by A.T.
Driving Route 5 West Side I overheard a regular rider named Elena talking to another passenger about her cat. “Oh, Luna does this . . . Oh, Luna does that . . . It’s the cutest thing . . . Luna is thee best cat.”
Bus drivers are not supposed to talk to passengers. There’s a DOT safety poster in the break room stating “unnecessary conversation is not only distracting, it’s PROHIBITED.” But Elena had crossed a line.
“I think you’re exaggerating.”
Elena glared at me in the overhead mirror. “Excuse me?”
”There’s no way Luna can be thee best cat. Maybe a distant second. I know this because I have the best cat. Her name is Billy, Billy with a Y.”
We adopted Billy ten years ago. I’d been the one hold out in the family when it came to having a pet. The kids wanted a cat. My wife wanted a cat. “But cats puke everywhere, and I’d be the one cleaning the litter box,” I’d say.
When I finally did go to the shelter it was under duress. The wife drove. I had agreed to go only if it was while the kids were in school so they didn’t beg for every cat they saw and whine when we left empty-handed. I got out of the car with my mind made up but prepared to pretend. The miasma punched me as I walked through the door. A thick, dank, disrespectful concentration of both pre and post-processed animal chow, wet dog, cat piss, and disinfectant. Dozens of dogs incessantly barked in some back area I would not venture.
A lady with bloody scratches on her arms told us to look around. I followed my wife into an enclosure with scattered condos and scratching posts where cats could mingle and lounge, and hope to con their way out of an overcrowded nightmare of shared litter boxes and donated food and into a new home. Use their big eyes, head tilts, and rollover playfulness to prey on lonely, affection-starved saps looking to buy a friend because they didn’t have any.
I watched them all with a cold heart, arms close to my sides. I couldn’t be fooled. I didn’t need friends. And they all seemed to know it.
All except one.
A solid female Tabby came out of nowhere and jumped atop a cat condo I was standing next to. She stared into my eyes, ready and willing to be petted. When I didn’t give in, she leaned forward and rubbed against my sternum with her full body weight, as if we were old buds. Nice try.
But something was different about this one. She didn’t vibe like the other idiot cats shucking and jiving for an easier life. Maybe she was just a better con. Or maybe she felt the same way I did about this whole ridiculous process and saw that in me. They say animals can tell what’s inside a person. I reached up, paused, then scratched her head, stroked her back. Her spine arched and she purred, headbutting me. I hung out with her for a few more minutes. Just to make it look like I’d made an effort. She seemed nice and I wished her well. On the way out I found her picture and information on the wall. A four-year-old stray someone at the shelter had named Millie.
My wife was wearing a big ass grin as we turned out of the lot. “So? Did you see any cats you liked?”
I almost mentioned Millie. Instead I folded my arms, looked out the passenger window like a petulant child. “No.”
Within a week I was back at the shelter. Alone. I hadn’t told my wife I was going. Just in case I came to my senses and turned around before getting there. A different lady with deep scratches on her arms had me fill out a questionnaire, so they could determine if our home was safe for Millie.
“Will the cat have an emergency savings fund of at least $2,000?”
“What specific brand of organic, free-range, grain-free holistic food do you plan to feed?”
“If you move, break up with a partner, or have a baby, how will you prove the cat is still your primary priority?”
“Are you willing to surrender your entire couch set to structural compromise?”
“What is your philosophy on feline behavioral discipline?”
I didn’t have two-grand for myself, let alone for a cat, hadn’t considered pet food yet, and I was for sure, without a doubt, never getting a divorce. I adjusted the truth and was handed a clipboard with adoption paperwork.
