WHO'S YOUR FRIEND?

Trigger warning: bereavement and loss

Who’s Your Friend?

By

Annie R. McEwen

As we did nearly every afternoon, we sat on the front porch steps of the broke-down farmhouse in the country, watching the day go out and the night come in. The sun went down, the moon went up. The world went round and round and everything was good.

“Same time tomorrow?” he said, like always.

      “Sure thing. Love you.” I kissed his cheek, scratchy with late day beard.

“Love you, too.” He winked at me, smiling.

It was the last time we spoke. I waved and walked back to my car. Drove the fifteen miles back to my house in the city. Made some dinner. Streamed a movie. Read in bed for a while. Fell asleep.

And while I did all that, my best friend died.

The emergency service called me, of course, at three a.m. I shot out of bed and into my clothes and my car but there wasn’t much point. He died in the ambulance, never made the hospital, never woke again, never said anything.

What was there to say? We’d said it all on some deep level where we tried and failed to prepare for the end of the thirty-seven years we’d known each other.

Preparing. That was what the daily porch ritual was, though neither of us consciously thought of that way. It was just what we did, month after month, year after year. We did it when it was sticky hot outside and we swatted mosquitos. When the rain poured down and we watching it bouncing off the tall plants that screened the house from the road. When it was cold and we sat closer together and drank steaming mugs of cider to stay warm.

There were two ratty old chairs on the porch, but we liked the steps better. It felt like we could just leap to our feet and run down the road on another adventure together. Long after disease made adventure impossible, we still sat there, cherishing the illusion, living in our shared past and ignoring the present, which we thought of as a lengthy layover in an unpleasant airport. We never talked about the bites of our future that Death was taking. Appetizers. Tidbits. Amuse-bouches before the main course that would swallow one and therefore both of us.

We’d never had a romantic arrangement, though in the beginning when we were young and silly we made a half-hearted stab at it. Partners, the romantic sort, came and went for each of us after that. They whirled into, around, and out of our lives. We were Tilt-a-Whirls where riders regularly got ejected by a centrifugal force of disinterest. There wasn’t anything terribly wrong with the ejectees. Their only fault, to him, was that none of them was me. For me, none of them was or could ever be him.

We together were the bedrock, the prima materia, the foundation on which we built and kept building each other. We were friends. Best friends, true friends, friends of the heart and soul and brain and every other dimension that mattered.

Every once in awhile some fool that didn’t know us said, “Why don’t you two get married?” It was easiest and most genuine to say we already were. For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. ‘Til death do us part.

Which it did.

Once the damnable post-death housekeeping – the cremation and the Will and the lawyer and the bequests and the endless, endless paperwork – was over, I learned the worst part about loss. It’s not the tears. I cried myself blind for months and I will tell anyone right here, right now: that can be survived. It’s the part after the tears that made me wish I was the one to go first. That’s the part where I fell apart like a book left out in the rain. Covers peeling, paper turning to mush. Words running off the pages and down the driveway, jumping the curb and into the storm sewers, the story dissolving and flowing down to the sea and gone.

People went back to living and I lingered in some gray place between Life and Death. Except I didn’t feel like any part of me was one or the other. Life got no investment from me. Death certainly didn’t care about me, now that I wasn’t in close proximity to a target. I was of no more interest than a gnat. Unimportant until my time to die arrived, when Death would briefly find me interesting again.

That’s when the cat turned up.

#

It wasn’t a lot to look at. I’d seen worse but this cat wouldn’t be taking home any ribbons at the Cat Fanciers Annual. It was big, mostly black with a white cravat and two white socks, one ear torn from a fight that went sideways. Its eyes might have been green or gold, I didn’t look long enough to tell. It swayed out of the road-screening bushes at the front of the farmhouse in the way cats do, like they have all the time in the world and aren’t interested in you or anything you have to offer, which is a lie.

I was too empty to even say Shoo. I shut the screen door and latched it, leaving the cat on the other side staring at me. With the tarnished old screen between us the cat was blurred and almost not there, which is where I wanted it to be. I went back to sorting and packing estate goods. This box for the kidney foundation. That one for the homeless shelter.

I could still feel the cat staring, even through the screen. I shut the front door and bolted it.

#

The next morning I dragged myself out of my friend’s bed and told myself, not for the first time, that I needed to change the sheets. Just like the other times, I didn’t. The sheets, the furniture, the house, the litter of the dining room table where household bills and receipts were stacked haphazardly. Valley Electric. Pd. 10/21. Ck. #1780. Spring Water Service. Pd. CC 10/30. Hill Rd. Veterinary. Pd. 11/14. Ck. # 1784. I wasn’t sure why I balked at either tossing the receipts or filing them somewhere out of sight. It was like the sheets, I guessed. If I didn’t change anything, if I left everything the way it was when he was alive, then maybe . . .

No, I knew my friend wasn’t coming back. At least I knew that in my head. The rest of me wasn’t there yet and if I had to leave everything frozen the way it was on that last day for a year or ten years or forever, then that’s exactly what I would do.

I flipped through the stack of paid bills. There were three more for the vet, going back over the past year and stopping when the last of the farm cats died. There had been three, all males, all from the same litter. They grew old as their owner grew old, grew sick as he did, died one by one before him. The last was the hardest. Rob Roy MacGregor, a big ginger cat, the alpha of the pack but a marshmallow at heart.

           I was in town when Rob Roy was euthanized at home. I drove, fast, but when I got to the farm he was being buried. My friend, in a wheelchair, had dragged the shovel out of the barn and dug the grave.

           “I could have done that,” I said. “Why didn’t you wait for me?”

           “I couldn’t save him. But I needed to do – something.”

