When the library board voted to hire me, I was deliriously happy. I was young, footloose, fancy-free, and, since I’d given up any hope of my height reaching five feet and had become resigned to the fact that my curly black hair was never going to straighten, things were working out just the way I’d crossed my fingers that they would.
But three years after my move to Chilson, not long past my thirty-third birthday, life took an abrupt turn.
I woke on that fateful Friday morning to the beeping of my alarm clock and a cat-shaped weight on my chest. Eyes closed, I thumped off the clock and spoke to the weight.
“Eddie, it’s time to get up.” I opened my eyes, then immediately shut them. “Why do you have to sleep so close to my face?” If I opened my eyes again, I’d see late-May sunshine streaming through the gap in the white curtains and illuminating my cat’s furry face, which was maybe an inch from my chin. Soon after Eddie had followed me home last month, I’d learned his preferred mattress was a human one.
As there’d been no feline reply, I tried a second time.
“Eddie, get up.”
A faint rumble spread into my chest.
“No purring.” I gave him a gentle shove that was meant to instigate a move. It did nothing. “I have to go to work. Sorry, pal, but you have to get off.” I rolled onto my left side. Eddie, still purring, slid off my chest and landed on my arm. “No,” I told him. “Really off.”
He opened one eye.
I pulled my arm out from underneath him. “What do you want me to do, stay in bed all day?”
He stopped purring and opened both eyes.
“Not a chance,” I said. “I have to go out and make a living so I can support us in the style to which you’ve recently become accustomed.”
He settled deep into the covers. With my freed arm I scratched his chin, earning more purrs. Then, grunting a little with the effort, I carefully moved him aside and got up to start the first day of the rest of my life.
Halfway to the bathroom I looked back at Eddie. My first cat. My first pet. My parents hadn’t encouraged household animals—my dad was allergic to pet dander—and until I met Eddie I’d never felt the lack.
Eddie yawned wide, laying his ears back against the sides of his head and showing me far too much of his pink tongue.
“Cover your mouth when you do that, will you?” I asked.
“Mrr,” he said sleepily.
“That’s what you always say,” I said. “You’d better learn some etiquette by October. Aunt Frances is a sweetheart, but she doesn’t tolerate bad manners.”
All winter I lived with my aunt in her old and large house, but come May she good-humoredly kicked me out to make room for guests who paid a lot more than I did. That was when I moved down the hill to the small houseboat I’d bought from an elderly couple when they’d moved to Florida. The month of April involved a lot of cleaning and prep before the guys at the marina moved the boat out of the warehouse and into the water, but I didn’t mind the work.
Friends shook their heads at my living arrangements. I heard a lot of “Don’t you want your own house?” and “You should be building up more equity,” and “Your aunt is awesome, but isn’t it a little like living with your parents?”
My reply was a smile and a shrug. It worked for me and it worked for Aunt Frances, who didn’t like to live alone. Maybe someday I’d want my own lawn to mow, my own furnace to repair, roof to fix, and plumbing to worry about. Maybe. For now, I was happy. And so was Eddie.
Six weeks ago, on my last pre-Eddie day, I’d been spending a gloomy Sunday on the houseboat, scrubbing and washing. Come midafternoon, a slice of blue sky had appeared through the partially open warehouse doorway. I’d wandered outside to see. Not only had the low gray clouds vanished, but the temperature had gone from stay-home-with-a-book to I-need-to-get-outside-or-I’ll-die.
I looked at the cloudless blue. At my boat. At the sky.
It’d be okay to take a short walk, I told myself. After the long winter we just had, it’d be criminal not to take advantage of this weather. A short walk, then I’d get the galley cleaned up, see that my neighbor Rafe hadn’t passed out from paint fumes in the house he was rehabbing, meet my friend Kristen for dinner, and still have plenty of time to clean the bedroom before heading back up to Aunt Frances’s place to sleep.
It didn’t turn out that way.
My short stroll through the streets of Chilson turned into a long ramble through a nearby park, which became a wandering walk through an old cemetery.
No one knew that I like to spend time in cemeteries. Not my friends or relatives, and certainly not my coworkers. The single time I’d suggested walking through a cemetery to someone (my very-ex-fiancé), he’d made me feel like such a freak that I’d decided then and there to keep my cemetery inclinations to myself. I found cemeteries peaceful and calming in a poignant sort of way, and I always left from them eager to get things done.
The appropriately named Lakeview Cemetery was perched on the edge of a hill, overlooking the sparkling waters of the twenty-mile-long and two-mile-wide Janay Lake. That April afternoon I sat on a bench next to the headstone of Alonzo Tillotson (born 1847, died 1926) and enjoyed the pleasurable sensation that comes from skipping out on chores.
“I should get back,” I said to the view, not meaning a word of it. “There’s a lot to do.” Which was true, but Aunt Frances wouldn’t mind if I stayed in her house for another week. Her summer boarders wouldn’t show up until after Memorial Day—there was plenty of time for me to move to the houseboat.
I slid down into a slouch and lifted my face to the sun. “Lots to do,” I murmured lazily. “Finish the inside, wash down the deck, call the marina to schedule—”
“MRR!”
I leapt up. Small animal noises eeked out of me, little bleats of panic that made me sound pathetic and small and frightened. All true, but still. I grabbed on to an arm of the bench, sucked large amounts of air into my lungs, and tried to pretend that I was a fully functional adult.
The cat at my feet didn’t look impressed.
“Did you make that awful noise?” I asked.
He—maybe it was a she, but the cat’s attitude felt decidedly male—looked at me. Unblinking yellow eyes stared into my brown ones. His markings were black and white stripes with a chest and paws that probably would have been white if they’d been clean. A small pyramid of whitishness had its peak between his eyes, spreading down to touch the outside corners of his wide mouth. The pale triangle gave him a face so expressive I almost felt as if he were talking to me.
“Mrr.”
Then again, maybe he was.
“Hello,” I said. “My name is Minnie Hamilton. And before you ask, yes, it’s short for Minerva, and no, I don’t know what my parents were thinking.”
“Mrr.”
The cat was sitting up straight, studying me intently. I didn’t care for the look. “Don’t you have a home?” I asked. “Someone’s looking for you, I’m sure.”
Without visibly flexing a muscle, he moved forward three inches.
“Yup,” I said, “there’s someone coming, without a doubt. You stay here and wait, okay?” I nodded. “Nice talking to you.”
I took one step away from the bench.
The cat didn’t move.
I took another step.
He still didn’t move.
Good. He wouldn’t follow me home and beg to be fed and housed and cared for. Or was it only dogs that begged? Everything I knew about pets I’d learned from watching America’s Funniest Home Videos.
I walked down the hill, not dawdling, but not hurrying, either, because being chased out of the cemetery by a cat was ridiculous.
So I headed back toward the marina with a light heart, thinking about the coming summer. My walk took me through the outskirts of town with its clapboard cottages, past the brick post office, past the stucco city hall, and through downtown with half its shops still closed for winter.