Love Saves the Day

I put one paw tentatively on Laura’s knee, waiting to see if she’ll make any sudden movements—or try to stop me—as I crawl into her lap to get closer to the little sweaters. I rub my cheeks and the backs of my ears so hard against them—trying to get rid of that other cat’s smell and also trying to get that little bit of Sarah-smell onto me—that the clasp of my red collar gets stuck on a thread and Laura has to untangle me. Once I’m freed I rub my head on the sweaters again, trying to re-create some of that good Sarah-and-me-together smell. Laura begins to massage her fingers gently behind my ears. Closing my eyes, I lean the side of my head into her hand and purr. She cups her hand and runs it from the tip of my nose all the way down my back in a good, firm way that makes the skin under my fur tingle.

Suddenly we hear the jangling of keys downstairs that means Josh is home. Whenever he comes home this late, it’s usually because he’s been meeting with the humans who live in that building above the music studio—collecting their stories, he says. We hear his footsteps coming up the stairs, and Laura moves the white box top so that it mostly covers the little clothes that aren’t underneath my head. In another moment Josh is in the doorway with speckles of rainwater all over his jeans, saying, “Hello, ladies.”

Josh still comes in here sometimes to look through Sarah’s black disks. It doesn’t bother me anymore when he does this, because he always washes his hands first and treats them so respectfully. He’s looking for music that got recorded at that studio, I heard him tell Laura. Sarah has hundreds of black disks, so it’s taking him a while to get through all of them. He never touches things in the Sarah-boxes, though—the ones that don’t have any black disks in them—like Laura and I do.

But now he’s not here to look through black disks. He smiles like he always does when he sees Laura in here with me, looking at Sarah’s things, and tells her, “I picked up a tuna sub at Defonte’s, if you want half.”

“How did you know I was thinking about cold tuna for dinner?” Laura asks, smiling back at him.

Josh leans his shoulder against the door frame. “You know, it’ll be our anniversary in a few weeks. We should do something grand.”

“Not too grand,” Laura says.

“How many first anniversaries are we going to get?” he asks her. “And I’m talking about dinner out. Not a week in Paris.” He looks at her hopefully. “Come on. We haven’t gone out for a great meal in a long time, and I’ll still have a couple of weeks left of my severance.”

He says this like it’s good news, although from the deepening frown on Laura’s face, she doesn’t think the same thing. But all she says is, “I’ll be down in a minute for the sub.”

Josh walks toward their bedroom, and Laura throws the little clothes back into their white box, then tosses the whole thing into one of the Sarah-boxes. “You must want dinner, too,” she says to me. Scratching some of the shedding fur on the bottom of my chin, she adds, “And maybe a good brushing later on.”

I look back at the Sarah-boxes for a moment. But then—thinking about my dinner and tuna and a nice, long brushing—I follow Laura down the stairs.

Josh never used to talk about his work very much, but now he talks about it whenever he can find somebody to listen. Laura usually wrinkles up her forehead and changes the subject. Or else she says things like Mm-hmm or Really in a way that doesn’t sound like she wants Josh to keep talking about it. But the littermates ask him lots of questions. Josh brings them here one day a week to help him organize his papers and stuff them into envelopes. I usually help, too, by scattering the papers onto the floor to make sure there aren’t any rats hiding in them—I’ve been extra cautious ever since we found that rat in the Sarah-boxes, even though it turned out to be a fake. Josh isn’t always as grateful for my efforts as he should be, though. He acts frustrated and says, “Ah, Prudence, why are you doing this to me?” while arranging the papers back into a tidy stack. But you can tell how happy and relieved the littermates are, when they laugh and praise me for all my help. Occasionally Josh, acting like he’s doing me a favor, will crumple one piece of paper into a ball and toss it for me to practice my mice-fighting with. Although the littermates have invented an irritating “game”—called Keep Prudence’s Paper Ball Away from Her—and they toss my paper ball back and forth to each other over my head, yelling, “Keep away! Keep away!” until, finally, I jump high enough in the air to smack it away from them and take it downstairs to under-the-couch.