The Vet at Nine

Episode 3 of 4 of My Neighbor’s Cat by Helen Abbott

I had built him in my head. I want to admit that. Six weeks of handwriting that leaned left and a cat that smelled like coffee, and I had made a whole man out of it, and the man was older, and gruff, and had a beard for some reason.

He was standing on his front step at eight forty five on Thursday holding a cat carrier like it had personally wronged him.

He was my age. No beard. Tall in the way where he’d clearly been told to stand up straight as a kid and never fully took to it. He had a bandage around his left thumb and paint on the cuff of his jacket, blue, and when he saw me come around the fence he did a thing with his face that I can only describe as a man realizing he should have planned this part.

“14A,” he said.

“14B.”

“He’s under the bed.”

“He’s always under the bed,” I said. “Do you have a towel?”

He did not have a towel. I have a small blanket. I went home and got the small blanket, and I did not explain the small blanket, and he did not ask, and that was the first thing I liked about him in person.

Here is how you get a cat into a carrier. One person holds the carrier upright, door to the ceiling, like a well. The other person lowers the cat in, back feet first, wrapped in something so the front feet can’t find anything to hold. It takes two people and no talking.

We did it in one try.

He looked at me over the top of the carrier, with the cat inside it making a noise like a small engine, and he said, “How did you know to do it that way?”

“I don’t know. I just did.”

“Nobody knows that. I’ve been doing this alone for two years.”

“Well,” I said. “Now you’re not.”

Which came out of my mouth before I had reviewed it, and we both heard it, and he looked at the carrier instead of me, and I looked at the bandage on his thumb.

“He did that,” he said. “Last time. He’s got opinions about the carrier.”

“He has opinions about everything.”

“He has opinions about you,” said 14B, and then he picked up the carrier and walked toward the car before I could ask what that meant.

His car was old and clean. The radio came on when he started it and he turned it off fast, like I’d caught him at something. We drove eleven minutes and did not say much. The cat said plenty.

At the vet, the woman at the desk looked at her screen and then at us.

“Sergeant. And which of you is the owner?”

“I am,” he said.

“I am,” I said.

At the same time. Exactly at the same time. She looked at us the way you look at a couple who haven’t figured something out yet.

“I’ll put both,” she said.

The vet was a small, fast woman who ran a scanner over the cat’s shoulder and frowned at it, and then frowned at her screen, and then frowned at us.

“The chip’s registered to a Diane,” she said. “On your street. Number twelve.”

“Twelve moved out,” he said. “Before I got there. It was empty.”

“Then somebody’s Diane left a cat behind two years ago,” said the vet, “and he’s been walking between your two houses ever since like he pays rent on both.”

Nobody said anything.

I thought about February, which was his, and March, which was mine. I thought about a cat sitting on an empty porch at number twelve, looking at two lit windows, deciding.

The vet gave him a diet plan. He folded it into his pocket without looking at it, which is what I’d have done.

On the way out to the car, with the carrier between us and the cat gone quiet, he said, “So he’s nobody’s.”

“He’s not nobody’s.”

“You know what I mean. On paper.”

“On paper.”

We walked. It was cold. Our breath went out ahead of us.

“So who gets him,” said 14B, and he said it lightly, like a joke, and it wasn’t one, and we both knew it wasn’t one.

“Weekdays,” I said.

It was out before I’d thought. He stopped walking. So did I. I heard what I’d said, which was not a joke either, which was a schedule, which was a plan for a future with a fence in it, and he looked at me with the carrier in his bandaged hand, and I would have given a great deal to know what my face was doing.

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