Dewey's Nine Lives (37 page)

Then Dewey died.

My relationship with Dewey can’t be summarized in a few sentences. I know that. And yet, I always come back to these few lines from my first book when I think of him: “Dewey was my cat. I was the person he came to for love. I was the person he came to for comfort. And I went to him for love and comfort, too. He wasn’t a substitute husband or a substitute child. I wasn’t lonely; I had plenty of friends. I wasn’t unfulfilled; I loved my job. I wasn’t looking for someone special. It wasn’t even that I saw him every day. We lived apart. We could spend whole days together and hardly see each other. But even when I didn’t see him, I knew he was there. We had chosen, I realized, to share our lives, not just tomorrow, but forever.”

But nothing lasts forever, no matter how strong your bond. Dewey was my best friend; he was my comfort and companion. He changed the library. He changed our town. And he was gone.

The job wasn’t the same after that. I had been the library director for twenty years. I had dedicated more than two decades of my life to building the organization. Now, suddenly, it didn’t feel like my library anymore. Part of that was my relationship with the library board, which had broken the moment they tried to remove Dewey because he was old. But there was also a coldness, a loneliness, an emptiness that had not existed within those walls for the nineteen years Dewey lived there.

As always, I threw myself into my work. I had projects to finish, goals I still wanted to achieve. I wanted to build on what Dewey and I had created, to continue to transform the library from a warehouse for books to a meetinghouse for souls.

I also wanted to write Dewey’s story. I felt I owed it to him, because of what he had given to me and the town of Spencer. I owed it to his fans, who deserved the whole tale. His love, his companionship, his friendship—those were the reasons more than 270 newspapers printed his obituary and more than a thousand fans wrote letters and cards. That’s why his life mattered. And that’s what I wanted to share. I felt I owed the book to the world because I believed, and I still do, that there’s an important message in Dewey’s life: Never give up. Find your place. You can change your world.

But I was sick. After Dewey’s death, I had developed an upper respiratory infection, and no matter what I tried, it would not go away. I had suffered for decades from serious illness, ever since that hysterectomy in my early twenties—a hysterectomy I didn’t even know was going to be performed until I came out of the anesthesia—damaged my immune system. Every three or four years, what started as tonsillitis ended in the hospital. It was part of my life, part of what Dewey had helped me endure.

But this time was different. This time, I was sick in heart as well as body. In December, I drove myself hard to fulfill every Dewey-related request, but bitterly cold, post-holidays January found me tired and weak. In February, the weakness moved into my muscles and lungs. By March, I was barely making it out of bed. In April, I started working from home, at partial pay, to conserve my strength. My doctor tried all sorts of treatments, but my health deteriorated further. Nausea, headaches, fevers. Most days, the only food I could keep down was saltines. My doctor performed tests. Colonoscopies, upper endoscopies, MRIs. There seemed to be no solution. I went back to work in May, but I wasn’t myself. I was sent to specialists in Sioux City and Minnesota, but driving to the appointments wore me out. By summer, I was so weak I couldn’t take a shower without having to lie down afterward for a rest.

Everyone thought I was depressed. And I
was
depressed. Dewey’s death, combined with my problems with the library board, had collapsed my comfortable world. But I wasn’t sick because I was depressed; I was depressed because I was sick. And nobody knew what was wrong with me. I thought,
This is it. This is how I’m going to be for the rest of my life. I can’t get out of bed, I can’t go anywhere, I can’t see anybody. And then I’ll die.

Twenty years before, I had been a single mother making twenty-five thousand dollars a year. To keep my job, I had to earn a Master’s degree in library science, which required a four-hour round trip to Sioux City every weekend for ten hours of class. At the same time, my daughter—the rock of my life—was growing apart from me. Maybe it was a natural part of growing up. Or maybe it was the fact that, because of everything I had to do to support her financially, I couldn’t support her with my time. All I remembered for sure, years later, was the loneliness of my nights in the library, dead tired and struggling to complete my school papers and keep my priorities in order. I remembered the moments when it felt as if the weight was too much and the ceiling was caving in.

