What the Cat Smelled Like

Episode 2 of 4 of My Neighbor’s Cat by Helen Abbott

We wrote for six weeks.

Not every day. He works nights, so the cat came home to him at eight and back to me at seven, and a note took a full day to cross the fence and a full day to come back. Two days for a sentence. It was the slowest conversation I’ve ever had, and I have never been so patient about anything.

He wrote about the cat. I wrote about the cat. We were both very clear that this was about the cat.

He sat on my keyboard during a call and typed a letter to my boss. 14A.

He does that. He has opinions about your work. So do I, probably. 14B.

He brought me a leaf. Just one. Set it down and walked off. 14A.

He brings me socks. Only left ones. I have a drawer of my own left socks that he has given me as gifts. 14B.

I learned things I didn’t ask for.

The cat came home smelling like coffee in October, strong coffee, the kind from a pot that has been on since four. In November he came smelling like paint. Not house paint. The other kind, the kind with a name. I don’t know how I knew the difference. I knew.

In December he came in with a small patch of blue on the fur behind his ear, and I sat with him in the window for a long time and thought about a man on the other side of a fence, painting something at three in the morning with a gray cat on the table.

I didn’t ask. I wrote: He has blue on him. 14A.

The answer came back: He gets into things. 14B.

And then, two days later, a second note, folded separately, taped under the first one, like he had gone back to the door and stood there:

It’s a bird. The painting. It’s not good yet. 14B.

I kept that one in the drawer with the others. I had a drawer now.

The old woman across the street caught me on the sidewalk the second week of December. She has a way of catching you. She’s seventy eight and she has never once been in a hurry in her life.

“You know he reads those on the step,” she said.

“Reads what.”

“Don’t do that. I’ve got eyes.” She adjusted the bag on her arm. “Every morning at eight, that boy comes up his walk from wherever he works, and the cat’s already sitting there, and he takes the little paper off, and he stands on his step and reads it. Standing up. In the cold. Eight, ten minutes sometimes.”

“It’s a note about a cat.”

“Honey,” she said, “nobody stands in the cold for ten minutes over a cat.”

I went inside. I did my job. I did not think about it, in the way where you think about nothing else.

The thing about a two day conversation is you can’t take anything back. Whatever you write is going to sit on a collar for a full day before anyone reads it, and then it sits in a drawer, and there’s no unsending a cat.

So I was careful. Six weeks of careful.

And then it was the third week of December and I’d had a bad day, the kind where nobody is unkind and it still lands on you, and the cat was in the window and the sun was going, and I wrote the true thing without checking it first.

Some days he’s the only one who comes to the door. 14A.

I taped it on before I could read it back. I sent the cat home. I stood in my kitchen for a while with my hands on the counter.

Two days.

On the second morning he came at seven with no paper on his collar at all, and my chest did something I didn’t ask it to.

Then I saw the paper was under the collar, folded twice, pushed down into the fur, like somebody had wanted it to stay dry.

Sergeant has a vet appointment Thursday at nine. He hates the carrier. It’s a two person job. 14B.

I had a pen in my hand and the word yes on the paper before I had looked at a calendar, and I looked down at it, and I did not cross it out.

My Neighbor’s Cat · ← The Note on the Collar · The Vet at Nine →