humans think about things makes sense to me.

The walls in this room are painted yellow, and the paint in here smells new. The floor is made of smooth wooden boards that have been polished until they shine in the sunlight like water. The first few days I was here, I thought maybe the floors really were made of water, they were so slippery. It took me days to learn how to walk here without my hind legs sliding out from under me if I ran or turned too quickly.

These same slippery wooden boards cover all the floors in the rest of the apartment, and even Laura and Josh slip a little on them sometimes. The other day Laura slid right into Josh as they were walking down the hall, and he reached out and grabbed her before she fell. I would have hated having a human grab me that way, but Laura squirmed and laughed. She laughs at a lot of the things Josh does. Sometimes he crumples a paper napkin in his hand, brings his hand to his mouth, and then coughs—making the crumpled paper napkin fly out. Oh, excuse me, he’ll say. I don’t know how that happened. It looks ridiculous to me, but Laura always rolls her eyes and laughs. This hardly seems fair. When I cough up a hairball for real, Laura doesn’t roll her eyes affectionately while she cleans it up and say, You’re so funny, Prudence!

This room is mostly empty aside from the Sarah-boxes and four dark brown wooden chairs with black leather seats, which live stacked up in one corner. I tried marking just one of the chairs in this room with my claws the way I’d marked our couch in Lower East Side (all I wanted was to make this room feel more like my own), but Laura saw me and said, “No! No, Prudence!” in a sharp voice. I don’t see why she had to get so excited. She could have calmly said something like, Prudence, marking chairs is bad manners in Upper West Side, and I would have understood her just as well. Maybe even better.

I don’t really need the chairs anyway, though, because the two big windows have sills for me to lie on while I look at things outside. This apartment is so high up that from the windows I can see all kinds of things I never thought about before. Like what the tops of buildings look like. Some of them have black tops, and some of them are white, and some have little brick areas where humans grow flowers and sit outside in the sunshine. A few of the roofs have these giant, pointy-topped round things I once heard Josh call “water towers.” All around us is more sky than I’ve ever seen, and when the sun is very bright and the sky is very blue, I see little squiggly things behind my eyes if I stare at it too long.

If Sarah lived here with me, she would probably carry one of those chairs from the corner next to the window, so the two of us could sit and look out at the sunshine together. She’d hum and stroke my fur while I sat in her lap, and maybe she’d even sing the Prudence song to me until I fell into a deep sleep.

But I’m alone in here almost all the time, and the only music anybody has sung to me since I left Lower East Side is the memory-music Sarah sings inside my head.


I hear a key turning in the lock of the front door downstairs, and from all the jingling I know it’s Josh. Laura must always have her key ready as soon as she steps out of the elevator. I never hear her jingling keys around, looking for the right one, before she comes in.

The sound of Josh’s feet-shoes comes up the stairs, and the faint scent of his cologne that smells so much stronger in the mornings drifts past as he walks toward his and Laura’s bedroom. After he changes out of his work clothes into socks and sweat-clothes, he spends a little while clackety-clacking on the scratching post in Home Office. Then he goes downstairs to listen to music in the living room while he waits for Laura. I hear the muffled sounds of it coming up through the floor of my room.

Most of Josh’s music lives on small silvery disks that go in a different kind of machine than the table Sarah uses to make her black disks sing. He also has a few black disks, although not nearly as many as Sarah. Even Sarah didn’t have more than a few when I first adopted her. Her posters and black disks and the special “DJ” table she plays them on were living by themselves for years and years in a place called Storage. It was only after I’d been living with Sarah for nearly two months that she went out one day and brought them home. It was you, you know, Sarah murmured later, when we were on the couch listening to the black disks together. You brought my music back. I thought I’d lost it forever. I rolled onto my side and purred, because I could tell from Sarah’s voice and hands how much love there was between us in that moment. But I didn’t know what I’d done to give Sarah back her music. Maybe I’ll do whatever it was again. Maybe (if I have to be here that long) in a couple of months Laura and Josh will drive out to Storage one day and come back with hundreds of their own black disks.

