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By Root 409 0

three A.M. and drive herself to the emergency room two months after her husband was dead. She had been oddly convinced that her heart was exploding and had been embarrassed to learn that she was having her first-ever panic attack. Or had her clients told her, and she listened only with part of her brain, thinking that this is temporary, this is part of grieving, and looked for the first sign of return without fully grasping the horrible landscape of the present? There was something essential and awful that she had missed, and here was one more thing to blame herself for: she failed to save her husband, and she had failed to see the true terror of the land where mourners traveled.

She heard a clear penetrating peal, like a light that pierces the fog. She looked at the sliding glass door and a striped feline face stared in at her from the base of the door. A tabby, eyes wide and insistent, white chest and calico body, had come calling. Rocky slid the door open and the cat dashed past her and leapt on the couch, purring with urgency. The creature paced the couch with familiarity then bounced to the floor and headed for the exact place on the kitchen floor where two saucers had been sitting hours before.

“Oh no, they left you behind,” said Rocky, crouching beside the cat before she knew what she doing. The cat pushed her spine hard into Rocky’s palm, offering her a generous view of her back end. A female, although she had already guessed that by her head size. Bob had always said, “Male cats generally have a bigger skull. But there is no correlation between head size and intelligence. The brain of a tom is located in his cajones.”

The cat moved in with a shocking level of confidence that Rocky wished she could have patented and injected into several of her old clients, people who were tentative, fearful, and anxious about the invisible audience that judged them from morning through night. The cat lived in a world without audience and expected attention without hesitation or explanation. Rocky immediately saw the irony of the situation; both of them had been left behind and both were pitiful. The cat did not appear to know its pitifulness, did not know the fate that awaited it if she was returned to her negligent owners or to the abyss of an animal shelter.

She did not want the world to treat her like this abandoned cat, in need of food and sympathy. She pictured the owners of the cat driving away in their Volvo, having decided at some point that the rent they had paid entitled them to not touch their own garbage. Being filthy and irresponsible with a rental was one thing, but she could not fathom the decision to leave the cat and hated them for it. Thus she began her career as animal control warden by not looking for the owners of the cat. She judged them harshly and, she believed, correctly. The cat slept on the couch the first night, but Rocky imagined that she heard her purring all night and breathing and padding around the small house. For the first time in months, she awoke not at three but at four A.M. and she thought that the hour was reason enough to keep the cat.

Chapter 4

The first two weeks of the job offered a sampling of island life in the post-tourist season. The island slumped, partly in relief, partly in the crash after an exhausting summer when the island exploded with people ten times the winter population. The dilemma of the love/hate relationship with tourists was temporarily relieved but exacerbated financially for those who had not budgeted well. The sprinkling of conversation that Rocky heard at a local breakfast spot sounded like a family where the obnoxious, cigar smoking, yet wildly wealthy uncle had just left after the annual visit during which your mother made you be polite all summer.

Several places closed immediately: the yogurt hut, the kite shop, the T-shirt businesses, and the fudge shop. The kayak company put up most of the sleek kayaks for the season, leaving just two on the porch for the owner to use on days when the ocean was quiet.

Rocky found a small gang of dogs that were