Bono

“Well, I’m worried about him. He refuses to take a pill. I’ve tried everything.”

“Is he drinking?” she asked.

“Yes. But he hasn’t done number two. And he’s so skinny.”

I waited for the nice woman to tell me to return him immediately.

“He’s always been a fussy eater,” she said. “There’s medication in the canned food we gave you.”

“He doesn’t like that much, either.”

“Is he eating any of it?” she asked.

“A little, now and then.”

“Well, that should be enough to keep him stable.”

“What about the chicken?”

“If he doesn’t like that anymore, you could try fresh fish.”

I remembered Olivia once telling me wild cats demand more variety in their diets than domestic felines. If a street cat has a slice of rat fillet here, a chomp of cockroach there, he’s likely getting all the nutrients he needs. A kitchen cat, by comparison, may have all her nutritional requirements met in a single can (or pile of dried food). I wondered if Bono’s pickiness was more to do with his homeless days than his illness.

“When will Jon be back?” I asked.

“In a couple of days. Meantime, just relax and enjoy Bono. He’s a great little cat.”

Relax? With sole responsibility for a seriously ill cat?

* * *

Lydia would be with me for just two more days. I decided it was time to drag her to my personal mecca—Broadway. I wanted her to love musicals as much as I did. When I was growing up in small town New Zealand, musicals were my religion. I soaked up amateur productions of South Pacific and The King and I along with the milk from our local dairy farms. To me, Rodgers and Hammerstein were philosophers who understood everything about love, life, and death. In Oklahoma! they even showed they knew what it was like to live in a tiny community on the edge of the Earth. I adored musicals because they affirmed that all a spirited girl had to do was fall in love, get married, and live happily ever after.

To visit the birthplace of these works and walk the same streets as Gene Kelly, Julie Andrews, and Hugh Jackman was living the dream.

“Just think,” I said, slipping my arm through hers. “We’re breathing the same air as Sondheim!”

I might as well have said we’d be having toast for breakfast. It was an odd reversal of our roles when I visited her in her Sri Lankan monastery. Perhaps this was karmic payback for not understanding the thrill of meditating for twelve hours in 100 percent humidity inside a sweltering temple frequented by scorpions.

Sitting inside the Eugene O’Neill Theatre waiting for the curtain to rise on The Book of Mormon, my excitement was, I think, almost too much for her. Perhaps she was uncomfortable with the musical’s theme of young, naive white people inflicting their religion on African villagers. But even she laughed out loud in the opening act when an actor dragged a dead donkey across the stage. No doubt it resonated with her experiences in the third world.

However, while I loved everything about The Book of Mormon, Lydia seemed to merely tolerate it. How she had missed out on the family musical theater gene remains a mystery. Her grandmother had starred as Katisha in three (admittedly amateur) productions of The Mikado. I couldn’t believe there was not a hint of greasepaint in Lydia’s veins. I guess some people just cannot get the hang of actors erupting into song every five minutes.

“Didn’t you love it?!” I asked as we made our way out of the theater.

Her answer was short and muffled. It sounded like “quite”.

On our way back to the apartment, she pointed out a poster for a play by Norah Ephron also running on Broadway. Lucky Guy was Ephron’s last play. Starring Tom Hanks, it was about a newspaper columnist living in New York in the 1980s. I wanted her last night to be one to remember. If I couldn’t change her mind about musicals, I thought she might at least enjoy a play. Miraculously, seats were still available. I booked two for tomorrow, her last night in town.

Bono was in his usual position under the bed when we opened the door to the apartment. A resident rat would have been friendlier.

While she was in the shower, I opened my laptop. After a few watery bleeps, Philip appeared on the screen. He was sitting in front of the fire with a blanket and Jonah draped over his knee.

“What have you been up to?” he asked.

“Not much. We’ve just been to The Book of Mormon. It was fantastic. You’d love it. And we went shopping. Lydia bought this fabulous handbag and . . .” I needed to play down how much fun we’d been having. “How’s work?”

“Hectic as usual. We had to let someone go.”

I knew how much he hated doing that. Through the years, I’d learned the corporate world is a shark tank, eat or be eaten.

“Sorry about that,” I said.

He looked older than I remembered. I was older too, of course, but only on the outside. Jonah blinked at me and yawned.

“It’s freezing here,” he said. “We’ve got to sort the heating out before winter.”