“I see,” Bridey said, but she didn’t sound very sure.
When the women left, Desmond slipped out of the bathroom, where he’d been hiding, and stalked all around the room’s perimeter, reclaiming it as his own.
* * *
—
On a balmy evening in early May, Mercy heard someone climbing her stairs. She figured it had to be Robin; the girls would be fixing supper at this hour. She stood up hastily from the daybed and turned the radio off. （The idea was that she was staying here nights to work, not to sit idle.） But when she went to open the door she found Mr. Mott outside, Mr. Mott puffing and sweating in a short-sleeved seersucker shirt that made his arms look embarrassingly naked. “Why, Mr. Mott!” she said. “You’re back!”
“Not back back,” he said. “Just here to pick up a few things from the house.”
“How’s your daughter?”
“Not so good,” he said.
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“She’s having to have these treatments, series of treatments,” he said. “Seems like things have spread everywhere.”
“Oh, no.”
“Right,” he said. Then he looked past her and said, “There you are!”—talking to Desmond, who was gazing at him blankly from his spot on the daybed. “How you doing, fella?”
“Oh, Desmond’s fine. We’re getting along just fine,” Mercy said. “Won’t you come in and—”
“So we’re going to have to move down there,” Mr. Mott said. “Move to my daughter’s place in Richmond. Got to help out with our grandson. Well, Elise can’t tend him. Right now she can’t even have him to visit her in the hospital, because the slightest little germ could be the end of her. And Dickie is not but eight, you know. So me and Mrs. Mott are going to have to move there.”
“But…maybe once everything is back to normal…” Mercy said.
He just looked at her.
“My nephew will be staying in our place,” he said finally. “He’s going through a divorce. So you can put the rent through our mail slot same as always and he will pass it on to us.”
“Certainly,” Mercy said.
“And would you might want to keep Desmond?”
“Keep him? You mean forever?”
“Right.”
“Oh! No, I’m sorry, I could never do that.”
“We can’t take him to Richmond because Dickie is allergic. And my nephew despises cats; I already asked him.”
“See, I really don’t lead the kind of life to own a cat,” Mercy said.
“But you’ve managed up till now, haven’t you? He hasn’t been any trouble, has he?”
“No, none at all. Still, I just don’t want a cat,” Mercy told him.
“But what am I going to do, then? How am I going to deal with this? I just have too much on me! Everything’s crashing in on me and I don’t know where to turn, and now I find out the water heater has been leaking all over our basement for I-don’t-know-how-long when my nephew swore in God’s name that he would keep an eye on things for us. I’m just…surrounded!”
He was. She could see that. He was going under. Oh, that helpless, sinking, beleaguered feeling, that weighted feeling of everything crowding in on you and strangling you and demanding from you, all at the same time!
She placed a hand on his arm, the sad puffy skin of his forearm. “It’s okay. I’ll take Desmond,” she told him. “Don’t you give him another thought. I’m glad to do it.”
“Thank you,” he said.
Then he turned to go. She wasn’t offended; she knew he had nothing left for the usual chitchat. She just dropped her hand from his arm, and he opened the door and walked out.
* * *
—
The following Saturday morning she walked over to the house to pick up the car, as she did every Saturday. She was the only woman she knew these days who had no car of her own, but she didn’t want the encumbrance, and anyhow, Robin would have found it extravagant. She went directly out back to the garage, and she fished her keys from her purse and got in and started the engine.
In her studio, she took Desmond’s travel case from the corner behind the door. Unaccustomed to cats though she was, she knew better than to let him spot it ahead of time. She set it on the kitchen counter and unlatched the lid before she went to scoop him up from the daybed. He struggled only briefly—surprised, it seemed, more than upset. She plopped him into the case and slammed the lid shut, lickety-split, and then she carried it outside and down the stairs. It was like carrying a bowling ball, the way the weight inside slid about and tilted and bucked, but she hung on. Meanwhile, Desmond was silent. She had expected him to meow. But it was an expressive silence, she felt, a sort of bristling of the airwaves. Not till she parked at the animal shelter and walked around to the passenger side to reach in for his case did he say anything, and then it was just a single, questioning “Mew?”