Nice to Come Home To

by Rebecca Flowers

  Pru stayed at the café later than usual, reading the Post. Finally, at ten, she decided she should brave the situation at home. The thought occurred that she might just grab her laptop and come back to the café to work. She was weighing the pros and cons of such a bold move when the door opened and another girl came in.

  The girl headed straight for the counter, calling out flirtatiously, “Owen! I have a bone to pick with you!” John looked up and smiled at the girl. He put his arms over his head, as if to defend himself, and the girl raised her fists. She took the seat Pru had just vacated and began scolding him, while he continued to pretend to cower.

  “Mea culpa!” Pru heard him say.

  Pru made herself keep walking out the door and away from the café. What was that all about? She didn’t think the girl had been John’s estranged wife, the elusive Lila. People in the middle of a divorce weren’t exactly playful with each other, but there was definitely something between these two. She wished she could return and see what was happening now. The café had been nearly empty. Anything could be going on in there now, anything at all.

  The cat was in the middle of the floor when she got home. He looked up at her, a greedy, hungry glint in his eye. He was hunched over her vintage cream-colored cardigan, eating one of the rosebud buttons.

  Pru stomped her foot and shouted and the cat sprang up and ran away. She picked up the sweater, which she hadn’t worn since the night Rudy broke up with her. The cat had chewed two large holes in the front and the right cuff had been shredded. The delicate rosebuds had all been ripped from the placket.

  The cat was destroying her favorite clothes. As if it knew exactly what it was doing, it was taking out its vengeance on her rarest, most treasured things.

  AS PREDICTED, MC KAY SAID HE WOULDN’T HELP HER take the cat back to the Humane Society.

  “Then I’ll take a bus,” she said.

  “No, no,” he said. “Wait. I have a better idea.”

  “McKay.”

  “Come on, I’ll buy you lunch. Where do you want to meet?”

  She thought of the girl and John Owen, alone in the café. “I don’t know,” she said, trying to hide her eagerness. “The Korner?”

  An hour after she’d left, she was back at the café again. The girl was still at Pru’s usual spot at the counter, pretending to read a book but watching John slice a cheesecake. McKay sat across from Pru, writing out a name and phone number on a paper napkin in his crisp design-school handwriting. He pushed the napkin across the table to her, obviously pleased with himself.

  “Who is this person?” she said, after reading the napkin. She had been trying to make out the title of the paperback the girl held in her lap. The girl looked extremely fit, with defined muscles in her calves and shoulders. John gestured to the cheesecake with the knife, and the smile the girl flashed him was blindingly white.

  “Bradley Bond. Our pet therapist?” McKay sounded exasperated. Clearly, she was supposed to have remembered Bradley Bond. “He helped us with Dolly’s end-of-life decisions? He’s fabulous. The Brewster-McCallahans’ cat was acting the same way, spraying everything, and Bradley put him on some kind of kitty Prozac. It’s supposed to work wonders.”

  She pushed the napkin back across the table at him. “I’m not getting therapy for a cat,” she said. “Christ, look what it did to Rudy!”

  “Not therapy,” said McKay. “Just drugs. You have to have one appointment with the pet therapist to get the drugs. But then you don’t have to go back if you don’t want. It’s not analysis.”

  Pru’s attention was brought back to the girl, who was having a huge reaction to John’s cheesecake. She rolled her eyes and moaned and exclaimed and wagged the fork at John accusingly. This was her trademark thing, Pru decided, this cutely accusatory, good-natured contentiousness. It was the kind of attitude you might expect from a sorority girl in college. It meant she was a girl who was willing to wrestle. Those kind of guys, the frat guys, probably loved this routine. But Pru didn’t think John Owen would be so taken with it, and for a moment she was satisfied to see him turn away abruptly from the overexclaiming and pointing, to answer the phone. The girl was left looking rather foolish, uncertain how to shift into some other behavior. She looked around a little self-consciously, wiping her mouth. Pru felt sorry for her then. She had half a mind to rescue the girl by going up to her and asking what she was reading. But just then the girl picked up her book and Pru saw the title: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. That made her not want to rescue the girl anymore. Why not just carry a sign: “I’m a sexy girl! Reading a sexy book!”