Josh likes music almost as much as Sarah. If he’s listening to music and Laura is in the room, he’ll pucker his lips and put his hands on his hips and pretend to strut around. He looks pretty foolish when he does this, but it always makes Laura laugh. Or he’ll take Laura’s hand and put his arm around her waist, and the two of them dance for real. It makes me wonder if Sarah would have liked to have another human to dance with when she used to listen to music in our old apartment.

Sometimes lately, because I haven’t slept well in so long, I get confused about what’s really happening now and what’s a memory or part of a dream I might be having if I were asleep. A breeze from the open window in my room makes the white curtains move. When its shadow on the opposite wall moves, too, I think for a moment that I see Sarah here in this room, bending down to stroke the fur of my back and saying, What should we listen to tonight, Prudence?

I stretch for a long moment, pushing my front paws all the way out in front of me and arching my back. My tail stretches, too, pointing straight up and curling at the tip. I have to get up and move around, or else I’ll just lie here not really sleeping and not really awake, thinking I see Sarah everywhere. The hurt I feel when I remember Sarah isn’t here starts to spread from my chest to my belly again. Trying to make the hurt leave me alone, I stand up and walk toward the stairs.

I used to wish Sarah and I lived together in a house with stairs, but it turns out stairs are tricky if you’re not used to them. I’m trying to figure out if it’s better to move each of my four legs individually to the step above or below me, or if I should move both of my front paws at the same time and then sort of hop with my back ones. I try to practice the stairs when Laura and Josh are out of the apartment so they won’t see me. That would be embarrassing. Poor Prudence doesn’t know how to use stairs! they might say, and chuckle at my ignorance. Two days ago, I happened to walk into Josh and Laura’s bedroom and saw the two of them rolling around on top of each other in the bed, making odd noises. It was the least dignified thing I’d ever seen in my entire life. I have no intention of making myself look equally foolish in front of them.

There’s a spot exactly halfway down the stairs where the floor gets flat for a little way before turning back into steps. When Laura and Josh are home, I can still practice walking up and down the top half of the stairs and then rest on the flat spot, peeking around the wall to watch what they’re doing in the living room.

The smallest part of the living room is the dining room next to the kitchen, which has a long table of dark wood and four matching chairs that look exactly like the ones that live stacked up in my room. The only time I’ve seen Laura and Josh in the dining room is when they pay bills and talk about money. Laura worries that they’re not putting enough into savings, and Josh says Laura worries about money too much. Once I heard Laura tell Josh he only thinks that because he doesn’t know what it’s really like to have no money at all.

Even though this apartment is much bigger than Sarah’s and mine, Josh and Laura don’t have nearly as much stuff in it as we did. There’s nothing hanging on the walls, and none of the “knickknacks” Sarah loves so much, like beautiful little glass bottles or the prisms she hung in our windows to make the sunlight sparkle and dance in different colors. Sarah used to keep plants, including a special kind called “cat grass” that was good to eat when my belly was upset with me. Here there’s only one plant that lives in a corner of the living room, and it’s made out of silk.

There are some framed photographs on shelves—mostly pictures of Josh at different ages, doing things like standing outside in the snow (which is just cold water!) holding up a pair of big wooden sticks or on a stage somewhere with lots of other young-looking humans, wearing funny costumes. There aren’t nearly as many pictures of Laura, and none from when she was younger. There are a few of Laura and Josh together on the day they got married, and also from their honeymoon in a place called Hawaii. (There’s a lot of water in the background of the honeymoon pictures, so Hawaii must be near that river we drove past on our way to Upper West Side.)

