by Gwen Cooper
Josh’s eyes over Laura’s shoulder looked worried, even though what his mouth said was, “I don’t want you to worry about anything. I know how rough things have been for you these past few months.”
Josh was still hugging Laura, so he couldn’t see her face the way I could. He couldn’t tell that it got that tight expression Laura always gets whenever Sarah is mentioned. It’s like there’s too much happening in Laura’s head for her face to show it all, so she holds all her face muscles as still as she possibly can so they won’t reveal anything. (This is something cats can do naturally without having to practice the way humans do.) “Josh, I’m fine,” Laura said, and her voice sounded almost annoyed. “You don’t need to worry about me right now.”
Then Josh pulled back to look into Laura’s face, and he pushed the corners of his mouth up until his own face looked more happy than sad. “The good news is that I’ll be getting five months’ severance. They’re emailing me the agreement next week, and once I’ve signed it they’ll mail the check. And in the meantime I’ll start making calls first thing Monday morning.”
The crease in Laura’s forehead smoothed out, and she smiled. “That is good news. Five months should be plenty of time for you to find something else. You have such a great résumé.”
“I think so,” Josh said, and he smiled, too.
The days have been getting longer, and when Laura or Josh pushes open the top half of one of the long windows in the living room, I can feel how much warmer the air outside is. Still, it was cool enough inside the apartment. There was really no reason for the tiny beads of sweat-water that popped up on Josh’s forehead.
At first I almost felt sorry for Josh, because it sounded like what happened at his office was even worse than the things that happen at the Bad Place. That was before I knew how disruptive to all my usual routines it would be to have Josh home all the time. If I’m upstairs in my room with all the Sarah-boxes, trying to spend some quiet-time alone with my memories, Josh is also in that room, walking around in circles—like those pigeons Laura likes watching so much—while he talks on the phone. I don’t know why talking into the phone should have to involve walking around. I, for example, am perfectly capable of meowing as clearly and frequently as I need to from a still, sitting position. But Josh likes to walk when he’s talking on the phone. Every time I try to walk over to one spot, Josh is pacing around that same exact spot, and I have to dart over and around the Sarah-boxes to get out of his way. I’m paying extra attention to what my whiskers tell me these days just to keep from getting stepped on or tripped over. (Maybe Josh’s balance is so imprecise because he shaves off his own whiskers every morning.)
When I decide to go downstairs to the living room, where I could always count on being alone during the day, Josh comes downstairs, too. He’s still talking on the phone, opening and closing the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets without taking anything out of them (or even really looking into them) as he talks. This is particularly frustrating because a cat has every right to expect that when a human opens the refrigerator or a kitchen cabinet, he’ll pull out some food and share that food with the cat. Even sitting directly in front of Josh and meowing while staring pointedly at the cabinets does nothing except cause him to walk around me without any acknowledgment, as if I were no more than a couch or coffee table in his path. Sometimes he presses down on the handle of the can opener, which then makes the whirring sound that usually means a can is being opened. And even though I’ve realized that Josh isn’t really opening cans when he does this, I still have to run in to check—just to be completely sure—because what if the one time I don’t check, Josh is opening a can of tuna or something else I’d want to try and I’ve missed it?
Finally, when I can’t bear that frustration anymore, I go back upstairs to have a short, restful nap on top of the cat bed in Home Office. And wouldn’t you know it, Josh comes back into the room just as I’ve started to doze and says, “Prudence, I told you, stay off the computer!” and shoos me away without so much as a please or a thank you. And of course I know that he’s told me before to “stay off,” but I thought he meant only at night when he’s home to use it as a scratching post. It seems perfectly obvious to me that something so warm and springy and cat-sized was intended to be used by cats for napping. If Josh is looking for something to exercise his fingers on, he’s more than welcome to share my scratching post downstairs. I think he’ll find he gets better results anyway, because that’s what the scratching post is meant for. And it’s quieter, too.
Sudden change is always bad. Change of any kind is something to be avoided if at all possible. Even humans understand this instinctively as well as cats do, which is why they follow our example and fall into sensible habits, like always sleeping on the same side of the bed, or sitting on the same spot on the couch, or eating the same breakfast every day at the same time. As unpredictable as Sarah can be, she always does certain things the same way. Like the way she counts exactly to one hundred when she brushes her hair before getting into bed at night.
Josh’s being at home all the time is a very big, and very sudden, change. It’s disrupted all my routines, and I can’t remember ever having spent so much time with one human. Even Sarah, who doesn’t have nearly as many human friends as Josh seems to (what with his endless phone-talking), never spent more than one full day a week at home without leaving the apartment at all, and that was only on days when she didn’t have to go to work.
Don’t misunderstand me. It’s nice having a human or two around the house. Even though no other human will ever be as important to me as Sarah is, a well-mannered human can be a pleasant companion. They’re very useful for things like opening cans of food, or cleaning a litterbox, or running a brush over your back when your fur gets too itchy (like Sarah used to do for me at least once a week), or making a spot on the couch nice and warm so that, when they stand up, it becomes the most comfortable spot in the whole room to sleep on.
