Dewey's Nine Lives (39 page)

When spring finally arrived, Glenn drove me to Pierce, where he had spent his childhood summers. He showed me his grandmother’s old house, and the auto repair shop where he’d fallen in love with cars. We parked under the town’s one big tree, near the intersection where Glenn had run to watch the train blow its huge cloud of steam as it crossed downtown, and kissed. We drove to Storm’n Norman’s for a dance, and Glenn told Norman he was sorry, but he was too busy to bartend anymore. After dinner one night, he drove me to a big beautiful house in a suburban neighborhood.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“My first ex-wife and I used to live there,” he said. That was the one moment I was taken aback. The moment when I remembered, suddenly, that I didn’t want a serious relationship with a man, and I remembered why: because they were unpredictable and complicated.

But it only lasted for a second. Because I knew the man beside me. Maybe not every fact, maybe not every decision in his life, but I knew his heart, and I felt more comfortable with him than with any man I’d ever met. I was reading the last drafts of
Dewey
that spring, and I could feel the confidence I always felt when that cat was near me. I read for the twentieth time the last page of the book, where I talked about the lessons Dewey taught me.

I invited Glenn to Spencer for Memorial Day. For every date, he went to the florist and chose the healthiest and brightest rose in the store, just as he had on our first “date” at Storm’n Norman’s. I kept each one, drying them in my craft room for my curio boxes. This time, though, he arrived with two red roses. We were planning to visit my mother’s grave near the town of Hartley, Iowa, so I assumed the second rose was for her. Glenn said he wanted to make another stop first. He drove to the library and walked to the large window where Dewey’s grave was marked by a simple granite plaque. It was a cold December morning when, just as the sun rose, the assistant librarian and I had broken the frozen ground and laid Dewey’s ashes to rest.

“You are always with us,” I had said.

Glenn put the second red rose on Dewey’s grave. “I know how much he means to you,” he said, holding me tight.

I’m going to marry this man
, I thought, and it didn’t surprise me at all.

 

 

Glenn and I are now engaged, and I have never been happier. We are so sure of our love that we even bought a house together, a nice bungalow on the west side of Spencer. We figured we might as well go ahead and move in together, we’d be married soon, but it’s been two years, and we still aren’t married. I know that might strike a few people as immoral, even if we are a committed couple in our sixties, but I have my reasons. My first wedding, back in 1969, was just our immediate families and a few friends. My dress was a hand-me-down my mom had bought cheap when a local girl’s wedding fell through at the last minute. The reception was held at my husband’s favorite restaurant, and more than half the guests were related to him. It was my wedding, but I can honestly say that nothing about it was mine. I always felt cheated.

I don’t care if this is my second marriage; I’m not doing that again. This one is going to be special. I am going to personally plan every detail, from the flowers for the ceremony at the Catholic church in Milford to the color of the type on the invitations to the beautiful white dress I had always wanted to wear. Glenn will have to give up his black jeans for a tuxedo, and I’ll convince the Embers to play the reception, which we’d hold at Storm’n Norman’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Auditorium, of course, if it weren’t so far for everyone to drive.

Unfortunately, I’ve been too busy to plan the perfect day I’ve waited a lifetime to enjoy. The month we moved into our new house,
Dewey
, the book I wrote as a tribute to my best friend and favorite library cat, a book that healed my body and heart, was published. It went straight to the top of national bestseller lists and stayed there for more than six months. Sometimes, it feels as if I’ve spent every day since on the road, but don’t get me wrong; I’m not complaining. For the last two years, I’ve been doing the best thing in the world: talking about Dewey. My health is still precarious, and it always will be. I have to be careful not to overtax myself, and sometimes I have to cut appearances short, but I want to experience everything I possibly can. I want to see the world. I want to meet wonderful people who love Dewey as much as I do, even if they never met him. I want to talk about him and know that he is there—with me and for me. We are intertwined, Dewey and I, more than we’ve ever been.

