“Good idea.” Julie doubted that animal control came out right away here in the middle of nowhere, and she wouldn’t be able to sleep with a wild animal running around the house. Hopefully, she could shoo it outside. She grabbed the first thing she found under the sink, which happened to be a plunger.
What kind of animal had it been? It had run past too fast for her to tell.
Slowly, on her tiptoes, she crept along after it. Her parents were nattering on in her ear, but she barely heard them between the renewed static and her thumping heart. When she reached the living room, she caught sight of a lump of fur in the shadow of Gram’s chair, licking its white fur clean of dust.
She lowered the plunger and set it against the wall. “Oh, it’s a cat.”
“A cat?” Clearly, she’d interrupted her mom in the middle of saying something, but she hadn’t been paying enough attention to know what.
“The wild animal. It must be a stray.” And that explained the noise. Julie relaxed, even though this only added to her problems. She couldn’t throw a cat out into the cold snow to fend for itself. It would be wrong.
As if knowing the bend of her thoughts, the cat glared at her with brilliant-blue eyes. She crouched, holding out her fingers for the cat to sniff. “Here, kitty, kitty.” She clucked under her tongue.
The cat looked her over as if she was a lesser being.
In her ear, her mother laughed, the sound half-covered with static. “You always did love cats. Remember Whiskers? You used to take that cat with you everywhere, even up to the inn in the summers!”
Whiskers hadn’t looked that different from this cat. Well, she might have, once this cat was properly cleaned. Whiskers had been a gray cat with white markings without being covered in years’ worth of basement dust. This one could be any color underneath all that dirt, though Julie suspected it was mostly white.
A pang of longing shot through her. She’d loved that cat and still missed her to this day. But after Whiskers had died, she’d gotten busy with college and then making her way in the world with her first jobs. Her apartment in Boston didn’t allow for pets, and even filling it with plants on every spare surface hadn’t quite filled that hole. But there was no sense in getting attached to this cat. She’d be going back home and wouldn’t be able to keep it. She straightened and returned to the kitchen to lean against the counter, where the cell signal was better.
“What am I going to do with it?”
She realized that she’d interrupted her parents’ reminiscences of their old cat only at the awkward silence. She cleared her throat.
“Sorry, my mind’s miles away. I moved back to the kitchen where I have better cell signal. What were you saying?”
While she waited for her parents to answer, she chewed on a thumbnail.
“I don’t see why this is a problem,” her dad said. “You love cats. Probably the only grandchildren I’m likely to get.”
Julie sighed. Her parents had recently started mentioning grandchildren, but Julie was in no hurry. She was only thirty-two, and there was plenty of time, wasn’t there? “Just because I’m not dating anyone right now doesn’t mean I never will, Dad.”
Her mom said, “Stop teasing, Greg. She’s clearly had a long day.” Julie opened her mouth to thank her mom for the intervention, only to have her mom add, “But I do agree with him, Jules. You love cats.”
“I don’t live here. I can’t keep it.”
The cat, in that uncanny way felines had of knowing when they were unwanted, slinked into the doorway. It had managed to clean itself until it was mostly white again, with only a bit of dusky gray on the muzzle. It glared at her and swished its tail.
“Well, there’s an animal shelter in town. Your gram’s friend, Myrtle, runs it, if I remember right.”
Julie pulled the phone away from her ear to check the time. After five o’clock. “I don’t suppose it’s open late.”
“Probably not, no…”
“And how am I supposed to get the cat there? I can’t take it in the truck. It’s a rental. What if the cat scratches up the seats?”
She was starting to get a headache. As if she didn’t have enough problems already, now she was going to have to go into town and hope there was a pet store to buy a cat carrier.
Thankfully, her mother came to the rescue. “Oh, you know Gram. She never throws anything out. I bet one of Whiskers’s old cat carriers is in the attic.”
“Perfect. I’ll look now. The signal here isn’t great, so I’m going to let you go.”
“Let us know how it goes tomorrow,” Mom said.
“And give a kiss to my furry grandchild for me,” Dad joked.
“Very funny, Dad. Love you both.”