But even the most useful companion can wear away your patience if they spend too much time just walking around and getting underfoot.
Josh settles into the chair that lives in front of the desk in Home Office. I follow and squeeze behind the desk to bat at some of the dangling wires that live back there. Josh doesn’t like when I do this, either, but he’s too distracted right now to notice, and it’s important for me to practice my mice-fighting skills. (I got used to practicing them at exactly this time of day long before Josh started spending all his time in the apartment, and I’m trying to keep my routines as close as possible to what they’re supposed to be.) He presses a few buttons on the telephone. It rings a few times and then Josh’s mother answers. After they’ve said hello to each other, she says, “Do you have me on speaker? You know I hate being on speaker.”
“I’m sorry, Ma,” Josh says. “I’ve been on the phone all morning and I think my hand has stiffened into a claw.”
Josh’s hand doesn’t look even a little like a claw, but his mother can’t see that from the other end of the phone line. So she laughs and says, “Why are you calling from home in the middle of the day? Are you sick?”
“That’s actually what I called to tell you.” Josh takes a slightly deeper breath. “I lost my job last week.”
“What happened?” She sounds alarmed, and instinctively my left ear turns in the direction of the phone, listening for any hint of sudden danger.
“Nothing, really,” Josh says. “The company was having financial trouble and they made staff cuts. I was one of them.”
There’s a silence. “You’ve never lost a job in your whole life,” Josh’s mother finally tells him. “You’ll find something else again before you know it. A smart boy like you has nothing to worry about.”
“Thanks, Ma.” Josh is smiling a little.
There’s a muffled sound, and what sounds like a conversation in the background, and then Josh’s mother says, “Hold on. Your father wants to talk to you.”
“Josh?” his father’
s voice shouts from the speaker. Josh’s legs shift slightly and he sits up straighter in his chair. Suddenly I’m trapped behind the desk with no way to get out until he moves. “Sorry to hear what happened. Listen, you’ve been putting away fifteen percent of your take-home every month like I told you, right?”
“More than that until this past year.” Josh runs one hand back and forth over the top of his head. “Although I took a big hit back when the market tanked. I haven’t fully recovered yet.”
“Don’t worry about that now. You just keep that money right where it is. Laura’s job is still good?”
“Oh yeah. Laura’s busier than ever.”
“Good, good,” his father repeats. “The two of you will be fine.” Then there’s another muffled pause, and he says, “Mother wants to talk to you again, so I’ll say good-bye. Give Laura our love and try not to worry too much. You’re a smart kid. You’ll find a new job in no time.”
Josh’s mother’s voice comes out of the speaker again. While the two of them talk about Josh’s sister and how she’s hoping to send the littermates to a place called Summer Camp next month, I try to figure out exactly how long “no time” is. It’s hard to be sure, because the way humans think about time is so different from the way cats do. Waiting for someone to feed me tuna from an open can, or standing on the metal table at the Bad Place while they stab me with needles, is a long, long time. Sitting in my ceramic bowl in our old apartment until Sarah comes home from work to play with me is longer than anything. But sleeping in Sarah’s lap while she brushes my fur or sings to me is always too short—even when Sarah says something like, I’m sorry, little girl, but I have to stretch my legs. We’ve been sitting like this for four hours. (This just proves again how made up human hours are—because if hours were real, sleeping in Sarah’s lap for four of them wouldn’t go by so quickly.)
“No time” sounds like it should happen right now. But when Josh and his mother say good-bye, it doesn’t seem like Josh has found a new job yet. “I’m supposed to call a headhunter in a few minutes,” Josh tells her. “I’ll talk to you and Dad later.”
There’s a difference between saying things that aren’t true, and saying something that’s part of the truth but not all of it. Josh tells Laura how he’s looking for a new job, and that’s true. He also says he doesn’t want her to worry, and I can tell that’s true, too.
But the whole truth that Laura doesn’t know is how nobody Josh talks to will ever be able to give him a new job. That’s because Laura isn’t here all day like I am and doesn’t hear the phone conversations that Josh has.
Josh talks on the phone with lots of different humans, but the conversations all sound pretty similar. They begin with Josh saying how great it is to talk to the person again after so long. He asks how the other person is doing, how their kids and wives have been, and then I guess the person he’s talking to must ask how Josh is, because that’s when he says, Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but …
Josh sounds and looks genuinely happy at the beginnings of these conversations. But as the conversations go on, even though his voice sounds the same, his face starts to look different. He goes from having the look of a human who’s hoping for good news to the look of a human who’s still trying to sound happy even though what he’s hearing has made him feel just the opposite. By the time he gets to the part where he says things like, If you hear about anything … or, I’m thinking of taking on some consulting projects, so if you know anyone who’s looking to outsource … there’s no happiness left in his face.
Now Josh is talking to a type of human called a “headhunter.” This sounds like a strange thing to be, because why would somebody only hunt heads? Even if you could catch just a head, that’s the least-good part to eat!