Glenn doesn’t mind sharing me. I told him straight away, on our first date: “I’m a package deal. My friends and family come with me.” By the second date, he knew Dewey was part of the package, too—even though I didn’t tell him about the book until we were engaged. He not only understands that Dewey will always be a part of my life, he embraces it. If I ever doubt my man, all I have to do is see him with animals. When I walk outside, the birds in our yard scatter. When Glenn walks outside, they stay where they are. In Florida, I once saw a squirrel eating cereal out of the palm of his hand.

That doesn’t mean everything about our new life is easy, especially for Glenn. He didn’t mind giving up his rental house, putting his 1953 Studebaker Commander into storage, and tooling around in his (much safer) Buick. But it was hard to leave the people he loved. He’d visited his mother almost every day since his father died almost twenty years before; now, with a two hour drive between them, he gets to see her only every few weeks. There was crying on both sides when he broke the news to Bobby, Ross, and the other disabled adults that he was leaving New Perspectives.

Moving away from his daughter Jenny, who was starting college in Sioux City, was especially difficult. Glenn has lost five children in his life; how can he not fear losing her, too? He knew Jenny and Rusty loved each other, and he knew he always wanted to maintain a presence in her life, so he made the ultimate sacrifice: He gave her Rusty. Now Glenn goes to her house every time he is in Sioux City, just to check on Rusty, he says. It is a transparent ploy, of course. Rusty is fine. Jenny already had two pets, but the big orange cat has them both trained. The dog is a wimp. Mama Kitty, an old blind cat, follows Rusty around the house as he meows. Old Rusty loves having animals he can take care of and boss around—and since Jenny is older now, he doesn’t even have to do his Butterball Exercises.

I knew Glenn missed Rusty. I could see it in his eyes whenever we left Jenny’s house. And I could hear it in his voice when he said, every few days, “You know, as soon as this
Dewey
stuff dies down, we should volunteer at the animal shelter.” I knew, in my heart, he wanted a cat of his own.

But that was where the problem started. You see, I didn’t want another cat. I always told myself,
Someday. Someday I’ll be ready
. But every time I thought about it, that day seemed a long way off. I had spent nineteen years with Dewey, and I still missed him terribly. I had owned cats all my life, and they had all died, of course, but Dewey was different. He was one of a kind. I had loved him so much, and thought of him so highly, that I had spent a year writing a book about him. Now I was spending much of my time at book events, talking about his life and legacy. I was attached to him, forever. It wouldn’t be fair to adopt another cat. The new cat would always be compared to Dewey, and how could it ever compete?

Then one December morning, almost exactly two years after Dewey’s death, a Japanese film crew arrived in Spencer. Dewey had been famous in Japan ever since, five years before, a crew had come from Tokyo to film him for a documentary. This second crew wanted follow-up footage of me at the library, but before I could take off my coat and settle in for the interview, the library staff grabbed me and pushed me back to my former office. I could tell they were excited, but I had no idea why. Then I saw a tiny kitten crouched in the back corner of the room.

Oh, she was cute. She had long copper fur, with a magnificent ruff at the neck. She weighed two pounds, maximum, and half of that was hair. But I didn’t want another cat. And I definitely didn’t want another cat that looked like Dewey. If I adopted another cat, I had always told myself, I needed a clean break from the memories. A black cat. A white and gray calico, maybe. But when I saw that little orange kitten huddled by the heater in the back corner of the office, my heart leapt. It was like seeing Dewey on his first morning: so tiny, so helpless, so wonderfully, beautifully ginger brown. She had green eyes instead of Dewey’s gorgeous gold, and her tail was stubby instead of fluffy, but otherwise . . .

I picked the kitten up and cradled her in my arms. She looked at me and began to purr. Just as with Dewey on his first morning, I melted.

Then I heard her story, a story so much like Dewey’s story, in its way, that it made me hurt. After all, we were in the middle of another bitterly cold Spencer winter, and several feet of snow and ice had been on the ground for weeks. Sue Seltzer, a computer technician who worked occasionally at the library, had been edging her car down a side street in downtown Spencer, when she saw a truck swerve outside Nelson Hearing Aid Service. She thought there was a clump of ice in the road, so she slowed down. Then she saw the clump move. It was a bedraggled little kitten, shivering and staggering, with ice and twigs matted in its fur. She picked it up, looked in its face, and thought: Dewey. Sue had always been a big fan of the Dew.

