The Cat

The milk was sour. Now she had ruined a bowl of perfectly good bran flakes. She couldn’t use up the milk fast enough now that she was alone, without Henry to help her. She should try to drink more of it, she told herself. The calcium was good for her. She certainly didn’t want to be one of those frail, little, old ladies who stumbles on the stairs and shatters into a million pieces. Of course, it was probably too late for preventive measures. It was lucky that she didn’t have any stairs in her home. Still, she could always slip and shatter on the ice in her driveway. Now that sounded like her son talking. Her son always worried about her, all alone up there in the mountains. He always urged her to move into the city, closer to himself and his wife and their kids, the grandkids. But no, she liked her little house. She and Henry had lived there since their marriage, and she wasn’t about to leave it now. Yes, she was old and dreadfully alone, but she was perfectly capable of looking after herself. Besides, she didn’t like the way her son talked down to her too slowly, too loudly, like you might talk to a small child or to a foreigner.

She would have to drive to the grocery in town to buy more milk. She put on her hat and her scarf and her driving gloves. Henry always used to laugh at her driving gloves, black leather and slightly too large so that they drooped at the fingertips. He used to say that she looked like she was going out to commit murder, and was she sure that she wasn’t hiding a dagger in that innocent-looking purse? She chuckled to herself. Oh, she missed him every day. I miss you.

Her old Cadillac started on the second try. She turned on the radio. She loved the British correspondents on the BBC news. For some reason they always sounded more intelligent with their crisp, charming accents. She backed the car out of the garage. There was a sickening thump. She stopped abruptly and lurched forward in her seat. He car must be falling apart. It was old, like her, and there was no Henry to fix it. She got out of the car, expecting to see stray automobile parts on the snowy ground. Instead, she saw a cat. And, Goddamn, it was very much dead. Flattened and bloody in the snow. Damn.

Her first instinct was to call an ambulance. That was what she had done for Henry. She had known he was dead when she woke up next to him, yet she had shaken him and screamed at him and tried to get him to take his pills. Somehow she couldn’t comprehend death outside the context of a hospital. She needed a caring doctor in a white coat to break the news to her gently. You couldn’t just have a dead husband at your house. When the ambulance arrived, she hadn’t minded the strange, pitying looks that the paramedics had given her. To be honest, she was just glad to not be alone. It was scary, then, to be alone. I’m so sorry, Henry.

In any case, this cat was not only already dead, it was also, of course, a cat. She couldn’t very well call an ambulance. She stood there, transfixed, gazing at the cat. It was a white cat, once. White cats had always seemed cold and severe to her, not the type to cuddle in your lap. Now the tender inner pinkness seeped out of the seams and trickled over the snow. The fur was ripped along the cat’s spine, and she could see the glistening, pearly vertebrae, twisted awkwardly, floating in the smooth, rolling pinkness.

Although it was, of course, she who had hit the cat, she felt almost as if this cat had selected her to reveal this beautiful, rosy secret to. It was a secret that could really be shared only once, and here they were, together, at just this moment. She felt that perhaps she had loved this cat, once. She loved it still. More, now, maybe. She loved her cat.

She paused to contemplate this false sense of ownership. Of course, this cat had to belong to someone, and it wasn’t her. She should try to find the owner and inform them of this new development. But what to do? She could put up a sign, she supposed. Found: Cat. White. No tags. By the way... dead. No, that wouldn’t do. She wouldn’t be able to describe the lovely, raw pinkness that was so important, and the alleged owner wouldn’t understand about that, anyway. Besides, this wasn’t just any lost, mangled, flattened pet. She decided that in its present state, the cat belonged entirely to her.

This idea was exciting to her. She had never had a pet. Henry used to say that it was strange enough for humans to live in artificial habitats and that other animals certainly shouldn’t live in houses with them. Besides, he would say, he didn’t like having all that hair everywhere. But that was their joke. When she was younger, she had had very long hair, blond and curly, the kind that strangers would come up and touch because they just couldn’t control their enthusiasm. And when she and Henry kissed, her hair used to envelope both of them and get in their mouths and between their teeth. Henry used to joke that he was afraid her hair would strangle him in the night. She had cut her hair when her son was born; proper mothers didn’t have long, unruly hair. But she always missed it. Now her hair was thin and limp and white and she usually covered it with a scarf and tried to forget about it. Henry would still tell her that her hair was beautiful every now and then. “Almost as gorgeous as mine,” he would say, and stroke his shiny, bald head with a chuckle. She missed him. She missed his bald head on the pillow next to hers.

She wondered if she would always miss him so much. Although she fully understood that he was permanently gone, he didn’t seem dead. Not really. Not dead like Moses or Shakespeare or Lincoln. They were dead people. She wondered whether they had seemed so dead while their wives were still alive and missing them.

She wondered if anyone missed this cat. She wondered why it was this cat that died today, and not some other cat, somewhere else. She wasn’t sure she believed in fate. Henry used to always say that he wanted to die before she did. He didn’t think he could last long without her, anyway. She told him he was selfish, and who would take care of her once he was gone? His reply was that a good-looking lady like herself should have no trouble finding some dashing, young fellow to warm the lonely nights. She would laugh and hit him good-naturedly, and they would fall silent. Perhaps it was Henry’s fate to go first. But that meant it was her fate to live on without him.

She became aware of the cold very abruptly, and realized she had been outside for quite some time. It had begun to snow, and the snow melted on the pink inside of the cat, which seemed all wrong, like snow falling inside the house while you sipped tea at the dining room table. She couldn’t leave the cat there. It would get all watery inside from the melted snow, and then it would freeze, and in the spring it would thaw and the soft, beautiful pinkness would flow in delicate rivulets down the driveway, into the gutter. She couldn’t have that happen.

She remembered that she had some newspapers in the back of the car. She had meant to take them to the recycling center, but she had never quite gotten around to it. She spread out a large sheet of paper on the driveway and gingerly lifted the cat onto the paper with gloved hands. Then, struck by curiosity, she removed her gloves and stroked the cat’s white fur. It seemed strange that a body so completely dead there in the snow could still be so warm. She arranged its stiff legs and folded the edges of the paper over it to create a tidy package. A small classified ad caught her eye. Free kittens. It was her granddaughter’s birthday soon, and the little girl liked animals. Maybe she would discuss this with her son.

She climbed into the car and placed her cat in the passenger seat next to her. She would bring it to the cemetery. That seemed like a proper place. And it was really quite pretty in the summer, when the trees flowered with their white blossoms and the grass was lush and green. Just like Better Homes and Gardens. She couldn’t quite bring herself to visit Henry there, yet. Maybe in the spring. She knew that her son kept flowers on the grave. He really was a thoughtful young man.

Maybe she could stop at her son’s house for dinner. He was always coaxing her to come, and she didn’t really like cooking for herself, anyway. She would give him a call when she got home. She had to stop at the store for milk, anyway. She would buy a nice bottle of wine to bring to him. Turning on the radio, she hummed along to a lovely Mozart sonata as she drove smoothly down the road. Down the road into the peaceful, white snow.