  “Pru,” McKay said warningly, “you owe him at least that.”

  “The cat? I owe the cat? How did I end up owing the cat?”

  “Just by loving him.”

  “I don’t love him! I hate him! He ate my sweater! I’m going to the bathroom.”

  Just as Pru stood up, the girl too rose to leave. She had one of those yoga bodies Pru envied, pliant and long-torsoed, with a little pooch of a butt. John, who was passing behind the yoga queen, put a hand on her hip, close to the butt pooch. She smiled and said, “Adiós, amigo.”

  “So, let me know, okay?” John said.

  Let him know what? Pru wondered, pushing open the door to the ladies’ room. She could only think of romantic situations: If you’re free for dinner . . . If we’re still on for some sex later . . . Nothing innocuous suggested itself, with a sentence like that.

  To her surprise, when she came back from the restroom, John and McKay were sitting at the table together, chatting away like a couple of old pals.

  “You know each other?” Pru said. She looked from one to the other, alarmed. McKay was eating a piece of cheesecake, innocence itself.

  “I work out at the gym with Bill,” John said. “Is he going tonight?”

  “I think so.”

  “Did he tell you he benched two-ten? I was spotting him.”

  “Lord, yes. He gloated all night about it.”

  “Wow,” said Pru, just to keep herself included. She was still trying to puzzle it out, what it meant that McKay and John Owen knew each other. She hadn’t told anyone about her friendship with John. Not that there was anything to tell. But McKay was tricky. He was always doing stuff like this, staying one step ahead of her, somehow.

  John saw the napkin on the table and said, “Bradley Bond, I know him. Oh, for Rudy’s cat. That’s a great idea.”

  Pru cut a sliver of cheesecake with the fork and said, “I’m not sure what I’m doing. You know, maybe it’s kinder to just have him put out of his misery. He’s obviously a deeply disturbed cat. Maybe he takes one look at me and sees, you know, Cloris Leachman in Young Frankenstein.”

  “Who doesn’t?” said McKay.

  She let the cheesecake melt in her mouth, looking at John to see how he’d respond to what McKay had said, which was exactly what Pru had expected McKay to say. In fact, she had handed that one to him. She didn’t know quite how they did it. They kept themselves amused, and yet there were boundaries, things they would never say to each other. But sometimes their teasing put other people off, the people who didn’t understand how ridiculously devoted they were to each other. But John just reached behind and pulled a chair up to the table for himself.

  “You know, you could always just call Rudy and tell him you have his cat,” John said.

  He’d put his feet up on the rungs of Pru’s chair, rather possessively, she thought. McKay was looking at her, she could feel his interest and delight, his brain working out this new equation: Pru plus John equals . . . She finished the cheesecake, feeling slow and languorous, in the stretch of this moment, when nothing was happening except the contemplation of John’s comment, the anticipation of what would be said next, the living vibe between the three of them. Who could go back to work when there was this, John’s feet under her chair, McKay to process it all with later, when they were alone? I could spend all day doing nothing but this, she thought.

  “Well,”
she said aloud, “that certainly puts it in perspective.”

  “YOU KNOW HE’S GETTING A DIVORCE,” SAID MC KAY, when John Owen had left the table to return to his usual spot behind the counter. The batwings over McKay’s eyes moved up and down, suggestively.

  “Forget it,” said Pru. “He’s totally unavailable. It’ll be years before he gets over Lila.”

  “Please,” McKay said. “No, it won’t. You need to give him a little motivation, that’s all. Why don’t you ask him out?”

  “Oh, okay,” she said, “I’ll just ask him to the Sadie Hawkins, after social studies. What’s his wife like?”

  “Nothing special,” said McKay. “I’ve only seen her a few times. She’s pretty.”

  “Pretty pretty? Or just pretty?”

  “She’s pretty, Pru.”

  “You should hear him talk about her. He makes her sound, I don’t know, like Sophia Loren or something. All alluring and mysterious and un-havable and perfect.” She chewed her bottom lip thoughtfully. “That’s it. I’m too havable. There’s no real challenge here.”

