Love Saves the Day

“We went down to Katz’s. I had an urge for corned beef.” Josh drinks from his glass and puts it back on the table. “Then we walked around for a while and went over to Alphaville Studios on Avenue A.” He looks at Laura curiously. “Do you know the place?”

Laura stops chewing, but swallows hard before Josh notices. “Of course,” she finally says.

“I figured you would. Evil Sugar recorded their first few albums there.” Josh sprinkles garlic powder onto his pizza slice. “I never realized how cheap it is to book studio time there. They even let a lot of the bands leave their equipment set up so they don’t have to pay an arm and a leg lugging it back and forth. And they have programs for neighborhood kids who are interested in music. They’re good people down there—it’s a real asset to the community.”

Laura is chewing slowly. She tries to sound casual when she speaks, like she’s just asking the questions a human normally would at this point in the conversation, but she doesn’t quite succeed. “What made you think of going there?”

“I thought Abbie and Robert might get a kick out of seeing the inside of a recording studio. You know how kids like that kind of thing. I used to know one of their techs, and it turns out he’s still there. He must’ve been there forever. He’s got this beard practically down to his knees.” I try to imagine what a human with no arm and no leg and a long, long beard might look like. Before I can get a picture in my head, though, Josh’s cheeks turn a shade of pink so deep, it’s almost red. “And,” he says in the kind of voice humans use when they’re confessing to something they think they should feel guilty about, “I’ve been looking through some of your mother’s old albums. I keep seeing Alphaville Studios in the liner notes.”

This time Laura puts the plate with her half-eaten pizza slice down on the coffee table and turns to look straight at him. But before she can say anything, Josh rushes ahead with, “Look, you promised way back in March that we could look through your mother’s albums at home. I haven’t pushed it. I’ve been trying to give you space to get things done on your own schedule. But those boxes can’t just sit up there forever, Laura. At some point you’ll need to figure out what you want to keep and what you want to toss or put into storage. And I’d hoped”—his voice gets softer—“that we’d find something else to do with that room.”

Why can’t those boxes sit up there? Who are they hurting? It’s not like Josh doesn’t have lots of his own “junk” filling up Home Office. Why can’t there be one room in this whole huge apartment just for me and all my stuff? A spot in the middle of my back stings with an itch, and I turn to attack it angrily with my teeth.

“I don’t know, Josh.” I see the dark centers of Laura’s eyes widen in a flicker of panic. “Things are just so … unsettled … right now.”

“The history of the world is people having children under less-than-perfect circumstances,” he tells her, gently.

They’re discussing something else now, and I don’t understand what it is. All I understand is that if Laura doesn’t find a reason to care about the things in the Sarah-boxes, Josh is going to make her send them away. I get distracted, and my right paw—which is still batting at the plastic soda-bottle cap—hits Josh’s glass of soda harder than I expected and sends it spilling all over the coffee table.

Josh and Laura both cry, “Prudence!” and jump up to get paper towels from the kitchen. I leap to the floor and crouch there. Really, this is their fault for leaving a bottle cap right next to a full glass and then distracting me with odd conversations. Still, humans tend to blame cats for things that aren’t really the cat’s fault. Neither of them scoops me up to kiss my head the way Sarah did that time when I spilled a full glass in Lower East Side, but at least they don’t yell at me. They just wipe up all the soda and throw the dirty paper towels into the tall trash can that lives in the kitchen. By the time they’re sitting on the couch again, I can tell that Laura has decided to talk about something else.

“So how was Alphaville?” she asks Josh—and she must really want to change the subject from the mysterious threat Josh had brought up, because I could tell how much she didn’t like hearing Josh talk about this Alphaville place. “Did the kids have a good time?”

Josh hesitates and throws her a quick look. But he just says, “They did. Although from what the guy I know there was telling me, they may not be around much longer. The landlord’s trying to sell the building. The tenants in the apartments upstairs are up in arms about it.”

“That’s a shame,” Laura says, and there’s real sympathy in her voice. “But that’s what happens sometimes.”

“I don’t know,” Josh says thoughtfully. “It sounds like there’s something sketchy going on. I thought I’d poke around online tomorrow and see what I can find out.”