When Elinor
came downstairs in the morning, Grandpere was stretched out on the kitchen
floor, lying in a pool of urine. The cat
had received his name in infancy 16 years earlier, his patriarchal bearing
obvious even then.
“Damn,”
Elinor whispered, lifting him under his front legs and reaching for a rag. She cleaned him and set him down gently. His
hind legs slid out from under him, confirming her fear that this was the
beginning of the end.
“Oh,
Perie,” she crooned, moving the long black length of him to his favorite spot,
a square of quilt on the kitchen floor.
His paws and whiskers still glowed white; the pads of his feet still the
pink of youth. Grandpere and his mistress
sighed together.
Sixteen
years. He’d been the family’s first
shelter adoption. Elinor had gone to the
humane society alone, leaving her excited children and unashamedly equally
excited husband at home to await the arrival of what would become the first of
many cats. Remembering the cats of her
childhood, she had in mind a longhair in a ginger color, or smoky shades of
grey, perhaps—maybe even a pastel calico if such a beauty could actually find
itself homeless. She was unprepared for
the sheer numbers of cats at the shelter, the cold steel of their cages, the
desperate cries of some and the withdrawn hopelessness of others.
Elinor
passed an hour at the shelter, no closer to choosing a cat than when she’d
arrived. A sign she hadn’t noticed
before warned against touching the cats and spreading disease. She realized she had touched dozens of cats,
going from cage to cage and spreading who knows what. She spotted an attendant and opened her mouth
to ask where she might wash her hands.
But what came out was, “Could you please open that cage?” The attendant did so, and out flew a sleek
black cat with white feet and the longest white whiskers. Her first impression was that he was so
incredibly clean. Overshadowing
that in a split second was the connection he had created between them. In her arms was every cat she had ever wanted.
Wiping up
the puddle on the floor, Elinor remembered how she had brought the cat carrier
up to Keith’s office in the attic that day, for what he’d called “the
unveiling.” Keith opened the carrier’s
door, and smiled as the cat stepped out confidently, aware of Keith’s approval
even before he spoke. “You’re a handsome
fellow,” he said in the British accent that clung even after all the years in
Massachusetts. “Welcome to the family.”
The
attic. Elinor dropped the paper towel
into the garbage and stood at the sink, letting warm water run over her hands
as she thought about the daunting task ahead of her. It was an old thought. She had noticed Keith’s first symptoms of memory
loss in that office, and had tried to talk to him about it there, so many
times. Later, she had looked over his
shoulder at his unintelligible writings, had watched, tearful, his frustrated
efforts to remember how to boot up the computer he’d once programmed.
As Keith’s
condition deteriorated, he spent more and more time in the attic. He was gone now, laundered and sanitized in
the pink-and-white nursing home, but the attic, still untouched eight months
later, reflected the state of a mind in pieces.
