Seven in the Morning
Episode 4 of 4 of My Neighbor’s Cat by Helen Abbott
We kept the schedule. Weekdays mine, weekends his. The cat did not know about the schedule and did not care, and came and went exactly as he always had, and we both pretended the schedule was real because it gave us a reason.
The notes changed after the vet. Not what they said. How they were folded. Smaller. Pushed under the collar so they’d stay dry. Two a day sometimes now, one from each of us crossing in the cat, so you’d write something and get an answer to a thing you hadn’t asked yet.
He weighed in. Down half a pound. The vet did not smile but she also did not frown. 14B.
That’s a smile for her. 14A.
How’s the bird? 14A.
Better. It has a face now. Birds are hard. 14B.
I’d like to see it. 14A.
That one sat in the drawer for a day before I let the cat carry it. I want to be honest about that.
The answer came back on a Saturday, which was his day, so it was strange to see the cat at all. He came to my door at seven with the paper under his collar and sat on the mat and looked at me like he had been given a job.
It’s a robin. It’s on the wall by the window, facing your side. It has been facing your side since November. 14B.
I stood in my doorway in my socks and read that four times.
The old woman across the street was on her porch. Of course she was. She was watering nothing, at seven in the morning, in January, and when she saw me look up she did not pretend to be doing anything else.
“Told you,” she said, across the street, at full volume.
“You didn’t tell me anything.”
“I told you nobody stands in the cold over a cat.” She set the can down. “You know what else nobody does? Sit on their step at ten to seven every morning to watch a cat walk across a yard. Every morning. Since spring. Before the notes, honey. Before any of it.”
“Since spring.”
“He gets home, he doesn’t go in. He sits down. Cat comes out, cat crosses, cat goes in your door, your light comes on. Then he goes in.” She picked her can back up. “That’s not a cat he’s watching.”
I went inside. I sat at the kitchen table where I’d read the first note in October, and the cat got up on the table, which he is not allowed to do, and I let him.
I didn’t write anything back. That’s the part I can’t explain. I had a pen and a drawer full of paper and six months of practice, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to put on a collar.
So on Sunday I did something else.
I took the cat’s bowl, the one I’m not proud of, and I walked it out to the fence between our two yards, and I set it on the top rail. It was a stupid place for a bowl. It was six feet up and it would fall off in a wind.
Then I went to the hardware store and bought a shelf bracket and a piece of wood, and I put a shelf on the fence, at cat height, exactly halfway, and I put the bowl on it, and I went inside.
Monday morning at seven the cat came out of his door and did not cross the yard.
He went to the fence. He got up on the shelf. He ate from the bowl, in the middle, on nobody’s side, and then he sat down on the shelf with his tail hanging over my half and his face pointed at his half, and he looked extremely pleased with himself.
And on the other side of the fence, a door opened.
I heard it before I saw him. Then I saw the top of his head over the fence, and then more of him, because he was standing on something, a bucket maybe, and he looked at the shelf, and the bowl, and the cat, and then at me in my doorway in my socks.
“That’s a good shelf,” said 14B.
“It’s a terrible shelf. It’s crooked.”
“He doesn’t mind.”
“He doesn’t mind anything. He’s a cat.”
He was quiet for a second, with his arms on the top of the fence, and the cat between us eating like nothing in the world had ever been complicated.
“He’s on a diet,” said 14B. “So am I. We’re both doing a lot better.”
I was laughing before he finished the sentence, and I was already walking toward the fence, and I have no memory of deciding to do either one.