Dewey's Nine Lives

But still, in her heart, Mary Nan misses them. She misses the eighty pounds of cat that used to sleep on her bed at night. She misses the ritual of feeding and grooming and petting. She misses looking out the window and seeing lounging cats sprawled all the way to the top of a ladder, or lying on the benches in the sunlight with their raccoon friends. She misses seeing them scatter in every direction when the bomber roared overhead. She misses the sight of a door opening and a cat strolling out in violation of all the rules of hygiene and property management. Most of all she misses the comradeship, the sense of being a part of something special as people mixed with cats, and cats mixed with people, and they all enjoyed themselves right down to their bones.

There won’t be any more cats. At least not at the Colony Resort. But Mary Nan and Larry are thinking about retiring and moving back to the mainland, and they’re pretty sure that when they do, they’ll adopt another cat. Larry had always been a dog person, cocker spaniels to be precise, but sharing that Thanksgiving TV dinner with Tabitha in 1969 had changed his opinion of cats forever. He loved Tabitha, and he loved every one of those twenty-eight cats at the Colony Resort every bit as much as Mary Nan had loved them. And like her, he knows that he would enjoy nothing more than to live the last decades of his life in the Florida sun, lounging with a furry friend and remembering those hectic but happy days when the world seemed little more than palm trees and friendship and cats.

FIVE

Christmas Cat

“While I stood there holding him in my hands and talking to the owner as to what to do, the kitten coughed. Or more accurately, he sputtered. That little sputter took us into a chapter of life that still brings tears to my eyes and a smile to my face.”

Vicki Kluever never liked cats. Didn’t grow up owning one, never had a friend who owned one, but she’d been around them enough to know they weren’t for her. Cats were always rubbing against you. They always wanted to sit in your lap. They always wanted to be petted or given some kind of attention. Vicki was born and raised on Kodiak, a large, mountainous island off the harsh southwest coast of Alaska, where the only milk was powdered and the only affordable meat was the fish you pulled from the freezing sea. She considered herself a strong and independent woman, from a long line of independent women, and if she had an animal, she wanted that animal to be strong and independent, too. Cats? They were soft.

But her daughter, Sweetie, was four years old, and Sweetie really wanted a pet. Vicki suggested a dog. After all, she had grown up with dogs. One of her favorite childhood pictures was of herself with two black eyes, one for each time the enthusiastically playful family dog had knocked her off the front porch with its tail. But her landlord was adamant: no dogs. He had no problem with a cat. If the little girl wanted, he said, they could even adopt two, which sounded good to Vicki because two cats could keep each other company, and she might not have to bother with them. So when a coworker’s cat had kittens in November, Vicki Kluever thought she’d found the perfect Christmas present. Or at least the best present allowed at her third-rate fourplex apartment building in Anchorage, Alaska.

Two weeks before Christmas, just as the kittens were being weaned, she drove over to meet them. They were pathetically cute, of course, tiny and uncoordinated and nestling energetically against their mother. There was one little guy that stood out, though, the one that kept biting his siblings’ tails and stepping on their heads when they tried to suckle their mother. He was a live wire, a real spunky personality. The independent type. So Vicki picked him. Then she chose his exact opposite: a cute little female that looked Siamese and seemed like the most docile kitten in the bunch.

She planned the adoption for Christmas Eve. She and her daughter were having dinner with their friend Michael, so she asked him to pick up Sweetie from day care. (The girl’s real name was Adrienna, by the way, but Vicki has called her Sweetie since she was a few weeks old.) Vicki would pick up the kittens. Her daughter was always asleep by seven, so by the time dinner was over and it was time to drive home, she’d be so dead to the world, she wouldn’t notice the box in the backseat. Sweetie wouldn’t know about the kittens until she woke up Christmas morning and found them under the tree.