Love Saves the Day (30 page)

“I don’t know.” Josh gives a small shrug. “How you found out you’d have to move. How your mom and your neighbors felt about it. What it was like having to move away from your friends and all those people you’d known for years. It doesn’t necessarily have to
be the bad stuff,” he adds gently. “I know you’ve been going through your mother’s things with Prudence lately. That must have jogged some good memories.”

Listening to Laura talk about her Sarah-memories has become one of my favorite things. Leaping into the nearest Sarah-box, I helpfully push something out with my nose and paws. This way Laura has something to start talking about. The plastic bag I spill onto the ground holds tiny white-and-blue ceramic cups called a “sake set” that Anise brought back from a place called Japan for Sarah to keep in her record store. They clink against each other as they roll from the bag and around the cardboard covers scattered on the floor. The floor is so many different colors now from all the covers that it’s hard to see where some of the sake-set cups end up.

“See?” Josh smiles. “Prudence thinks it’s a good idea, too.” His smile turns wistful. “You see me with my family all the time. I hardly know anything about what you and your mother were like together. I’d just love to hear you talk about it.”

They look at each other for a long moment. Then Laura says, “I have to get out of these work clothes.” As her feet-shoes click down the hall, her voice calls back to us, “Let me know when you’re ready for dinner.”

A
T THE END OF
A
UGUST IS A LONG HOLIDAY WEEKEND CALLED
Labor Day. Humans need holidays and calendars to tell them things cats already know—like when the summer ends, and when the air starts to smell smokier and feel cooler. After Labor Day, the littermates go back to their school and stop coming here.

It’s around then that Laura starts getting sick in the mornings. She’s been sick
every
morning these past two weeks. My stomach gets upset sometimes, too (and I always try to hide it in some out-of-the-way place, because it’s embarrassing when humans have to clean up after me), but Laura’s stomach has been upset every single day. After Josh has gone downstairs to start making the coffee, Laura throws up into the toilet in their bathroom—I can hear it from under the door. Then she washes her face and brushes her teeth, and the two of us go downstairs so she can give me my
breakfast. Sometimes, when she opens the cans that hold my food, Laura gets a look on her face like the smell of my food is making her feel sick again. Even the way she smells is different—stronger and more sugary since three weeks before she started throwing up.

I don’t think Josh knows anything about how sick she’s been feeling, though, because if he did I’m sure he would insist she go to whatever the human version of the Bad Place is. Laura probably hates the Bad Place as much as I do, and that’s why she hasn’t said anything about it.

Still, I wish Josh would notice, because Laura’s being sick is also putting her in a bad mood. Ever since that night when Josh spread all the black disks out on the floor of my room, Laura hasn’t seemed as interested anymore in coming in here to look through the Sarah-boxes with me. Still, I keep trying to think of ways to encourage her. Like this morning. I find one of the shoe boxes with Sarah’s matchbook toys and nudge it out of the big brown box so Laura and I can look through them and she can tell me things about Sarah. It’s true that once a few of the matchbooks spill out, I start batting the rest of them around, until there are matchbooks scattered all over the floor and wedged underneath some of the big boxes. But I’m pretty sure that when she sees how much fun it is to bat the matchbook toys around, she’ll want to join me.

That’s not what happens, though. Laura is walking quickly past my room, but when she sees how the matchbook toys are strewn all over the place, she stops. I nose a few hopefully in her direction, but I can tell she’s angry by her hard, rapid footsteps as she comes into the room.

“No!”
she yells. “No, Prudence! Stop pushing things out of boxes and making a mess!
Why can’t you just leave me alone?
” She tosses the matchbook toys back into the smaller box they’re supposed to live in, then throws the whole thing into one of the bigger Sarah-boxes. She starts going around to all the boxes and folding their flaps over so that they stay closed by themselves. Then she shoves them around on top of each other until they’re all in two big stacks that are so high I can’t possibly reach the top. She’s
breathing hard from her effort, and there are dots of sweat-water on her forehead.