The headhunter tells Josh that people are getting the ax all over town, which I guess explains how he’s finding so many heads. This sounds even worse than the humans who got gutted at Josh’s old job. I had no idea human jobs could be so violent. Then again, if so many people can’t do their jobs anymore because their heads are getting chopped off, you’d think that would make it easier, rather than harder, for Josh to find a new one.
But what the human on the other end of the phone line says to Josh is, “Even if I could find you something, the money wouldn’t be anything close to what you were making.”
“How much less are we talking about?” Josh asks.
“Half, maybe. If that.”
This is the first time I realize that human jobs all give people different amounts of money. I’d never really thought about it, but I just assumed that money was money, and any human who had a job got the same amount of money as any other human with a job. I guess it makes sense they’d be different, though. Jobs are what humans use to get food, like hunting is what cats use. And every cat knows that sometimes you catch a mouse that’s plump and juicy, and other times the mouse you catch is so small and stringy you’re hungry again almost right away.
“It’s possible,” Josh says slowly, “that I would consider something at a reduced salary. If the opportunity for growth was there.”
“The problem is that anybody in a hiring position will figure you’ll take the lower-paying job for now and then leave as soon as things pick up again. Which, let’s be honest, you probably would.” The headhunter pauses, and I hear a glug glug sound, like he’s drinking from a glass. “The world isn’t what it was when I first reached out to you two years ago, Josh. Frankly, there were never that many publishing jobs at your level to begin with. Your business is shrinking, and I don’t see it expanding again anytime soon. I wish I could give you more hope, but those are the facts.”
“I know it’s bad out there,” Josh says. “I guess I didn’t realize how bad.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” the headhunter says. “I talk to people every day who are out of work and whose husband or wife also lost their job. They’ve got kids in college and mortgage payments, and there’s no money coming in. Do you and Laura rent or own?”
“We rent,” Josh says.
“Well that’s good, at least. How’s Laura doing, by the way?”
“She’s great.” A smile flits across Josh’s face. “She’s been a rock, actually.”
“You’re a lucky man.” The headhunter lets out a noisy sigh. “I’ll keep my ears open. But, Josh …”
“Yes?”
“If I were you, I’d start thinking about how I could take my skills and experience and apply them in a different direction.”
I’m sleepy by the time Josh finishes talking to the headhunter, so I go to curl up in my favorite napping spot with Sarah’s dress in the back of my closet. It still smells like her, but I’ve noticed lately that the Sarah-smell is getting fainter. What will I do when her smell is completely gone? Sarah says that as long as you remember someone, they’ll always be with you. But I remember Sarah all the time, and she still hasn’t come back for me. What if that’s because I’m not remembering her enough? What if I can’t remember her at all anymore when I don’t have anything with her Sarah-smell on it?
Lately Josh has been listening to Sarah’s black disks while Laura is away at her office, always turning the music off and putting everything back into the Sarah-boxes before she comes home. It’s the sound of Sarah’s music that draws me downstairs after I wake up from my nap. Josh is sitting in the big chair in the living room, and as soon as I round the corner in the stairs I can tell he’s upset about something by the way his shoulders are set. Resting on the coffee table is a thin stack of folded white papers held together with a paper clip.
I settle into my favorite spot on the short side of the big couch and listen to Sarah’s music with Josh. From time to time he looks over at the papers on the table. After the music stops and he’s returned the black disk upstairs, he takes the papers in his hand and looks through them. From the little creases around the edges, it seems like he’s looked through them a few times already.
Even though the days
are getting longer now, it’s still dark outside when Laura finally comes home from work. Usually Josh’s face changes as soon as he hears Laura’s key in the lock. He looks the way I probably look when Laura is putting food down for me, and I know it will be one of the best times of the whole day. But now his face doesn’t change at all when Laura calls out her usual greeting and he calls back to say, “I’m in here.”
Laura walks into the room with two glasses of wine, and she hands one to Josh. That’s when she sees the odd look on his face. “Is anything wrong?” When Josh doesn’t say anything, she asks him, “Did something happen?”
Josh is quiet for a long moment while he drinks from the glass Laura handed him. Then he says, “Why didn’t you tell me, Laur?” He picks up the folded stack of papers and hands them to her. “I got my severance agreement today. It’s dated from a week before they let me go. Somebody at your firm must have known what was going on. I thought you worked on contracts.”
Laura’s face gets as red as it did the night of that Pass Over dinner. She takes the papers Josh is holding out to her, but she doesn’t unfold them or try to read them. “Josh, I had no idea.” I know she’s telling the truth, because the black centers of her eyes stay the same size and nothing about her posture stiffens the way it usually does when a human isn’t telling the truth. “I never saw this. Nobody said a word to me.”
It’s odd, because humans don’t normally look this upset when what they’re saying is true. And that’s when I know. Laura is upset because she’s telling the truth. That doesn’t make any sense, and yet I feel sure I’m right.
“Well, maybe you can help me out with a couple of questions I have, your firm being the attorney-of-record.” Josh’s mouth twists into a shape that’s trying to be a smile but isn’t quite. “I’ve looked over the vacation pay and expense-account money they owe me. And I’ll get another three months on my insurance until COBRA kicks in.”