Love Saves the Day

“I was fifteen. I had my first after-school job at a Sizzler near our house, but I didn’t have my driver’s license yet. So my dad would come to pick me up at the end of my shift. One night we found this cat, sitting in the middle of the street. He had been hit by a car. He was just kind of wagging his head, you know? People were honking and honking at him, but he wouldn’t move. I got out of the car and wrapped him up in this blanket we kept in the trunk. My father drove to the nearest emergency animal hospital as fast as he could.”

Josh shifted slightly, leaning his head back to rest it on the wall behind their bench. “I remember holding this cat, his eyes were open and staring up at me, and he was panting so hard. He must have been in shock. The whole time my father was driving, I kept thinking, Don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die. When we got to the hospital, the vet on duty examined him and said he could save the cat, but it would cost a lot of money and the cat would need a lot of looking after while he was recovering. My dad explained that he wasn’t our cat, and that we couldn’t take him home with us because of our dog. That’s when the vet said that maybe the best thing to do would be to euthanize him, so at least he wouldn’t suffer anymore.”

Josh fell silent. Laura didn’t know if the pity choking her throat was for the cat in the story, or for the boy Josh had been—the boy who was now a man and still didn’t understand why there should have to be such a thing as suffering in the world.

“But I thought, no. I thought if I could go home and call all my friends, surely one of them would offer to take him. I had a girlfriend, Cindy, and she had cats, and I thought maybe her parents would agree to take him. My father wanted to euthanize the cat while we were there, but I talked him into taking me home and letting me try. I thought I at least had to try.

“Of course,” Josh continued, “I couldn’t find anybody who was willing to take on the financial burden of some cat they didn’t know who might require all kinds of long-term care. I called everybody I could think of, but they all said no. I guess it was stupid of me to think someone might take him. I was only fifteen, what did I know? My dad called the vet hospital and told them to go ahead and euthanize the cat. But they couldn’t do it without my dad coming in to sign some paperwork first. And my dad, who’d been working all day, was so angry. Here it was, nearly midnight, and he had to drive all the way back to the animal hospital. I was in my bedroom on the phone with Cindy, and my father came in and yelled at me for all the trouble and inconvenience I was putting him through, and to tell me how selfish I’d been.

“Cindy could hear him shouting. I don’t think I’ve ever felt worse. The cat was going to die. I’d made all this extra work for my father, and he was yelling at me. And my girlfriend could hear him yelling. You know how the most embarrassing thing in the world when you’re a teenager is for your friends to hear your parents yell at you.” Laura, who had only ever been yelled at by Sarah once, and never in front of her friends, nodded anyway. “When he left, Cindy said, Listen to me, Josh. Listen to me. You’re a good person. You’re a good person, Josh, and you did a good thing. Don’t listen to what your father said.” He shook his head. “I don’t think I ever came as close to hating my dad as I did that night.”

“I can understand that,” Laura said softly.

Josh looked up at her. “My parents were having money problems then, although they didn’t tell us at the time. That’s why he was working such long hours, why he was so tired at the end of his day. He worried about me so I could have the luxury of worrying about a stray cat.” He held her gaze. “I can see where you might think I was doing the same thing now, letting you worry about money so I can worry about other things. That’s not what I’ve been doing, but I understand how it could look that way.”

Laura was silent for a moment. Then she said, “You never told me that story.”

“No,” Josh agreed. “I guess I try to only tell you the good ones.” His left hand plucked at the folds on the sleeve of his sweater. Laura saw the glint of his wedding band as it caught the light. “There are a lot of stories you haven’t told me. I wish you would.”

Her chest and throat were so heavy with tears that wouldn’t come out, she could hardly speak. She looked down at her own hands. “What if my stories aren’t good?” she whispered.

He laughed. The sound incongruous in the humid air of the waiting room. “What do you think, I got married so I could hear interesting stories for the rest of my life?” Laura lifted her eyes to his face and saw that he was smiling at her.