In those moments, Dewey came for me. He jumped on my lap; he knocked pens out of my hand; he flopped on the computer keyboard. He bumped me with his head until I relented, and then he streaked out of my office and down some dark aisle between two shelves of books. Sometimes I caught glimpses of him disappearing; sometimes, after five minutes, I still hadn’t found him. Then, just when I was ready to quit, I’d turn around and he’d be standing right behind me. And I could swear he was laughing.

Now, once again, Dewey came to me. Before my health collapsed, I had committed to writing a book, and I was no quitter. Every evening, after working as much as I could for the library, I would sit at my kitchen table and talk with my cowriter, Bret Witter, about Dewey. And the more I talked about him, the more alive he became. I could see again the way he crouched when I dangled his red yarn and how, just when I turned away, he would leap at it with all four paws. I remembered the exact way his nose twitched as he sniffed his food—and then rejected it. I laughed at the memory of the poor cat soaking wet and angry after his twice yearly baths; the way his tongue would drag as he licked his toes; how he would jam those wet paws into his ears for a good cleaning. I smiled at the way he sniffed the air vent in my office three times every day, always protecting me.

Some nights the conversations were hard. My brother’s suicide. My mother’s death. I was most terrified, I think, to talk about my mastectomy. I had kept my surgery a secret, and even a decade later, I felt vulnerable and scarred. I was afraid to admit, even to myself, that when the doctor said breast cancer, I felt my world pull away. No one would touch me; no one wanted to say those words. Only Dewey was there for me, hour after hour, day after day. Only Dewey gave me the physical contact I craved.

Some days were even harder. The first time I talked about his death—how Dewey looked into my eyes and begged,
Help me, help me
, as I held him in the examination room—I bawled into the telephone. It had been months, but once again I felt flattened out, stretched to the point of breaking as Dr. Beale told me, “I feel a mass. It’s an aggressive tumor. He’s in pain. There’s nothing we can do.”

But opening that door brought back other memories, too. I remembered the cold of the examination table, the worn threads of Dewey’s favorite blanket, the hum of his purring, the way he melted into my arms and laid his head against my skin. I remembered the trust in his golden eyes; the calm center beneath his terror; the closeness of our hearts as I whispered, “It’s all right, Dewey. It’s all right. Everything will be all right.”

I remembered looking into his eyes and realizing I was alone.

It might seem that, in my weakened condition, all this talking, writing, and crying would have been too much. The truth was the opposite: The book was keeping me alive. When you are so sick that turning over in bed makes you throw up; when the only thing you can keep in your stomach is a few crackers; when no one can give you any assurance at all that your health will ever improve, it’s easy to give up on the day. And once you start giving up on whole days, where does it end?

I never gave up on a day, because every day I looked forward to my evenings with Dewey. Even on the days when I could do nothing more than crawl to the bathroom, I could lie on the couch, a phone to my ear, and talk about the Dew.

As I read the early drafts of the book, I could almost feel him on my shoulder reading along.
No
, Dewey would say,
that’s not how it was
. When I heard that whisper of doubt in my mind, I would focus on that paragraph, or that sentence, or even that word. I had to get Dewey right. I knew that. He wasn’t just the heart and soul of the book; he was everything. The more I focused on the details, the more he returned to my mind and heart. And the more I felt his presence, the more sure I was that everything in the book was right. It wasn’t just the sight and sound; I was capturing the
feeling
of being around him—that old Dewey Magic—word by word.

In August, I made a decision. I was tired of listening to the experts. I was tired of driving two hours to explain my life history to a new doctor who couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. I was tired of falling to my knees in exhaustion at the end of the day, of pulling myself up from the sofa when the nausea overcame me. If I was going to get better, I realized, I needed to do it myself. After six months of thinking about him, I was imbued with the spirit of Dewey. I really believe that. His can-do, always-keep-going, everything-will-be-fine spirit inspired me.

I retired from the library. I didn’t slouch out a beaten woman; I went out on my terms, having accomplished all my major goals. The library board, God bless them, granted me that. With half the stress and a tenth the daily exposure to germs, I felt better immediately.

