Love Saves the Day

But, other than one time when they went to see Great Lawn in Central Park, the places they go don’t sound like fields at all. One day Josh took them to Museum of Natural History, and another time he took them to an indoor place where they could paint their own ceramic plates and pots. In between making phone calls to try and get a new job, Josh also calls humans he knows who have litters of their own, trying to get ideas for new things he can do with Abbie and Robert.

“I thought I’d take the kids down to the Lower East Side next week,” he tells Laura one night, after she’s come home from work.

Laura’s eyebrows come together. “Really?”

“It’s not like Manhattan ends at Fourteenth Street,” Josh says in a dry voice.

Laura doesn’t seem to like this idea. I’m not sure why, though, because going back to Lower East Side sounds wonderful. Maybe Sarah is there someplace, waiting for me! And even if she’s not—even if she’s still doing whatever it is she went off to do—I bet smelling all those familiar Lower East Side smells again would make me remember all kinds of things about her.

I have no way of asking Josh to take me with him if he decides to go to Lower East Side, but I try to give him hints by jumping into the cloth shoulder bag of “supplies”—like games and fruit-juice boxes—that he takes with him whenever he spends time with the littermates. Sometimes I have to push little toys and plastic-wrapped packets of tissues out of the bag and onto the floor to make room for myself (it still surprises me how not-skinny I’ve become). Josh always laughs when he sees me curled up in his bag with just my head poking out of the unzippered top, but he also always lifts me out of the bag and puts me back on the floor. It was foolish to let Josh trick me with fish and silly singing into not hissing at him when he touches me, because now he’s not hesitant about picking me up. If he were, he’d have no choice but to let me stay in that bag and go with him to wherever he takes the littermates.

Josh laughs at some of the things I do (as if I were here to entertain humans!), but he’s also been laughing and smiling a lot more in general. I guess I wasn’t paying close enough attention to him before to notice the small changes in his posture and expressions that showed how unhappy he was becoming, being in the apartment all the time. Humans like spending time with other humans. Sarah was always happiest when both Anise and I were there to keep her company. Now Josh’s shoulders are straighter than they’ve been since before he lost his job, and even his face looks different. It’s darker from spending time outdoors under the sun, and there are tiny brown freckles on the skin of his nose.

“I didn’t expect to love being with them as much as I do,” Josh says to Laura one night.

“I’m sure they love being with you, too,” Laura tells him with a smile.

Josh and Laura order a pizza tonight, because Josh says he’s too exhausted from running around in the heat all day to even think about what they should do for dinner. Laura is tired, too. She’s been staying up very late again—later even than she used to when I first came to live here. She isn’t spending time with her work papers, and the pink marks on the sides of her nose have begun to fade. (Maybe she’s not reading as many papers at her office, either. She doesn’t have nearly as many little ink smudges on her fingers as she used to.) Mostly what she does now is put the TV on low and let her eyes go unfocused, as if she’s thinking hard about something. She’s also started putting little bits of food beside her on the couch and making a pss-pss-pss sound that calls me over to come eat them. Lots of times I don’t bother moving off the couch after I’m done. I stretch out and settle into a deep sleep, and lately this has become the most restful sleeping I do.

Laura doesn’t put any pizza cheese (I love pizza cheese!) on the couch next to her as she and Josh eat, but she does drop a bit onto the floor for me. Normally, when a pizza comes to our door, the man who lives behind the counter downstairs calls us on the phone to announce that the pizza’s on the way up. He didn’t tonight, though, and when the doorbell rang, Laura said, “That’s odd, Thomas must be away from the desk.” She and Josh are eating the pizza anyway, which I definitely won’t do. It’s always bad when things are different from the way they usually are, but when the thing that’s different is with your food, that’s the worst of all. So, ignoring the cheese Laura and Josh keep dropping onto the floor (as if they expect me to eat the next piece when I didn’t eat the last one!), I devote myself instead to pushing the little plastic caps from their soda bottles around the coffee table with my front right paw.

“So what’d you and the kids do today?” Laura asks as they eat.