Sue took the kitten to her office and bathed her. Like Dewey, the kitten purred in the warm water. Sue already had five cats, and her husband refused to entertain the thought of making it six, so she decided to take the kitten to the library. If any cat was destined to take Dewey’s place, she figured, it was this tiny girl. But since the publication of
Dewey
, the Spencer Public Library had been deluged with cats. Two poor kittens, I regret to say, had even been shoved into the book drop. The only sensible thing was to implement and publicize a blanket No Cats policy. And that’s why, when I finished my interview with the Japanese crew, the kitten was still waiting in the corner of the office. But now, she was sitting on Glenn’s lap.

They both looked up at me. Glenn smiled and sort of shrugged. My heart melted for the second time. And the tiny kitten, so reminiscent of Dewey it was both scary and exciting, came home with me.

That night, I mentioned the kitten on Dewey’s Web site. A boy named Cody wrote back to suggest the name Page. I was turning a new page in my life, he wrote; what could be more appropriate?

The next day, Page did something very Dewey-like: She appeared in the
Spencer Daily Reporter
, our little five-days-a-week newspaper. The story spread to the
Sioux City Journal
. Soon, an AP photographer was on his way to Spencer from Des Moines. Just like that, Page and I were appearing in hundreds of newspapers around the country. Librarian in Iowa adopts a cat! Sounds like hard-hitting national news, right?

“What’s next?” Glenn joked. “Are they going to start reporting what you had for breakfast?”

That news report may have been the last Dewey-like thing my new cat ever did. Much to my relief, Page had a personality of her own. She wasn’t like her older brother at all.

Well . . . in one regard maybe, because when we took her to the vet—the same vet who treated Dewey and discovered his tumor—we received a startling diagnosis. Page was a boy.

So Page Turner, as we renamed him, had boyness in common with Dewey, too. But beyond that? No. Beyond that, there was nothing Dewey about our new cat.

He was clumsy, for one thing. The first night he was at my house, he broke a ceramic angel when he jumped on my side table. The first night! Dewey was graceful. He had gone nineteen years without breaking anything. Page Turner wasn’t even graceful when he lay down. Instead of easing himself down like a normal kitten, he flopped over on the ground like a hairy dust mop. And it’s so not true that cats always land on their feet. Page Turner would be sitting on the back of the sofa and suddenly just fall off onto his back. He even fell off the bed when he was sleeping. Bam, right onto his back, and he never even woke up.

Dewey loved heat. He would get so hot lounging in front of the library heater that you couldn’t touch his fur. Page Turner hated heat. Even in winter, I found him curled up in the coldest place in the house: the basement stairs. He hated sunlight. He was skittish around strangers. And he never curled up in my lap, which was Dewey’s favorite spot. Page Turner preferred to lie on top of my feet.

He didn’t care about my rules. No matter how many times I put him down, he always jumped on the dinner table. He ran back and forth through the drapes, driving himself into a frenzy. Without fail, he chose my best furniture to sharpen his claws on. He chased his tail like a dog. He stared at the TV like a slack-jawed teenager. When I put ice in his water dish to keep it fresh, he fished it out and chased it around the house. Dewey hated water so much, he wouldn’t even drink it. Page never cared about getting soaked. He never cared about being laughed at. Dewey was dignified. He couldn’t stand being the butt of the joke. Page Turner never seemed to mind that I was doubled over laughing at his antics.

Thank goodness
, I said to myself,
they didn’t try to put this cat in the library.
It’s a common misconception that just any old cat can live in a library. Page Turner, although appropriately named, was far too high-strung for the job. He was too distrustful and shy. He didn’t have a quiet dignity about him. He wasn’t Dewey, of course, but he wasn’t Rusty, either. He wasn’t cool. He didn’t have empathy. He wouldn’t rub against you when you were down. His advice, if he could have given any, would have been abysmal I’m sure. But we can’t all be the prime rib on the plate of life, right? Some of us, like Page Turner, have to be the broccoli.