Bono

“Remember I told you about my friend Monique?” Michaela interrupted. “You’d love her. She’s an extraordinary person. She lives in my building and takes care of my cats when Gene and I are away. She loves black cats.”

“Really?” I have a soft spot for people who like black cats.

“Her precious kitty Onyx passed away a few years ago and she still keeps his dishes and litter boxes where they always were.”

The snow leopard leapt off his rock and disappeared into the foliage. “She adores the photos you posted of Bono. And I’ve told her what a lovely cat he is.”

I thought of Michaela lying on her stomach peering under the bed. It made me worry she might have oversold Bono’s charm.

“She’s interested in adopting him.”

“Really? Does she know how sick he is?”

“Monique’s a nurse. She specializes in infectious diseases and her husband Berry’s an internist and pediatrician. A little kidney failure’s nothing to them.”

“They must be amazing,” I said.

“They are, and I’d love to have Bono for a neighbor. That way I could keep him in my life.”

It sounded wonderful, but when things seem too good to be true, they usually are.

“I can’t promise anything,” Michaela added.

Peering into the bushes for another glimpse of the snow leopard, I could feel option three starting to wobble on its foundations. I’d always thought I’d be overjoyed if Bono found a loving home. Now it was in the cards, I wasn’t so sure. With him adopted, there’d be no reason for me to stay and extend the glorious highs of freedom in New York. I’d be just another face in the human soup pouring down Fifth Avenue.

I was reluctant to welcome serious contenders into the life Bono and I had created in our scruffy apartment. Still, if I’d had to choose anyone to trust his future with, a nurse and a doctor would be near the top of the list.

“You know how shy he is,” I said.

“Monique and Bono will have to make their own decisions about each other,” Michaela said, laughing.

We wandered toward the three brick arches supporting the famous Delacorte Clock. An updated version of a medieval European clock tower, the timepiece features a collection of whimsical animal sculptures that “dance” to various melodies on the hour.

“She’d like to drop by and meet him sometime,” Michaela added. “How about tomorrow morning around 10:30?”

Surely this was a joke. Who was Monique anyway, and why hadn’t she been in touch earlier?

I glanced up at a pair of bronze monkeys on top of the tower. They struck the hour on a large bell. We stepped aside to let a small family move in front of us. Two little girls about the same age as our granddaughters chattered at each other in French. The music started and we watched the animals spin past, oblivious to the follies of human concerns. Among them was of all things, a kangaroo, complete with a joey in her pouch, blowing on a horn.

It took a few seconds to recognize the tune: “What the World Needs Now Is Love.”

Chapter Twenty-nine

LAST CHANCE

A cat is immune to the sound of a ticking clock.

A person who lives in an old house invariably dreams of owning one with windows that do not rattle. Someone who spends days in a townhouse with sleek, functional lines longs for a home with character and a scrabble of roses over a white picket fence.

So why was a happily married woman approaching 60 living out a fantasy about running away from home to New York? Maybe I was chasing after a youth never lived, undergoing some kind of hormonal meltdown, escaping responsibility, or running away from my old buddy, death.

Having grown up under a snow-capped mountain in rural New Zealand, I’d never regarded Australia as my soul home. I considered the Australian landscape too vast and dry, the sky too huge. The lakes and rivers of my beautiful homeland ran through my veins. Besides, few things rile New Zealanders more than Australia claiming one of its own.

But when I saw that bronze kangaroo on the Delacorte Clock, something shifted in me. The five years we’d expected to stay in Australia when we moved there in 1997 had somehow stretched to sixteen. We arrived with a small black cat named Cleo, who watched over our unfolding lives. The five candles I’d placed on Katharine’s birthday cake a few months after our arrival had suddenly become ten, and then sixteen. Anxious nights before school exams had morphed into decisions over what university courses to take. Tears and prayers through Rob’s ulcerative colitis surgery melted into relief as he gained strength during the months of recovery. There were girlfriends, and then, as our daughters blossomed into womanhood, nervous young men standing on our doorstep. The happiness of Rob’s engagement to Chantelle was mingled with sadness at Cleo’s departure.