Love Saves the Day

Josh likes to tease Laura that you can tell she’s a lawyer by the way she negotiates over everything. If he’s the one who suggests Thai food, which Laura hates (and I agree, because Thai food is way too spicy for a cat to eat—which means they should never order it), Laura will say something like, Okay, Thai tonight, but then I get to choose for the next three nights. And Josh will respond by saying, Thai food tonight, you get to choose tomorrow, plus I’ll give you a foot rub. And Laura says, Thai food tonight, one foot rub, and you have to clean Prudence’s litterbox for the rest of the week. And Josh will squint his eyes and draw the corners of his mouth down, and say, Ooh … I don’t know … I can’t decide if I’m coming out ahead or not. Then they laugh and order the Thai food.

But when Laura suggests Thai food now, which should make Josh happy since he’s the only one who likes it, he doesn’t say anything except, Get whatever you want, Laura.

When I was much younger and had only been living with Sarah for a few months, I used to have a hard time getting my tail to do what I wanted. I would be trying to groom myself, and my tail would wriggle all over the place, pulling itself out of reach of my claws no matter how hard I tried to catch it. I would growl and snap at it, to show it how serious I was. Sometimes I even tried to chase it down, but it always remained just out of reach of my teeth, and all that happened was I wound up running in circles. I didn’t get angry at it, exactly. But it was frustrating to see a part of myself doing things I didn’t want or expect or understand.

That’s what Laura and Josh remind me of now. They seem bewildered and frustrated when they look at each other, like they just can’t understand the things this other human—who they thought they were so close with—is doing or saying.

I wish I could talk in human language, so I could tell Laura that Josh is only acting so angry because his feelings are hurt, just like hers. Maybe then she would sleep better at night.

Of course, if she wasn’t having trouble sleeping, she might not want me to sleep in the bed with her. And sleeping next to Laura is the best I’ve slept since the day Sarah left without telling me why.

Today is Sunday and Laura is awake earlier than she usually is on Sundays—so early that I don’t have to do any of the things I do on Sundays to gently remind her to feed me breakfast at my regular time, like lying on her chest and staring straight at her face until her eyes open, or walking on top of the clock radio next to her head until it starts playing loud music. When Josh hears the clock radio on Sunday mornings, he buries his head under a pillow and says in a muffled, irritable voice, Isn’t today Sunday? Can’t you hit the snooze button or something? And Laura, sounding sleepy, tells him, I don’t think there is a snooze button on a hungry cat.

But today Laura gets up at her usual workday time and cleans the whole apartment. I even hear the sounds of The Monster rampaging in the living room while I’m eating in the kitchen! (I realize now that Laura and Josh use The Monster to make the floors clean. Sarah used to get the same thing done with just a regular broom and rolling thing called a carpet sweeper. It seems foolish to risk all our lives by having a Monster living in our apartment just so we can have cleaner floors, although I do have to admit that Laura seems strong enough to control it—for now.) My heart pounding, I leave most of my food uneaten and race for my upstairs room with the Sarah-boxes as fast as four legs can carry me. But when I get there, the door is closed! I meow in my loudest “fishmonger” voice, but the continual shrieking of The Monster downstairs drowns it out. When nobody responds, I jump up and latch onto the door handle with all my front toes, then let the weight of my body hang down until it drags the handle down, too, and makes the door swing open a crack. We had regular round doorknobs when I lived with Sarah in Lower East Side, but here in upper west Side the door handles are long and skinny enough for me to hold without slipping off.

Josh wanders out of his bedroom—dressed to go outside in jeans, his old sneakers with the dangly shoelace, and a shirt with buttons down the front—in time to see the door swinging open with me attached to it. He laughs. “Poor Prudence! Did you get locked out of your favorite room?”