           I understood. We had a little service by the grave. Then I pushed the wheelchair back to the porch and helped my friend out of it so he could sit on the steps. I got a vodka and lemon-lime soda for him and a mineral water for me. We sat there ‘til dark, as usual.

#

The second day after the black and white cat arrived, it was still where it first parked itself, the front yard just beyond the porch steps. It stayed there all day. Maybe it stayed there all night, too, since the next morning it was still in the same spot.

           “I’m not feeding you,” I said. The cat hadn’t exactly asked to be fed, but why else would it be sitting there, staring? There was work in the front garden that needed doing, but I decided to work in the house instead. I left the front door open but latched the screen door again.

#

The fourth day after the cat showed up, and it still hadn’t moved. That couldn’t be true, of course. It had to go somewhere, the bushes probably, for peeing and pooping. It had to eat, and I wasn’t feeding it.

           “I’m not feeding you,” I said again. “And I’m not naming you, either.” My father used to say that. Don’t name strays. It gives ‘em permission to stay. Right, Dad. Some sort of World War II Era animal magic. Short of taking a broom to the cat, I wasn’t sure how to change its mind about squatting in the front yard. I gave Dad Magic another try.

           “No food, savvy? And no name. You’re wasting your time.”

           The cat just looked at me. Its eyes were green.

#

Five days and I admitted to some worry about the cat. Not a huge amount of worry, but – concern. It didn’t appear to be wasting away, so it must have a food source somewhere. I tried to remember if there had been more birdsong before it appeared. I read somewhere that cats were the biggest single threat to songbirds in the U.S. Maybe I should spare the cardinals and put some cat food out.

           I looked in the kitchen cabinets and found some left-over cans from Rob Roy and his brothers. I hadn’t given the can opener away, yet, so I opened one. It didn’t feel right to use Rob’s dish, the red plaid one I’d brought back from a trip to Scotland, so I just unlatched the screen door and put the open can on the porch.

           The cat didn’t hesitate at all. It came up to the porch like it did that every dinnertime and went to work on the food. In a few minutes the can was as clean as if I’d run it through the dishwasher. I opened the screen door to pick up the can and as I did the cat brushed against my leg. Not a wild show of emotion, just a brush, accompanied with the softest of meows. The cat trotted back down the steps and into the yard. It took a seat where it had been sitting for five days.

           I felt a strange sensation around my mouth. A very small, very faint smile. The first one in six months.

#

A routine developed. I got up in the morning, went to the kitchen. Put the coffee maker on. Opened the front door, looked out through the screen. Made sure the cat was there. Went back to the kitchen, poured coffee into a mug. Opened a can of cat food. Took it and my mug outside.

           The food went down on the porch and the cat came for it. I stood, drinking my coffee, while the cat inhaled Gravy Lovin’ Beef and Turkey. After the food was gone and the can licked clean, the cat rubbed against my leg. I didn’t speak to it and I didn’t sit down with it and I definitely didn’t pet it. But I did let it brush against me. And when I felt the little brush against my leg I gave a little smile in return.

           It was a boy cat. I saw that the first time it turned and trotted back to its place in the front yard.

           I counted the cans of food in the kitchen and decided I’d better buy a few more. I’d get a better price on a case. I wrote that on my grocery list. Case cat food. Gravy kind.

           I started putting a bowl of water on the porch, too.

           #

A week or so went by. Most of the house goods were boxed or given away. Among the things my friend and I hadn’t discussed was what would happen to the house when he didn’t need it any more, but the Will left it to me. My first reaction was to offload it as fast as possible. To be buried alive in those memories – it was a nightmare scenario.

           Now, though, I wasn’t so sure. Keeping the farmhouse, living there – it bridged what seemed like impossibly distant shores. The living and the dead, the past and the future, the world defined as friend-and-me and now just – me.

           And the cat, of course. I had to consider the cat. I didn’t know where he’d lived before he came to the farm but he had a planted, dug-in look, now, like he had always been here. Or maybe he hadn’t been anywhere before, maybe he just popped into existence when the other cats were gone and there was a vacancy sign only cats could see.

           I still hadn’t named him. And while I liked his little brushing thanks after I fed him, I didn’t cuddle him or chat with him or do anything that might be construed as a permanent relationship. Permanence was a condition I no longer had faith in.

           Today, though, I did go out on the porch without a can of food since the cat had dined earlier. It was late afternoon. Long, bluish light. Smells of dinner barbecue coming from the neighbors on both sides. I sat in one of the ratty chairs, not on the steps. I knew the UPS truck made the rounds at this time of day and I was waiting for a package.

           I didn’t have to wait long. The cat and I turned our heads toward the road at the same time, as the UPS truck pulled up to the end of the driveway. The driver got busy for a minute sorting stuff, and then bounded off the truck and toward the porch. I stood to meet him, took the padded mailer, and signed the digital clipboard for it. As the driver turned to leave, he saw the cat and turned back to me with a laugh.

“Who’s your friend?”

           I didn’t give him an answer since I didn’t have one. He just grinned as he stuck his pen in the top of the clipboard and bustled back to his truck. I looked at the package in my hand. I couldn’t seem to remember what I had ordered. Whatever it was didn’t interest me enough to open it. I dropped it into the chair where I’d been sitting and moved to the porch steps. I sat on the top one.

           The cat trotted straight to me. He hopped up three porch steps to the top one and sat next to me in an Egyptian cat god pose, haunches tucked, small white forefeet together, tail wrapped neatly to one side. We stayed that way for a minute or two, staring into the yard.

Finally the cat looked at me and I looked back. I reached over and rubbed his nocked ear between my thumb and forefinger. He pushed his head against my hand, liking it.

           You can call me Tom, he said.

           I nodded. We sat on the steps, watching the day go out and the night come in. The sun went down, the moon went up. The world went round and round and everything was good.