As a staff member slipped away to do whatever they do with paperwork I called my wife, who was surprised to hear where I was. “The kids are gonna be so happy!” She didn’t like the name Millie because she’d had a dog named Millie and was against the idea of using it again. But I was reluctant to change an animal’s given name. She might hate it and decide to ignore us whenever we called her. When people claim their pet doesn’t know their own name I want to say maybe they just don’t like it. As a compromise, the wife suggested Billy, because it sounded similar. I looked into the enclosure and saw Millie, now Billy, sitting atop the same cat condo as when we first met, looking at me through the glass. I waved like an idiot. The staff member went in, grabbed her by the scruff, and stuffed her in a cardboard carrier with “I’M GOING HOME” printed on the side in big, red bubble letters. Billy yowled and yawped the whole ride.
When I got back to the house I brought the carrier down into the basement and opened the top, expecting Billy to leap out. But she just stayed there, looking up at me like What the fuck is happening? I tried to coax her out by going psss, psss, psss, and then with treats, but nothing worked. I considered turning the carrier over and shaking her out like pruned limbs from a trash can but decided that might be taken as a poor welcome by an already scared cat. I thought about how friendly she was during my first visit to the shelter and briefly wondered if I’d been given the wrong cat. I checked the time, saw I had to pick Holly up from preschool and bolted out the door. Holly burst with excitement when I told her about our new cat.
I figured Billy would have taken advantage of her alone time to explore. But she was still in the box. Staring up at us with that same look on her face. I told the kid we would just have to be patient. We set up a litter box, put out a bowl of water and a bowl of food, but several hours later Billy was still in the box. So I poured her out. She scrambled across the fake wood flooring, and found a place to hide. And that was the last any of us saw of her that day. My wife and Sam came home, looked everywhere and couldn’t find the cat. The following day, Sam caught a glimpse of green-yellow eyes reflecting light from under a piece of furniture. By the time anyone else got there they were gone. This is how it went for a couple months. It was almost like we didn’t have a cat. The only reason we knew she was there, somewhere, was because food and water would disappear, and there’d be something for me to scoop from the litter box.
I felt like a moron. Billy had conned me afterall, which I kind of respected. But my kids had wanted a cat and I managed to adopt one that didn’t want anything to do with us.
One night, Holly said, “What ever happened to the cat we had that day?”
I hate to admit it, but I considered seeing if I could take Billy back to the shelter and exchange her for a different cat. My wife had enough. She enacted a strict daily program of exposure therapy that became known as “Billy Time.” After dinner was cleaned up she’d drag the cat out by the scruff from whatever piece of furniture she was hiding under and bring her to the couch where we could all pet her. At first the forced integration sessions only lasted a minute or so before Billy dug her claws into someone’s lap and escaped to one of her hiding places. But the time she tolerated this gradually increased. A couple minutes became ten, ten became twenty. She stopped digging her claws into our laps. Her body relaxed. She began to purr with the attention we gave her. By six months Billy was voluntarily coming out to hang with us, appearing in the living room at “Billy Time” all on her own, pausing to look at us like, You forgot to drag me out from under the dresser. She even began begging for food. Loudly and insistently. She was still skittish with Holly because little kids are full of energy and like to dress cats up and carry them around like a baby, which Billy usually tolerated with nothing more than an indignant expression. And when she simply had enough of being forced to wear a tutu, Billy would lightly scratch H, who would then cry and claim to have done nothing to deserve it.
Over a short period of time even that changed. Holly and Billy were becoming best friends. Billy even seemed to enjoy being dressed up and smothered with hugs and carried like a baby. As Holly grew and calmed down they spent more and more time together. Holly became her favorite person in the house. Billy didn’t sleep in anyone else’s bed. She would perk up when Holly got home from school, lay across her math homework, and no longer bothered shaking off the hair ties Holly draped over her ears, wearing them with purring, slit-eyed regal satisfaction and pride. As if she’d been crowned.
Billy also became my writing companion. There was never a time she wouldn’t curl up next to me as I typed or scribbled in my notebooks.
The kids discovered the box containing Billy’s adoption papers and saw her name had been changed from Millie. It was a major scandal.
“Changing someone’s name is mean!”
“You should have asked us first!”
