I’d envisioned a drive out to the country, to Tony’s clinic on John’s Island, with Beatrice in her carrier on the backseat of my Camry, and dinner afterward with him (the cat having been examined and treated for whatever condition was making her so ornery, then safely boarded in his kennel), and after dinner maybe an hour or two at his house on the creek before I drove back to town to let the sitter go for the night.
But Delores couldn’t stay late and when I called Shenille to ask her if she could come in for a couple of hours, she sounded terrible. “It’s just a cold,” she said. “I can do it if you really need me.”
“No, of course not. I’ll take Mom with me.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, we’ll be fine. Take care of yourself.”
But now I’m stalled in traffic on Highway 17 with my mother in the backseat complaining that she has to pee and Beatrice in her carrier on the seat beside her, complaining about whatever cats complain about. “Okay,” I said when we were starting out and Mom insisted on riding with the cat, “she can sit next to you, but you’ll have to promise me”—I took both her hands and held them firmly in the way I do when I’m trying to get her full attention—“you won’t let her out of her carrier.”
“I have to go!” she says now.
“Can you hold it for fifteen minutes?” In the rearview mirror I see her nod, but I’m not reassured. She has frequent accidents, wears pads in her underpants during the day. And the “fifteen minutes” is a fiction. We’re hardly moving. Beatrice yowls accusingly, as if she knows where I’m taking her. I turn the radio to the classical station—maybe music will calm her—but it’s some contemporary cacophony, a theme song for our distress.
Half an hour later I reach across for my purse (I’ll call Tony, thank him for waiting), but when my hand finds a soft hump, it isn’t the purse. It’s Beatrice, in the passenger seat. She looks at me with an expression of mild disdain, her head held high, as if to say, If you don’t mind, I prefer the front. When I brake suddenly she stiffens, claws the seat to steady herself.
“Sorry,” I say, and she relaxes. “I’m taking you to a place where they’ll be really nice to you. You’ll like it there, I promise.” She looks at me again with those yellow eyes, unblinking, a creature not easily fooled. She reminds me of my aunt Emma, my mother’s older sister, dead ten years now. “No wonder she never married,” Mom used to say. “She’s always glaring at you like she thinks you’re stupid. And she’s so tactless!”
When I visited Aunt Emma in the hospital near the end, I brought her some flowers. “You should have saved these for the funeral,” she said.
“Oh, Aunt Emma, you’re not dying!” She looked at me, her eyes as clear and determined as I’d ever seen them, and said: “I’m not a fool, you know.”
Aunt Emma always had cats, two or three at a time. “The thing about cats,” she told me once, “is that they know what they need from us, and it isn’t much. They need to be fed and petted, but they don’t need their humans fawning over them all the time. They want loyalty and respect. Remember that, and you’ll get along fine.”
* * *
Tony has the cat on his exam table. “Nice to see you, Margaret,” he says with a nod to my mother, who’s feeling better after using the restroom. “Okay, sweetheart,” he says as he runs his fingers down the cat’s spine, “will you let me feel your belly? How old is she?”
“I don’t really don’t know much about her.” I give him a short summary of the cat case. “There’s a box of stuff back at the office, maybe.…”
He checks the tag hanging from her collar. “Rabies vaccine is current, but you’ll have to renew it in March.”
“No way I’ll have her that long!”
“She doesn’t have a temperature. I could run some tests, but she seems fine, really. Just a little overweight, aren’t you, honey?”
“I am not!” says my mother.
“He’s not talking about you, Mom.”
“No, ma’am, you look lovely, as always,” he says. “What are you feeding her?” he asks me.
“I just got her today. I wasn’t expecting—”
“I’ll give you some samples until you can go shopping. Since you don’t know what she’s accustomed to, get some high-quality dry stuff, and some canned. Try the dry first—it’s better for weight loss—but if she won’t eat that, mix in some of the canned. Cats can be finicky.”
None of this is reassuring me. “You won’t board her for a while?”
“We don’t generally do long-term boarding.”