There’s also one from their wedding day of just Laura and Sarah. Laura’s wearing a plain, short white dress with a little white jacket and holding a cluster of long, beautiful white flowers. Sarah’s dress is light purple. This is my favorite photograph, because I remember when I helped Sarah decide that this was the outfit she should wear to see her daughter get married. It makes me happy to look at it, even though Laura and Sarah don’t really look comfortable, posed stiffly, each with one arm around the other.

Now Josh stands up from the couch and walks past the shelves with the photographs on his way into the kitchen. I hear the sound of heavy pans being jostled free from a cabinet, and after a few moments the smell of cooking floats toward the stairs. It smells like Josh is making eggs, although that can’t be right. Josh only makes eggs on Sunday mornings, and Laura goes out to get bagels for them to eat with the eggs. Laura says Josh makes the best scrambled eggs ever, although I wouldn’t know because nobody’s thought to offer me any the way Sarah would if she’d cooked something for breakfast.

It’s always bad when things happen in a different way than they’re supposed to, but when the thing that’s different is with your food, that’s the worst of all. I think maybe, even though she likes Josh’s eggs, Laura is going to be upset when she comes home and finds out Josh is making them on a Tuesday night instead of a Sunday morning. But what actually happens when Laura finally comes through the front door, and then walks into the kitchen to see what Josh is doing, is that she says, “What’s all this?” in a voice that sounds surprised and pleased.

“Breakfast for dinner,” Josh says. “I had a jones for scrambled eggs. And I thought it might help you sleep. You usually go right back to bed after breakfast on Sundays.”

“I don’t go back to bed alone.” Laura isn’t laughing, exactly, but her voice sounds like she’s smiling.

“Hey, I’ll try anything if it helps you relax.”

“Thanks,” Laura says, in what Sarah would call a “dry” voice. Then I hear the wet, puckering sounds Josh and Laura make when they put their mouths together. After a moment, when the sounds stop, Laura says in a quieter voice, “You don’t have to worry about me, Josh. I keep telling you. I’ve just got a lot on my mind, with work and everything.”

There’s a clatter of plates and silverware, and then the sounds of Laura and Josh walking from the kitchen to the living room couch, where I can see them again. The two of them talk about what they did at work all day while they eat. When the music that was playing stops, Josh walks across the room to where his music lives. This time he takes out a black disk instead of one of the small silvery ones.

The song that starts playing sounds like one Sarah and Anise used to listen to the two or three times a year when Anise came over. Something about a “personality crisis.” The two of them would act silly, singing into things like hairbrushes and empty paper towel rolls as if they were the microphones that singing humans on TV use. Anise has a nice singing voice (even though her regular speaking voice is deep and scratchy), and I can tell Sarah likes Anise’s singing better than her own. After all, Sarah says, Anise is famous for her singing.

Humans and cats must like different things in singing voices, because I think nobody has a nicer voice than Sarah. Anise would always say how Sarah should have tried being a singer professionally. I would rise up on my hind legs, butting my head against Sarah’s hand because it made me so happy when she sang. And Anise would bend down to scratch behind my ears the way I like and say, Look—even Prudence agrees with me!

But Sarah says she never had that Thing Anise has that lets her perform on a stage in front of other people. That’s what she liked about being a DJ, she says, and about the record store she opened after she stopped being a DJ. She could still give people music without having to stand in front of them. And anyway, Sarah would say to Anise, I was never as talented as you.

All I hear for a few moments is this song and the sound of one fork scraping across a plate. Josh is still eating, but Laura’s fork is hanging halfway between her plate and her mouth. Then Josh says, “Is everything okay?”

“Hm?” Laura shakes her head slightly, the way Sarah does when she’s trying to “clear her thoughts.” “I’m sorry,” she says. “I got distracted.”

Josh’s face flushes pink, although I can’t tell whether this is because he’s embarrassed or because he’s about to say something that isn’t true. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking. I saw this same record in your mom’s collection when we were cleaning out her apartment.”

“Probably,” Laura answers. “She liked the New York Dolls.”