I changed my diet. I cut back on my medications. I stopped focusing on my limitations and started thinking about my strengths. I knew I needed to work my body, but I hated exercise. So I started dancing again. At first, I spent a few minutes shuffling around my living room with the music on. Then I’d collapse onto the sofa. Eventually, I started tapping my foot and swaying with the beat. After a few months—and yes, it was months—I started dancing. By myself, in the privacy of my house, but I was dancing.

By Christmas, I was well enough to start thinking about getting out on the dance floor. I wanted, though, for it to be the perfect night. My favorite local band, The Embers, at the best dance hall in the area: Storm’n Norman’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Auditorium.

Storm’n Norman’s was a very cool, almost secret dance club located in a former high school gym in a small town two hours from Spencer. You would never just wander into Storm’n Norman’s by accident because when I say Waterbury, Nebraska, was small, I mean two blocks and one stop sign in the middle of nowhere small. I used to think it was a one-dog town, because I’d always see the same spotted mutt standing in the middle of the town’s one intersection, but I walked the main street one afternoon and realized there were probably as many dogs in Waterbury as people. In a way, it reminded me of my hometown of Moneta, Iowa, which was a hearty five hundred people when I lived there in the 1950s but had since become so small (fewer than fifty people) that it was no longer even incorporated as a town. Moneta died when its heart, the redbrick Moneta School, was shut down by the state of Iowa in 1959. Waterbury hadn’t died when its own school was closed by the state of Nebraska, but it was clearly limping along. There couldn’t have been more than eighty people in town, and the only business (other than Storm’n Norman’s) was the Buzzsaw Bar.

Storm’n Norman’s didn’t look like much from the outside. The former school gym was a squat, gray concrete block building on the edge of town, half hidden behind a clump of trees. The parking lot was the gravel road out front and a strip of grass. A wooden ramp led to the entrance, which was a plain metal door. Inside, a narrow hallway ended at the old gymnasium ticket window. Jeanette, Norman’s wife, was usually collecting entrance fees.

Past the window, through a narrow door, you could look across the dance floor and catch your first glimpse of the stage. It was just a plain wooden auditorium stage, the kind built in just about every schoolhouse in America between about 1916 and 1983, except for the front end of a 1955 Chevy sticking out of the middle. The Chevy was black, with flames on the sides, and when the band hit a button, the engine would rev and the wheels would turn.

The Chevy set the mood, because when you’re stepping through the doorway into Storm’n Norman’s Rock N Roll Auditorium, it was like a gorgeous new world—the world of 1955—exploded into life around you. The room was wide open and windowless, lit by hidden lamps and twenty strings of lights that connected above a disco ball in the middle of the high ceiling. The lights led your eyes down to the walls, where three 1950s American roadsters, two hot pink, sat on platforms twenty feet high. Underneath were signed guitars, statues, and black-and-white photographs of Marilyn, Elvis, and James Dean. Follow the walls around the room and you noticed first, over the entrance door, a vintage Chevy dashboard, then the rows of original, polished wooden gymnasium bleachers, perfect for lounging, along the back wall. There were two plain bars, in opposite corners, but the seating beside the wooden dance floor was neatly aligned and reminiscent of school tables and diner booths. Even the original basketball goals were still hanging from the walls. It was like walking into the idealized memory of your high school prom, but all grown up with nothing to prove. When two hundred people were crammed into Storm’n Norman’s and a great band was belting classic rock and blues, there was no better place in the world.

I was determined to be there. I was determined to hear the Embers play. And I wasn’t planning to be a wallflower, either. I was going to dance. Not to find a man, mind you, but to prove I could get off my sofa, heal my wounded body, and enjoy the rest of my life.

And that’s how on March 15, 2008, sixteen months after Dewey’s death sent my health into a spiral, I found myself riding toward Waterbury, Nebraska, with two of my best friends, Trudy and Faith. I still wasn’t healthy—I was terribly weak, and I had to roll down the window a few times to keep from being queasy on the drive over—but I kept that to myself. I was tired of talking about my illness, tired of people asking how I felt, tired of trying to explain. I just wanted to enjoy myself, and the best way to do that was to pretend that everything was fine. Besides, I had talked Trudy and Faith into driving down from Minnesota, and there was no way I was turning back on them now.