“It should only be a week or two, while I do my investigation.”
He laughs. “You hear that, Beatrice? This woman wants to abandon you already!” He hands the cat to me. “Hold her between her front legs, like this, so she feels secure.” He takes his white coat off, tosses it in the hamper. “So, would you ladies like to join me for dinner? What do you say, Margaret?” My mother beams.
“What about the cat?” I ask.
“The cat will be fine at my place as long as we keep her in the carrier. I’ll pick up some seafood and meet you there. Fried oysters okay?”
* * *
“This is where Tony lives,” I tell Mom. We’ve taken the dirt road that winds through the marsh.
“Tony?”
“The vet. You can’t see it now, but the creek’s back there, behind the house.”
“He could use a better yard man,” she says. When she talks like this she’s so much like her old self, it’s hard for me to believe she has Alzheimer’s. Never once in her life did she have a regular “yard man,” but that doesn’t matter—she considers herself the kind of woman who ought to have one.
I know the house will disappoint her. It’s comfortable enough, but small: a kitchen/den combination, two bedrooms, a tiny bathroom. Its saving grace is the big screened porch in the back, facing the creek, furnished with a hammock, an old sofa, and a picnic table.
Tony hardly ever locks the doors. The dogs, he says, are his security system. “They won’t bite, but they make a helluva lot of noise.” His two golden retrievers, Susie and Sheba, bound out of the darkness of the hallway, barking. Behind them comes Carmen the beagle, baying with her nose in the air. “Hush, girls, it’s just me.” Mom grips my arm, pulls back. The cat lurches in the carrier. I turn on the light—a cascade of dust from the lamp shade, a stack of unopened mail on the hall table. “They won’t bite, Mom.”
I lift the carrier to the kitchen counter, safe from the dogs’ curious noses. “Sit here. We’ll eat at this table.”
“But there’s nothing to eat.”
“Tony’s bringing something from a restaurant.”
“He lives here by himself?”
“The dogs keep him company. And his son visits.” Jake lives in California with his mother. “He’s thirteen.” I pour her a glass of water.
“Terrible age,” she says, pointing at me, wagging her finger: “You were so … awful!”
Breathe, I tell myself, and open the cabinet where he keeps the plates. I can’t find three that match. “That was a hard time for both of us, Mom. We’d just lost Dad.”
She takes a sip of water, holding the glass lightly as if it’s the finest crystal, her little finger extended. “Will Dad be home for dinner?” she asks. Delores, her favorite sitter, would know how to handle this. Let her live in her own world, she says. Easier on her, easier on you.
“No, Mom, not tonight.” Before she can ask another question Tony comes with the food: fried oysters, hush puppies, slaw. The dogs dance around him until he fills their bowls. The cat has pressed herself against the back of the carrier, about as far away from them as she can get.
“I brought some cat food samples,” Tony says, “and a bag of litter. You’ll need to get more of both. I also brought a litter box from the clinic, until you have time to shop for one. But maybe you should wait until you get home to feed her. The dogs are probably a bit much for her.”
I imagine how the scene would look to a stranger: a man, a woman, husband and wife, at their kitchen table. Her mother (of course there’s a clear resemblance) eating slowly, cutting each oyster in half, leaving the hush puppies on the plate. The man and his wife trading stories of the workday, this dinnertime much like the others in their history of dinnertimes. The dogs finish their food, settle in the living room.
Zoom out, and the little house almost glows with satisfaction. They’re in this together.
This is the way he wants me to see it. But I’m always zooming out too far, into the future, where they argue, where the wife resents the long commute or the husband hates living in town, where the old woman drives him crazy but he’s too nice to admit it, and the wife—she must be crazy, too, because she can’t bring herself to put her mother in a nursing home. And out there, not very far, there’s a boy. He won’t visit often, and maybe he’s as sweet as his father, but what thirteen-year-old (see, the old woman’s pointing her finger) isn’t sometimes really awful?
And then there’s the cat. An orphan cat who needs a good home.