  “You don’t have to sleep with him, you know. Just go to a movie together. See what it’s like to date a nice guy.”

  She shook her head. “I’m not ready to date. All that hope and expectation, I’m not ready for it yet.”

  “Right,” McKay said.

  “I’m serious.”

  “Honey,” he said, “tell that to your uterus.”

  When they were leaving, he picked up the napkin with the pet therapist’s phone number on it and tucked it into the back pocket of Pru’s jeans. “Don’t forget this,” he said. “Show me the good person I know you really are, inside.”

  Seven

  Dr. Bond’s waiting room was like a spa, with its soothing, dark green walls and a little trickling fountain. Pru went to the receptionist’s desk, where she was given a thick clipboard of papers to fill out. She sat on a modern white plastic chair next to two other “parents,” a lawyerly-looking woman about her age and an older gentleman, both with dogs straining at their leashes. In the cage at her feet, the cat spat and hissed at the dogs. It took her forty-five minutes to fill out the forms she was given, even though she had to skip over most of the “demographic” information. When she came to the daily diary, where she was supposed to list the cat’s minute-to-minute activities, she was a bit light-headed as she wrote: 2:00-5:00 AM—HOWLING, FLINGING SELF AT DOOR, WAKING UP PRU, ETC. 2:00 PM—EAT SWEATER, PEE ON BOOKS, NAP.

  “You didn’t put the cat’s name on here,” the receptionist said, taking the clipboard back from her. “What’s the cat’s name?” The receptionist wore a loud turquoise-and-black outfit, with turquoise jewelry. She had pictures of a curly-haired puppy, with red eye in every photo, covering the walls of her area.

  Pru glanced back over her shoulder at the cat, who was still emitting low, threatening growls from his cage. She never called him anything. What came to mind, looking at him, was big. Big Whoop, she thought. For the entire year that Patsy was in seventh grade, every other word was “Big Whoop,” accompanied by a shrug, a hair flip, or a sneer. “It’s Big Whoop,” she said to the receptionist, who made a note on a folder she’d slipped all the sheets into.

  Of course, Pru had had pets as a kid—a series of dogs that ran away or got hit by cars. Only one cat, though, a stray her mother had found on Bearswamp Road. They called the cat Annie Bearswamp. Every night when Pru was eleven years old Annie Bearswamp slept curled up in the crook of her neck. One day Annie Bearswamp simply disappeared. Months later, Leonard took Pru and Patsy down to the basement, where he showed them what he’d found: a pile of dainty white bones, behind the dryer. Not a lesson in personal responsibility, or anything like that, dead-cat bones; but a fascinating and educational discovery, in his opinion. Patsy had cried, and written a prayer to recite over the shoe box they buried the bones in. It wasn’t even Patsy’s cat. “It wasn’t even your cat,” Pru had said. She wondered about the smell. Shouldn’t they have smelled it decaying? Nadine had given them ice cream that night before bed.

  That was when she’d understood. She was lying in her bed, looking up at the swirls in the ceiling plaster, and decided she would never give one of her children something that would decay and die. What was the point? Pets were too expendable to love. Let them roam around outside, but don’t tell them your secrets. Don’t get used to them on your pillow. Better you should love only things that will last forever, like the color blue and swimming and Little House in the Big Woods and Steve Martin records.

  The receptionist called out, “Big Whoop Whistler?” Pru stood up. She picked up the carrier, and inside the cat began to howl, sadly. She followed the receptionist into a large office covered in bright, floral wallpaper.

  Dr. Bond came into the examining room. He was tall and unsmiling. He looked like someone who actually could have finished medical school. Somehow she’d imagined that pet therapists were sort of like tarot card readers. Dr. Bond looked like he’d be right at home in a surgeon’s lounge, with his long legs, his impeccably pressed dress shirt with glinting cuff links. She could see the outline of his chest muscles underneath. She had wanted to say something along the lines of “I’m having a hard time getting him to open up to me, Doc,” but decided to keep her mouth shut.

  The cat emitted a low, threatening growl. “Let him out,” Bond said. Without taking his eyes off the forms she’d filled out, he opened a low cupboard beneath the examining table. Once she got the little door to the cage open, the cat dashed straight for the cupboard.

