Lending a Paw
Laurie Cass
Chapter 1
When I was a little girl, I dreamed of growing up to be the president. Failing that, an astronaut or a ballerina.
My presidential aspirations were quashed when I found out that the president did not, in fact, get to do whatever he (or she) wanted. The astronaut idea faded when my mother told me that even people in space suits could get motion sickness, and my ballerina phase lasted only until I actually took a class and discovered that I had no aptitude whatsoever. Even at six, I knew what the ballet teacher’s headshaking meant.
With those career paths closed off, I went to my alternative tier of professional choices, determined in large part because I’d had the great good fortune to grow up within walking distance of a public library. By the time I’d turned ten, I knew that I would be one of three things: a librarian in a big city, a librarian in a large town, or a librarian in a small town.
Big cities give me the heebie-jeebies, so that was out. A large town would have been okay, but a few short years after receiving my master’s degree in library and information science and a few short weeks after the end of a long-term relationship, I found a posting for an assistant director position at the district library in Chilson, Michigan.
Chilson! I stared at the listing so long that my eyes dried out. Chilson was a small tourist town in northwest lower Michigan. It was where I’d spent childhood summers with my aunt. It was my favorite place in the whole world. Could I really be this lucky?
When the library board voted to hire me, I was deliriously happy. I was young, footloose, fancy-free, and, since I’d given up any hope of my height reaching five feet and had become resigned to the fact that my curly black hair was never going to straighten, things were working out just the way I’d crossed my fingers that they would.
But three years after my move to Chilson, not long past my thirty-third birthday, life took an abrupt turn.
I woke on that fateful Friday morning to the beeping of my alarm clock and a cat-shaped weight on my chest. Eyes closed, I thumped off the clock and spoke to the weight.
“Eddie, it’s time to get up.” I opened my eyes, then immediately shut them. “Why do you have to sleep so close to my face?” If I opened my eyes again, I’d see late-May sunshine streaming through the gap in the white curtains and illuminating my cat’s furry face, which was maybe an inch from my chin. Soon after Eddie had followed me home last month, I’d learned his preferred mattress was a human one.
As there’d been no feline reply, I tried a second time.
“Eddie, get up.”
A faint rumble spread into my chest.
“No purring.” I gave him a gentle shove that was meant to instigate a move. It did nothing. “I have to go to work. Sorry, pal, but you have to get off.” I rolled onto my left side. Eddie, still purring, slid off my chest and landed on my arm. “No,” I told him. “Really off.”
He opened one eye.
I pulled my arm out from underneath him. “What do you want me to do, stay in bed all day?”
He stopped purring and opened both eyes.
“Not a chance,” I said. “I have to go out and make a living so I can support us in the style to which you’ve recently become accustomed.”
He settled deep into the covers. With my freed arm I scratched his chin, earning more purrs. Then, grunting a little with the effort, I carefully moved him aside and got up to start the first day of the rest of my life.
Halfway to the bathroom I looked back at Eddie. My first cat. My first pet. My parents hadn’t encouraged household animals—my dad was allergic to pet dander—and until I met Eddie I’d never felt the lack.
Eddie yawned wide, laying his ears back against the sides of his head and showing me far too much of his pink tongue.
“Cover your mouth when you do that, will you?” I asked.
“Mrr,” he said sleepily.
“That’s what you always say,” I said. “You’d better learn some etiquette by October. Aunt Frances is a sweetheart, but she doesn’t tolerate bad manners.”
All winter I lived with my aunt in her old and large house, but come May she good-humoredly kicked me out to make room for guests who paid a lot more than I did. That was when I moved down the hill to the small houseboat I’d bought from an elderly couple when they’d moved to Florida. The month of April involved a lot of cleaning and prep before the guys at the marina moved the boat out of the warehouse and into the water, but I didn’t mind the work.
Friends shook their heads at my living arrangements. I heard a lot of “Don’t you want your own house?” and “You should be building up more equity,” and “Your aunt is awesome, but isn’t it a little like living with your parents?”