Josh is watching Laura’s face, which is trying to look the way it normally does, and would almost succeed if not for the crease between her eyebrows. Finally, Josh says gently, “Why don’t we go upstairs when we’re done and go through some of her boxes. We can do the records over the weekend. I really think,” he adds in a hurried way, as if he’s afraid Laura might cut him off, “you’ll sleep better once it’s done. And if we cleared a few out of the way, we could make life a little better for Prudence. I see her pacing around that room all the time. She hardly has space to turn around in.”

The muscles around my whiskers tighten. If Josh really cared about me, he’d know that the very last thing I want is to see even one of those boxes go away.

Also, if he really cared about me, he’d have let me try some of his eggs.

“Prudence is still getting used to being in a new place,” Laura says. “She’ll be fine. And I’ve got a ton of paperwork to go through tonight.” She stands, holding her plate.

“Don’t worry,” Josh says. “I’ll clean everything up.”

“Thanks,” Laura tells him, and stoops to kiss him on the cheek.


The apartment is silent, except for the scratch of a pen against paper from where Laura works on the living room couch. Josh went to bed a long time ago. From my spot halfway down the stairs, I can see that Laura is tired, too. Every so often she pauses to push up her glasses and rub her eyes. She doesn’t go upstairs to bed, though. Probably because she knows that even when she does, she’ll spend hours flipping from side to side and kicking at the sheets, the way she seems to every night.

Something has been tickling at my left ear, and twitching it back and forth doesn’t make the tickle go away. Finally I reach my back left paw around to scratch at it with my claws. This makes my Prudence-tags jingle, and Laura looks up, startled. Our eyes meet. It’s the first time she’s seen me in this spot. My body tenses, waiting to see if she’s going to do anything.

“Hey, Prudence,” she says softly. “Can’t fall asleep?”

I’ve heard Laura and Josh talk about me since I came to live here, but this may be the first time Laura has talked to me. This makes me feel nervous, for reasons I don’t quite understand. Rising to a crouch, I turn and take the top half of the stairs at a hop, then scurry down the hallway, staying close to the wall, back into my darkened room with all the Sarah-boxes. My Prudence-tags ring the whole way and only stop when I dart into the back of my closet.

Laura comes into my room and pauses. Even though she can’t see me hidden back here without turning the light on, I can tell she knows that this is where I am.

The dark outline of her shape crosses the room and kneels in front of one of the Sarah-boxes. There’s a bang and rustle of things moving around, and then the crinkling noise of a heavy bag being pulled out from beneath heavier things. I remember, now, Laura going back to Trash Room to get one of the plastic garbage bags she threw out the day they brought me to live here.

Laura approaches the closet and I scurry backward, my backside in the air as I keep my nose pressed tightly to my front paws. “Here you go,” she whispers as she hunkers down onto her heels and thrusts something into the closet toward me.

It’s one of Sarah’s dresses from her “going-out” days, dull gold with a white diamond-shaped pattern on it. I remember thinking, that day when Sarah tried on all her fancy bird-clothes, that I’d never seen Sarah look prettier than she did in this dress from when she was younger than Laura is now.

I creep cautiously toward the dress, kneading at it with my front paws to make it into a more comfortable shape. Already I can tell that having something soft with that good, familiar, Sarah-and-me-together smell to lie in is going to make it easier for me to sleep tonight. Laura continues to crouch in front of the closet, and when I look up from the dress, her eyes are looking into mine again. We look at each other, and then, very slowly Laura closes her eyes and opens them again. This was something Sarah did, slowly close and open her eyes when I was looking at her, and I feel a rush of exhaustion wash over my body. As my eyelids droop Laura slowly blinks at me again.

My eyes close into sleep so quickly that I don’t even hear when she leaves the room. It isn’t until the next day—when I wake up after having slept late into the morning for the first time since I can remember—that I realize some things are the same everywhere. Even here in this foreign country, all the way on the other side of the world from the home I was raised in, somebody has taught Laura the correct way to speak cat.