Home from the Vinyl Cafe (25 page)

Morley said, “We are not going to put the cat in the car again, Dave. If the cat’s in the car, I’m not coming.”

Dave said, “We’ll find someone to look after the cat.”

The cat had once belonged to Dave’s sister, Annie.

Dave and Morley took it the spring Annie moved back to Nova Scotia from Boston. She was planning to leave it behind.

“I don’t know,” she said when Dave offered to take the cat.

“What do you mean?” said Dave.

“I feel stupid,” said his sister. “I don’t like to say it out loud.”

“Say what?” said Dave.

“Whenever the cat is around, things seem to go wrong.”

Dave said, “Don’t be silly. We can look after a cat.”

Annie brought the cat in a cage. As soon as they were in the house, Dave knelt down and wiggled a finger through the bars. “Puss puss,” he said.

“Galway,” said Annie. “After the poet Galway Kinnell.”

The cat was beige with black spots, lean and rangy.

A female.

“Galway Kinnell is a man,” said Dave.

“I know,” said Annie. “But we were big fans.”

Dave started to fiddle with the latch on the cage door.

“Wait,” said Annie, holding out an envelope. But she was too late. Dave had already flipped the latch open.

“Here, puss,” he said.

The cat shot out of the cage as if she had been spring-loaded.

“Oh,” said Annie.

“Oh,” said Dave.

They were both off balance, staring at each other and then at Galway, who had sailed over Dave’s shoulder and landed in the middle of the hall with the sureness of a dancer.

“It’s okay,” said Dave. Thinking maybe it was not okay at all.

“You should have read this first.” Annie was gesturing with the envelope. “Before you let her out.”

As Dave took the envelope, Arthur, the family dog, ambled through the dining room door. When Galway saw Arthur, she hissed. Arthur jerked to a stop.

“Arthur,” said Dave, “this is Galway. Galway is a cat.”

Arthur took a cautious step forward, wagging his tail tentatively. Galway sank to the floor and began to lower her ears—they folded back on her head like bat wings—until they were flat and she looked like she was wearing a helmet. Arthur bared his teeth, and a sound that was more a rumble than a growl began to emanate from deep inside of him. The cat and the dog stared at each other for a moment, and then Galway flicked her tail. Arthur abruptly stopped growling, looked pathetically at Dave as if to say, “Why are you letting this happen?,” and slunk into the kitchen.

Annie looked defensive.

Dave said, “I’ll read this later.” He stuffed the instructions in his back pocket.

He forgot about the letter until that night. When he pulled it out, he wondered how his sister could have written three pages about a cat. Typical of Annie to fuss like that. He took the letter and went into the den. Arthur, who was curled up on the couch, lifted his head, furrowed his brow, slid onto the floor, and mooched out of the room, throwing a doleful glance over his shoulder. Dave shut the door. He had come into the den because he didn’t want to read Annie’s letter in front of Galway, so he was startled, when he turned around, to find she was sitting on top of the bookshelf.

“She was threatening me,” he said to Morley the next day.

Instead of reading Annie’s letter, he took it downstairs and put in his briefcase. Then he went to bed.

He was pretty sure he had put it in his briefcase.

“Maybe you threw it out,” said Morley. “It was garbage day.”

“I didn’t throw it out,” said Dave. “The cat took it out of my briefcase.”

“Probably,” said Morley.

“She did,” said Dave. “Look at her. She’s smirking.” At that moment Galway turned and walked away, her tail in the air.

“See?” said Dave. “She didn’t want us to read the letter. It said something about the cage. About keeping her in the cage.”

“Probably,” said Morley. “That’s probably it. The hair dryer is missing, too. Do you suppose she has the hair dryer as well?”

It took Arthur and Galway about a week to work out an uneasy truce. For the first week, the cat barely set foot on the
floor. She moved around the house from chair back to tabletop, often settling somewhere above Arthur, gazing down at him threateningly. Dave came home one night in the second week, and the cat had descended. Morley said, “See? They’re fine now.”

Dave wasn’t as sure. “Watch,” he said. “Whenever Galway comes into the room, Arthur gets up and leaves.”

One day Dave came home at lunch to check the mail. It was garbage day, so instead of going through the front door, he picked up the empty garbage can and lugged it down the driveway. As he passed the dining room window, he saw movement in his peripheral vision. He turned just in time to see Arthur hurtling through the dining room with Galway clinging on his back as if she were riding a bucking bronco.

A moment later, they came back, Galway barely clinging to Arthur. Dave watched her slide off as Arthur spun wildly into the kitchen. He watched Galway jump onto the dining room buffet and perch there, her eyes glued to the kitchen door.

No wonder Arthur had seemed so tired.

That summer Dave had made the mistake of trying to take Galway with them on a weekend trip to the Muskokas. This was what Morley was remembering when she said she would not travel with the cat again.

The car was all packed. Sam, who was two at the time, was already strapped into his car seat, and already crying, when Dave tried to put Galway back into the cage. Getting the cat into the cage was like trying to fold a large spring into a tin can. Galway kept popping free, then hiding—behind the fridge, under a bed. Dave chased her around the house, humiliated, thinking that when he was young, fathers knew how to do things like change the oil in their cars, solder things together,
clean fish. Surely he could put a cat into a cage. He needed to show his family he could do this thing. It was driving him wild.

Out in the car, Stephanie was throwing a tantrum. Morley, who was feeling irritable herself, said, “Stay here. I’m going to get your father.”

When she found Dave pulling Galway through a radiator by her tail, Morley said, “What are you doing? Why do we have to use the cage? Why don’t we let her free in the car?”

“That’s why,” said Dave five minutes later, as the family stood in the driveway beside their packed car, watching Galway disappear over the backyard fence like a burglar. There was a set of red scratches that looked like skid marks running up Dave’s face and over his forehead.

“You better have those looked at,” said their neighbor Jim Scoffield, who had been watching. “They can infect.”

“What?” said Dave.

“Cat scratches,” said Jim. “They get infected easily.”

“She didn’t have to do that,” Dave told Morley as she wiped his face with hydrogen peroxide. “She had to go out of her way to go over my head. It was deliberate. It was malicious.”

It started to rain. They never got to the cottage.

Last summer Dave said, “I’ll get Kenny to look after her. We’ll leave her here, and Kenny can come over and feed her. It’s just two weeks. Kenny can do that.”

Dave knew Kenny would be delighted to have a key to his house. To a television set with cable.

Dave was prepared to leave Galway in the house by herself, but not Arthur. Jim Scoffield had offered to look after the dog.

Usually, Arthur was anxious when he sensed he was being left behind, and Dave felt like a traitor when he led him over
to Jim’s house. But when they got there, Arthur seemed … relieved. Almost delighted. When Dave took him off the leash, he bounded around Jim’s house. When Jim leaned over to pat him, Arthur licked his face with enthusiasm.

“That’s odd,” said Dave.

They left on a glorious Monday morning in August. They drove north, stopping for hamburgers after two hours on the road. Stephanie walked into the restaurant after they had found a table and sat at the counter by herself.

They made supper in a provincial park on the shores of Georgian Bay.

“This is what Canada is all about,” said Morley. “This is the heart of our country.”

“It’s too windy,” said Stephanie. “It’s just trees.”

They drove aboard the ferry to Manitoulin Island in the morning. “First on, first off,” said Dave.