My wife explained the decision behind the name change. The kids weren’t swayed. They were angry we would do such a thing, angry we hadn’t consulted them. There was a revolt. In protest, they started calling her Millie. If I called her Billy, Sam would say, “You mean Millie.” But their attention spans were short. Millie became Billy once again. Peace returned to the valley. But only for a time.
In the divorce my ex-wife got the house. I got the cat. Billy didn’t appreciate being stuffed into a carrier and emerging into a strange new place with strange new sounds and smells. She expressed her displeasure the only way cats seem able to: puking. But, like she did with the family all those years ago, Billy warmed up to the new situation and even seemed to enjoy having a new home. My ex-wife had added a puppy to the mix, a development Billy and I did not care for. In no time she was strutting around as if my new apartment had been her territory forever. At this time, so early in the breakup of the family, there was no love lost between me and the ex, but I remained grateful to her for three things. Two of those things being our kids. The third was forcing me to go to the animal shelter the day I first met Billy.
Sharing custody of my kids, who I’d seen every day of their lives up until then, was the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through. Having Billy snuggled next to me as I read or watched tv in my sad, depressive state helped a lot. I suppose I did need a friend.
Time went on. Scar tissue covered old wounds. People adjusted. Billy got old. She was nearing eighty in cat years. Meds for a thyroid condition made her weight go up and down. Then only down. She went from twelve pounds to six, then four. She started to look like skin and bones. One weekend she began to have trouble breathing, then lost the ability to meow. Her not being able to meow was possibly the most heartbreaking part to me. She could no longer perform a cat’s sworn duty to annoy their owner with incessant cries for food. She didn’t ask for food at all.
The vet said it was heart failure. After having fluid drained from her lungs, Billy started eating and meowing again, but I was warned that is temporary. That she will get worse again. It lasted fifteen days.
Billy rode in the back of my car. I’d placed the towel containing her body inside a cardboard box. I thought about the cardboard cat carrier from the shelter with “I’M GOING HOME” printed on the side in big, red bubble letters. Billy was leaving us the way she had arrived.
The pet crematory was in a dark building atop a hill. In a reverse procession, I carried Billy to the door behind my ex-wife and kids. A man with a big mustache let us in. The main room had shelves and shelves of urns and keepsakes, such as necklaces and bracelets one could put their pet’s ashes in. The mustache directed us to a small room to lay Billy out on a cushioned counter. The little room had dark walls and was dimly lit. There was a bench to sit on while we said our goodbyes. On one side of Billy’s cushion there was a statue of a frog sitting in the lotus position. On the other side were a couple of children’s books about death. On the wall above, a framed image of Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet holding hands and walking away below the phrase “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” And goddammit I cried even more. Sam wanted a hug, then didn’t want a hug. I don’t know how long we were there. We said a difficult final goodbye to our Billy, walked out of the room and then the building. It was the first time we had left her with someone who was not one of us.
At home, afterimages of Billy haunted my peripheral vision in the form of a couch cushion, a shadow, a hoodie left crumpled in a corner. I was careful to watch my step in places she had always been underfoot. Drying tears left a salty film on my glasses.
That day when I told Elena that her cat couldn’t possibly be the best cat in the world, that Luna could only be a distant second best cat at best, she took playful exception to this hard truth. From then on, whenever she got on my bus, Elena would greet me with, “How’s the second best cat doing?” And I would dutifully reply, “I don’t know, you tell me.”
The first time I saw Elena after Billy’s passing she was waiting at her usual stop in a downpour. I knew telling her what happened was going to require everything I had not to cry. And it still wouldn’t be enough. I briefly considered sailing past, pretending I didn’t see her.
But I hit the four-ways, eased to the curb, pulled the E-brake, and the bus kneeled down before her. I opened the door. Elen boarded, closing her umbrella, and looked at me with a mischievous smile. “How’s the second best cat in the world?”
“I don’t know, you tell me.”
A.T.