Upright Hallmark cards and lasagna-stained paper plates cluttered Grandma’s kitchen table. I pulled up the sleeve of Grandpa’s old gray role then let it fall back upon my arm. Bare feet tapped cold white and gold linoleum. Less than four hours ago the last guest had left, asking if we needed anything. I replied, as I had with all the others, that we were fine. The cat watched me. Sitting on his haunches, his gray-and-black striped back brushing against the patio sliding door curtain, he blinked his eyes. Then blinked again. I looked down at him. The clock struck five times in the living room. Neither he nor I stirred. I lifted my coffee cup from atop a yellow piece of paper creased at an odd angle. A brown coffee ring encircled our neighbor’s condolences. My crumpled black jacket remained draped over the kitchen chair on my left. I reached over and fingered the fading white carnation in the lapel. The cat looked at me with a cocked head, as if to tell me not to wake up Grandpa.
Outside, somewhere beyond the front door, a car horn beeped. The cat turned his head to the sound then turned back to me. The rest of his body didn’t move. I closed my eyes and then reopened them. The scene was the same. I rubbed my palms together, callouses tugging at one another. Calluses earned on lonely nights in this house when I had lived here as a teen, unable to live peacefully with Mom and Dad that summer. Then coming home to where the cat prowled, sometimes glaring, sometimes licking fur with an irritated tongue.
Overhead, a board creaked. The cat looked up with wide eyes. We heard the sound of unpadded feet followed by the sound of a bathroom door opening and closing. The doctor had said that Grandma’s medication might side-effect in fitful sleep. I’d walked the doctor out to his car last night. Grandpa’s best friend of four decades had been the very first to arrive, the very last to leave. The chill had misted our breath. The cat trotted out with us. Perhaps he hoped we knew were Grandpa was hiding. The doctor had called him a good mouser, even though the cat had never caught anything. The doctor knelt down slowly on one knee to scratch the cat’s ears; the cat answered him with an audible purr. The doctor laughed and then fell silent for a long moment. Grandpa loved that old cat.
Grandpa had scratched the cat behind the ears the same way I did today, after my ballet recitals, my piano concertos, after I told him about the boy who had broken my heart. The cat had snuggled us as we ate Winchell’s donuts, watching us and trotting alongside happily.
But today we only sat where we were…and the cat continued his gaze to the hallway, waiting for Grandpa’s footsteps.