I’ve never had my feelings hurt by a human before, but now I feel hurt—and also confused. What did I do that was so bad? What was so wrong with wanting to play with Sarah’s matchbook toys that Laura had to yell at me and put
all
of Sarah’s and my old things where I can’t even get to them? How will I remember Sarah enough to make her come back and always be with me if I don’t have anything to remember her
with
?

I stretch out all my front claws and scratch at the floor, leaving long, angry slashes in the dark wood Laura cares about so much. I had thought that she and I were becoming close,
almost
like maybe I was a part of the family that’s made up of her and Josh. This is what I get for forgetting I’m just an immigrant here, and that
Sarah
is my one-and-only Most Important Person.

Josh hasn’t made eggs for Laura in a long time, but this morning is the one-year anniversary of when they got married, and I smell the aroma of scrambled eggs coming upstairs from the kitchen. It also smells like Josh is frying bacon and pouring orange juice—all the things Laura used to like so much on Sunday mornings.

When Laura gets close to the kitchen and smells the eggs cooking, she has to run back upstairs—probably to throw up again. Josh is whistling while he cooks, so I don’t think he notices. He scoops the eggs onto plates, and then he puts a little onto a Prudence-plate that he sets on the floor. Laura’s face looks much paler than it usually does by the time she comes back to the kitchen to sit down.

Josh stops cooking long enough to come over to her seat with a plate of eggs and bacon. “Happy anniversary,” Josh says, and kisses her on the mouth.

“Happy anniversary,” she tells him, with a smile that somehow makes her face look even paler. She pushes the eggs around with her fork.

“Are you okay?” Josh asks Laura. His forehead wrinkles in concern.

Laura tries to smile again. “I’m fine,” she says. “Just not that hungry, I guess.”

“I hope you’re hungry tonight. The reservation’s at eight, so if you’re running late at work we can always meet there.”

“I’ve been thinking.” The squeaky sound of Laura’s fork scraping against the plate is too high-pitched for humans to hear, but the agonizing squeal of it makes my ears twitch until the left one nearly folds in half. “Del Posto might be a little … extravagant for us right now. Maybe we should take a pass.”

“Okay,” Josh says slowly. He sounds confused. “Did you want to go somewhere else?”

“I don’t know.” She swallows hard a couple of times, like maybe the smell of the eggs is making her feel sick again. “We can talk about it later, I guess.”

“If that’s what you want.” Laura looks down at her plate while Josh’s eyes look at her face, as if he’s seeing for the first time that something might be wrong with her. They’re both silent until Josh says, “Listen, I’ve been wanting to ask you about Anise Pierce. I was wondering if maybe you could get in touch with her.”

Laura looks up in surprise. “Anise Pierce? Why would I want to get in touch with Anise Pierce?”

“She recorded a couple of albums in Alphaville Studios. We’re up to ten thousand signatures on the online petition, and I’ve got a few media outlets sniffing around. I thought that if someone of her stature came on board, we might be able to nail something down.”

“I don’t want to get in touch with Anise.” Laura picks up the folded paper napkin in her lap and drops it over the uneaten plate of eggs. I can tell already that Laura is going to show her bad mood to Josh, just like she showed it to me upstairs—and I think how much luckier Josh is than I am, because he can talk back to her.

He looks confused again for a moment. “I just think it would really help us if—”

“I already told you, I don’t want to,” Laura interrupts. “I don’t
think this building on Avenue A should be your priority right now. We’ve got things to worry about here.”

“What kind of things? What are you talking about?”

“If you want to worry about who can afford to live where,” she tells him, “maybe you should worry about where
we’re
going to live when your severance runs out next week and we can’t afford to keep this place anymore.”

Now
my
stomach feels upset, like somebody is squeezing it in their fist. We might have to leave this apartment? How is that possible? Why didn’t anybody tell me that something like this could happen? If Sarah doesn’t know where to find Laura, how will she know where to find me?

“Oh, come off it, Laura,” Josh says. “I know we’ve lost a chunk of our savings, but we’re still a long way from losing this apartment.”

“
You
come off it, Josh.” Laura’s voice gets louder. “I refuse to be the only person around here who worries about work. Do you ever think about what might happen if I suddenly lost
my
job? Do you even
know
how bad things have been at the firm lately?”