  Dr. Bond closed the cupboard door halfway and went back to reading the forms. When he finished a page, he turned it in an abrupt, final manner, pinning the completed page to the table with a strong, square-ended finger. Pru sat and waited. She wondered if she should bring up the kitty Prozac or let him suggest it.

  Dr. Bond frowned and looked up at Pru. He was reading the daily diary, where her tone had become a bit tongue-in-cheek. “Well,” he said, in his deep rumble, “I think I see what part of the problem is.”

  “Ah,” Pru said. She had decided to follow his lead and say as little as possible.

  He closed up the folder and crossed his arms. “So, why are you here?”

  Look in the friggin’ chart I just spent an hour filling out, she thought. “Well, he’s a really bad cat.”

  “Cats are neither good nor bad. They sometimes have impulses they can’t control,” Dr. Bond said, pinching an invisible thread off his spotless white trousers. “Go on.”

  “I was going to bring him back to the Humane Society, where I got him, but I wanted to try this first. My friend says you can give him some kind of kitty Prozac?”

  “Why did you get this cat?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Why did you get this cat?” He looked up at her with clear, sharp eyes.

  She faltered. Nothing she thought of sounded quite right. “Oh . . . the usual reasons, I guess,” she said.

  “And what is he doing that’s objectionable, specifically?”

  “Peeing. On everything.”

  “Is he peeing or spraying?”

  Peeing or spraying. Did he think she was on her knees, watching the cat soiling the bookcases? “I don’t know,” she stammered. “Is there a difference?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Bond said briskly. He pulled a clean piece of paper from a drawer in the examining table and turned it over on the table. He took a gold pen from his chest pocket, screwed off the cap, and handed it to Pru. “Let’s take a look at your setup. Will you draw a map of your apartment?”

  She drew the outlines of her apartment, indicating the bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom, and the hallway. “It’s bigger than it looks,” she said, self-consciously.

  “That’s fine,” Dr. Bond interrupted. “Now, let’s indicate where kitty is allowed to go during the day.”

  “Here. Just the kitchen. Since the whole closet incident, you know.” Her friend Fiona had given her a baby gate to stretch across the doo
rway of the kitchen, and the cat hadn’t yet managed to haul his massiveness over it.

  Dr. Bond frowned. “Is that it? Okay, where is he at night?” She circled the tiny hall closet. She didn’t like looking at the map. It made sense when she was at home, but here, the limits of the cat’s domain made her uncomfortable.

  “That’s not much room,” said Dr. Bond. “Does he go outside at all?”

  “No.”

  She was feeling accused and defensive. But why should she? Wasn’t she here, spending two hundred bucks to try to save the damn cat’s life? She hadn’t thrown him out on the street, or taken him back to the shelter . . . didn’t she deserve some points here? Animal people, Pru thought sulkily. They never have nice furniture, and you can never please them. Not really.

  The cat finally stuck his head out from the cabinet to see what was going on. Dr. Bond ignored him and said, wearily, “I see you’re using pine litter. How did you choose pine?”

  “I like the smell, I guess.”

  “You like the smell,” he repeated, significantly, making a note. “And his food? You feed him . . . canned? Why?”

  I like the smell, she thought. “Isn’t that what you feed cats?”

  “Sometimes.” Then it seemed he’d noticed that the cat had come out and was sniffing the air. Dr. Bond reached a long finger down to hover just above the cat’s nose, and said, in a completely different tone, “How you doing down there, big guy?” Suddenly he was softer, kinder. He scratched the cat gently between the ears. “Good boy, handsome boy,” he said. The gesture made Pru a little sad, and a little envious. She wondered when was the last time either one of them had been touched like that. She had the impulse to push her head under Dr. Bond’s hand, too.

  He straightened up again. “Here’s what I’m going to recommend. For starters, you need to let him out of this confined area.” He held up a hand before she could speak. “I know, he’ll spray everywhere. And yes, he will, for a while. He’s spraying because he’s anxious and unhappy. But cats interpret those feelings as threats, and when male cats are threatened, they spray.”