The Cost of Love

Gianna De Persiis Vona

In the morning, the cat doesn't come. Usually he's there at the kitchen window, on the ledge that once attracted birds. I've tried to discourage him from entering this way, but Henry or one of the girls will inevitably see him sitting there and crack the window, so there really isn't much point in trying to train him to do differently. Every morning, he slides in through the opening, jumps down onto the counter, and then onto the floor where he knows his food bowl will be waiting for him. But this morning he's not there and even after I throw open the kitchen window and whistle and call, he still doesn't show up. It's a beautiful day, with the cherry tree covered in blooms, and just enough of a breeze that, when I open the kitchen window, a dusting of petals blows in and settles on last night's dishes.

Henry comes in and kisses me on the cheek the way he does every morning, the same way the cat pushes his head up hard against my hand for a scratch behind the ears, like he doesn't really mean anything by it. Then the girls enter, clambering for food like they always are, and no one even notices about the cat. Usually, I fill his bowl before I let him in, so that he will leave me alone, and not start in one me along with everyone else, as if it is my born obligation to make sure that no one in the family need ever even experience one second past their first desire for sustenance. But this morning I notice that he isn't there on the ledge before I fill his bowl, so it is possible that the rest of the family just thinks he has already had his breakfast and that he is off cleaning himself somewhere. Because they do love the cat.

Henry is tense this morning. He eats his toast standing up and doesn't comment on the fact that I have scraped the burned parts off with the back of a butter knife, then he's pushing the girls out the door so fast that neither of them even has a chance to get to the bottom of their cereal bowl. "What's the hurry?" I say.

And Harry says, "I need to get to work on time if I'm going to make it to the parent night by six." He says this in an accusatory way, with his eyebrows all bunched together, as if it's my fault that it's parent night at the girls' school and that, if only I knew how to plan things a little better, this situation would never have come up.

I need money for groceries, but Henry gave me one-hundred dollars yesterday. I know that if I ask for more he'll stand there, with the door already pushed open, his car keys in his hand, and ask me with that look he gets, part irritation and part exhaustion, what happened to the one-hundred dollars he already gave me. Then I'll have to break it all down while both the girls, their backpacks slung across their little backs, watch to see what I'll come up with. "Well," I'll say, "Twenty dollars went into my tank, and then Ruby and Alice had their ice skating and that was fifteen dollars, and then I spent forty-five on groceries for dinner and cat food…."

Then my memory will fail, and I will begin to have that panicky sensation that I get when I can't remember where the last twenty-five dollars went. This feeling won't go away until I have rummaged though all of my receipts and discovered that I bought a shower curtain, and a new bath mat. Then I will have to explain why this was not a wasteful purchase, because the curtain we have is so dark with mold that no amount of soaking will get the stains out. As for the bathmat, that was a splurge, but it was on sale and so I was able to justify it at the time. I could tell him that the mat matched the curtain, but this would do nothing to further my cause, and Henry's mind will have drifted at this point anyway. I can't stomach it this morning, our money routine, can't stand the idea of standing there and explaining myself like a child to an angry father. Not with the weight of the cat being gone. And so I don't ask for any money, and reason that I will just have to make some sort of goulash out of whatever I can rummage up in the fridge.

After they're gone, I call out the kitchen window for the cat. He still doesn't appear, so I put on my garden clogs and tramp around the yard and behind the house, looking for him. Our other cat, Tipsy, was hit by a car a few months back and the girls are still upset. As I search, I begin to wonder, if he is gone, how will I explain it to them so that they won't cry as much as they did over Tipsy? All of those little-girl-tears will wash over me like a mudslide of guilt, because I could have taken the cat to the vet yesterday. No, I should have taken him to the vet yesterday. As soon as I spotted the wound on the back of his neck I should have put him in the cage, and taken him in. But how much would that have cost? Two hundred? Three hundred dollars? Do I love the cat that much? Yesterday, I didn't. In fact, I loved him so little that I locked him out of the house earlier than usual just to make sure no one else would notice the wound, the swelling and scab hidden under his fur like a weeks worth of groceries gone rotten. If you come back, I make a silent promise, I'll take you in. I'll just take you in, and everything will be cleaned up before the girls need to be picked up from kindergarten.

My silent promises don't seem to be working, and so after awhile I give up and go back inside. There is nothing in the fridge to make goulash out of, I can see that now, and for a moment I eye the un-opened bag of cat food that is leaning up against the side of the refrigerator. I could return it and use the money for dinner. For some vegetables and maybe some ground turkey. I open up my wallet to see if I saved the receipt, but before I have a chance to find it I hear the sound of the cat; the thump of his paws, first on the sink, and then on the tiles of the kitchen floor. He meows at his empty bowl, his complaining meow, and then pushes up against my legs.

"There you are." I say, and I can't tell for sure whether I'm happy to see him or not. My relief is thin and shapeless as if it doesn't belong to me at all but is something that I'm just trying on for the moment, to see how well it will fit.