“How the hell
should
I know?” Josh’s voice gets louder, too. “You don’t talk to me about what’s happening at your job. You don’t talk to me about anything. For months I’ve been trying as hard as I know how to get you to open up about
something
—your mother, your job, anything at all—but all you do is shut me down. What am I, a mind reader?”

“I didn’t realize you had to be a mind reader to do basic math,” Laura says. Her voice sounds angrier than it sounded even when she used to get mad at Sarah. “I didn’t realize you had to be a mind reader to add the
zero
dollars you’ll be earning to our monthly budget and come up with
zero
dollars for rent.” Laura is shouting now. She stands up and slams her chair so hard against the kitchen table that it bounces off and tumbles on its side onto the floor. The loud noise and the shouting scare me so much, I skid as I run for under-the-couch. I can still see and hear Laura and Josh, but I feel safer here as I twitch the fur on my back fast-fast-fast. Laura laughs, but it’s a kind of laugh that sounds the exact opposite of when a
human finds something funny. “And the truly
outstanding
part of the whole thing is that
I
never wanted an apartment this big or expensive in the first place!”

“Give me a break with your revisionist history
bullshit
!” I hear Josh yell. “
We
picked out this apartment together.
We
spent weeks looking for a place where we could start a family. You didn’t have one word to say against any of that, but now you turn green every time the subject of having children comes up. Maybe I’m not a mind reader, and maybe I can’t do basic math, but I’m not
blind
, Laura.”

“How can we even think about having children if we don’t have any money!”

“Oh, and you were just
so
thrilled when you got pregnant the first time.” Now
his
voice sounds mean. “Your happiness and absolute
elation
were written all over your face. How stupid do you think I am?”

“Don’t mix things up! That was then, and this is now, and
now
we
can’t
have children without worrying about how we’ll pay for everything.”

“Enough already!”
Josh roars. “Everything with you is about money! Stop with the money! We
have
money!”

“Not enough!” Laura yells back at him. “You have no idea how terrifying it is to have no money at all! You don’t know what it’s like when—” Suddenly Laura stops yelling and is silent.

“When
what
?” Josh demands. “When
what
, Laura? What happened to you that was so terrible you can’t even talk about it?”

Laura is silent. When she speaks again, her voice is lower, but it sounds cold. “What happened is that my husband started caring more about strangers, and about playing babysitter to his niece and nephew, than he does about our future.”

Josh’s voice gets lower, too, but somehow that makes his words crueler. “
You
are not the person to give
me
lessons on how to treat family. You left your mother alone in that miserable apartment you could barely bring yourself to visit once a month. You didn’t even take time off work when she died.
Think
about that, Laura. And don’t talk to
me
about family.”

Laura’s breathing gets loud and hard, the way mine does when I’m chuffing.
“What the hell do you know about it?”
Her shriek makes all the fur on my back stand up, and no matter how fast I twitch it I can’t make it lie down again. “What do
you
know about me or my mother or
anything
? With your normal, happy,
perfect
family where everybody pulls together and helps each other out and just loves each other
so
much!”

“Do you even hear what you’re saying?” Josh yells. “Is
that
what you think? You think there’s such a thing as a perfect family? Sometimes my dad’s the greatest guy in the world, and sometimes he pisses me off so much I want to
strangle
him, but I won’t spend the rest of my life blaming him for everything that goes wrong in it.” I hear the sound of Josh’s shoes clopping against the kitchen tile as he paces. “Whatever it is you think your mother did that was so awful, get over it! I can practically
hear
you fighting with her in your head, like she’s still here and you’re still fourteen.
Your mother is
dead,
Laura!
Grow up already!”

Now I realize it—what Josh said before about Laura not taking time off from work. Sarah is dead. Sarah is dead, and nobody ever told me. Sarah is dead, and I’ll never see her again. She’ll never feed me or hold me or stroke my fur again. Never never never never. No matter how much time I spend with her boxes or my memories, nothing will ever bring Sarah back to me. The ache in my chest from Sarah’s being gone rips back open so suddenly that I can’t breathe. I curl up in a tight ball under the couch with my nose pressed into my tail, trying to make my ripped-open chest stay together.