Part 6
The old conclusion rose in June with frightening speed: not ready, bad sign, stop this before someone gets hurt. It was the same certainty that had once fit neatly on a cage card.
Evelyn set her canvas tote on the floor. “May I try something?”
June stepped back.
Evelyn removed the cardigan she had worn during the last two visits and laid it inside the open carrier. Then she sat against the opposite wall. She tapped the carrier door three times with one fingernail and placed both hands in her lap.
They waited twenty-three minutes. Old Tom came out from beneath the bench, circled the carrier, and sniffed the sleeve of the cardigan. He put in one paw, backed out, and looked at Evelyn. Nobody moved.
The second time, he walked all the way inside.
June’s hand went instinctively toward the door, then stopped. Evelyn shifted into his line of sight, showed him her palm, and closed the carrier only after he turned to watch her do it. He crouched on the cardigan, tense but not panicked.
At the lobby doors, June gave Evelyn the smaller packet, a bag of his food, and the clinic’s number. There were several things she still wanted to say. She settled for, “Call if either of you needs help.”
Evelyn nodded. “We will.”
The empty cage at the far end of the hall looked larger than it had when occupied. June removed the yellow tapping sign but did not throw it away. She cleaned cage fourteen herself, not because it needed special treatment, but because for once she did not want to hurry through the place where she had been wrong.
Evelyn called that evening. Old Tom had left the carrier and gone beneath the guest-room bed. He had not eaten, but he had used the litter box while she was downstairs.
“That’s within what we expected,” June said. “Keep the food and water near the edge of his hiding place. Don’t pull him out.”
The next morning, Evelyn reported that the food remained untouched. She had slept on the hallway floor because she was afraid to enter without warning, though the cat had shown no sign of coming out.
“Sleep in your bed tonight,” June told her. “He needs the house to become ordinary.”
At the forty-eight-hour call, Evelyn’s voice had changed. Old Tom had licked a little gravy from his food but eaten almost nothing else. Whenever she entered, he pressed farther beneath the bed and stared at the floorboards. He had slapped at the edge of the dish when she tried to move it closer.
“I think he’s worse here,” she said. “I need you to see him.”
June and Tessa drove over after the afternoon feeding round. June placed a carrier in the back of her car before leaving the shelter. She told herself it was responsible preparation, not a decision.
Evelyn’s small brick house stood on a street of deep lawns and old maples. She had followed every instruction June had provided. Rubber-backed runners crossed the hardwood floors. A lamp remained on in the hallway so the doorway would not disappear into darkness. The guest-room bed had been pulled away from the wall, and food, water, and litter were arranged where the cat could reach them without crossing open space.
Old Tom was beneath the bed, wedged near the headboard. Only one green eye and the tight scar beside it were visible.
June sat on the floor outside the doorway and tapped three times. His eye shifted toward her but his body did not move.
“He hasn’t slept that I can tell,” Evelyn whispered. “Every time I pass, he’s watching.”
Tessa examined the room from the hall. “Can he see the door from where he is?”
“Only through the gap beneath the bed,” Evelyn said.
June watched Old Tom’s rigid flank. At the shelter, even during his worst weeks, he had eaten after people left. Forty-eight hours of almost no food could not continue safely in an older cat.
“We may need to take him back tonight,” she said.
Evelyn turned. “You’ve been here six minutes.”
“He’s not eating.”
“I know. I’m the one who has been counting every bite.” Her voice remained low for the cat, although he could not hear it. “But you looked under the bed and decided. Isn’t that what all of you did before?”
The accusation landed cleanly because Evelyn had not raised her voice or made it larger than the moment. June looked at the carrier she had left near the front door.
“What do you want us to do?” she asked.
“Look longer.”
They sat in the hallway. Evelyn made coffee nobody drank. Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. Old Tom’s eye closed once and opened again.
From somewhere beneath them came a low mechanical thrum. June barely noticed it until the surface of the water dish trembled. Old Tom flattened himself against the floorboards.
The vibration stopped. His shoulders eased.
“What’s under this room?” June asked.
“The laundry room and furnace.” Evelyn looked at the clock. “The washing machine is running. I put his room up here because it’s farthest from the street and the television.”
Tessa placed her fingertips against the floor. A moment later, the washer entered its spin cycle. The boards hummed beneath their hands. The water in Old Tom’s dish shivered against the rim, and he pushed backward until the headboard stopped him.
The room was quiet to Evelyn. To the cat, the floor had been warning of something he could neither see nor escape.
June went downstairs with her. The washing machine sat directly beneath the bed, beside an older furnace whose blower sent a second vibration through the ceiling. They switched both off. The house became physically still.
The best alternative was Evelyn’s library at the rear of the house. It stood over a concrete slab, had two broad doorways, and looked onto the screened garden enclosure. The bookcases created sheltered edges without hiding the entrances. They moved the food, water, litter, towel, and Evelyn’s cardigan there, leaving a clear route from the guest room.
“How do we move him?” Evelyn asked.
June looked toward the front hall. “We don’t. Not yet.”
They removed the hanging bed skirt so Old Tom could see the doorway. Tessa placed his towel just beyond it, then another familiar-smelling cloth halfway down the hall. June brought the empty carrier from the front door and set it open against the wall—not as a threat, but as one available shelter among several.
For almost an hour, nothing happened.
Evelyn sat on the library floor with her hands in her lap. Tessa waited in the kitchen. June remained in the hallway where Old Tom could see her, fighting the urge to check beneath the bed again.
At last, one gray paw appeared. Old Tom lowered his head beneath the frame and studied the hallway. He touched the floor with his paw, feeling for the vibration that had stopped.
Then he came out.
He paused beside the open carrier. June held her breath, aware that if he entered it, she would have to decide whether to close the door.
Old Tom sniffed the edge and walked past.
He followed the wall to the library, stopped several feet from Evelyn, and looked through the glass toward the green shape of the fig tree outside. Evelyn did not reach for him. After a while, he sat beside her shoe…
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