Recognize

Issue 9

Lucia can’t believe I recognize her.
“It’s been so long.” She is not wearing her nametag, and I wonder if this is an experiment.
Lucia and Jerry live twenty minutes over the bridge, but they only visit the shelter every presidential administration or two. Lucia tells me this is because she cannot trust herself not to abscond with all the cats. Jerry tells me this is because they are busy.
Lucia is a bench scientist with Merck, and Jerry supervises continuing education for financial planners. Based on the “God bless yous” in his emails and the 1 Corinthians signature line in hers, I smell incense between workdays. Perhaps she makes pies for the bazaar. Perhaps he flips omelets at the Sunday School Teacher Appreciation Breakfast. Perhaps they have been scorched by sacred words on jalapeno tongues. Perhaps, like most of my donors, they come to church when they come to the cats.
Lucia has not come through these doors since the world spoke freely. Viruses were for computers, and politicians hated each other in good humor, and you could still hear the ice cream man after dark.
Jerry used to frighten me every time he called, all disembodied urgency. His big red voice needed to change the credit card we used for his monthly donations, or to get our tax ID number, or to ask if we accepted conscientiously laundered towels. He had litanies of letters after his name, and he did not use exclamation points, and I suspected that one false move on my part would end his sponsorship of Dumpling the diabetic cat.
Then Jerry and Lucia visited, confirming that my caricature factory was as broken as ever.
Jerry crammed so many rocks into his voicemails, there were none left to hold him down in person. “It gives me peace that you people are here.” He erupted in little benedictions. A three-hundred-pound child in a paisley tie, he ballooned between cats as though touring the world. Helium escaped mid-sentence. “This little fellow – oh he is a friendly lad!” “Who is the calico – sweet baby, sweet baby girl!”
I wished the financial planners could listen in. I remembered how fortunate I am to hear non-fiction secrets every day.
Lucia’s eyes requested that she not be added to the mailing list of memory. Lean as a stray, she wore no patterns. She was here to see Dumpling and to thank us for our work. Most donors bread me in their details, scrolling blurry cat photos until I am fried, but Lucia saw her stories as too soggy to share.
“Well, our Ernie is diabetic like Dumpling. He gets his insulin at 6am and 6pm and – I’m sure you hear this stuff all the time…”
“It takes a special family to stand by a diabetic cat.” I told her what I know. “To build your schedule around a creature who needs you…that’s love.”
“It’s just the right thing to do.” Lucia met my eyes, then fell to her knees to pet someone small. “You people are the real inspiration.”
Lucia and Jerry drove back across the bridge, back to the cat who prevents them from making dinner plans or taking weekends down the shore. I wonder if their church friends say they should just put Ernie down. I wonder if I might find the nerve to comment on that signature line, to tell them that this shelter is not my first sanctuary. I wonder if Lucia would smile to know that my cat people and my Jesus people gnash their teeth at each other, and I feel like a wild cat lost in suburbia. I wonder if their donations for Dumpling are a rebel tithe.
Lucia mails coupons for cat food and cat-adjacent items, Swiffer refills and Bounty twelve-packs and rolls of stamps “for all those beautiful acknowledgement letters you send. I’m sure you have a lot of donors like us, but you make us feel special.”
Lucia emails to obtain the exact number of staff members, then sends us cat socks at New Year’s. “Just a little something to extend the holiday season. You all work so hard.”
Jerry leaves me a scary message to announce that they are coming to our donor appreciation picnic. The Muppet is a Viking on voicemail.
His wife arrives without expectations, and she approaches me without a nametag. She will wait. I am talking to a woman who is both wave and particle, kinetic energy rattling ten thousand black sequins. Jeanie is a Zumba teacher with hair like a dandelion. She has just told me twice that she is celebrating her 88th birthday this week. She has just performed a litany of saints, seventeen feral cats with names like Adonis and Fabio. I have just told her, almost to her satisfaction, that this world needs more people like her.
Lucia waits until Jeanie leaves to shimmer at others. Lucia has eyes like a Byzantine icon. Jeanie has inoculated me against decorum, and I grab Lucia’s hands. She startles.
“I’m Lucia—”
“I know! Look at you, looking all beautiful tonight!”
Lucia furrows. She is not wearing sequins or earrings. The pandemic did not buy her any crayons. Her bob is as solid as a crash helmet. She did not dress to be observed.
But I have absorbed too much appreciation not to blunder my benedictions. “Lucia, blue is your color, and those shoes are very Audrey Hepburn.” Why am I saying this? “I was excited from the moment I heard you and Jerry would be joining us tonight. I can’t wait to give you a tour of the new expansion. Dumpling has been counting the days.”
Lucia waits before speaking, and I wish I could tell her I wish I was more like her. “I didn’t think you would remember me.”
I wish I could tell her what I know, but cats bolt when you speak too freely. So I just say, “of course I remember you!”
Her eyes swirl with cosmologies and hypotheses. Perhaps I have reviewed my notes on all our “major donors.” Perhaps I have identified her by process of elimination, the dandelion among the dahlias. Perhaps I am slightly tipsy, and God has gifted me good guesses.
Perhaps she is memorable.
“Do you remember Ernie?”
“His face is embroidered into my heart.” I speak like I write, the cats’ honest fool. Lucia once emailed me exactly one picture of Ernie, a tabby Volkswagen with a kink in his tail. I remember. “He’s on a new prescription diet, right?”
“I can’t believe you remember.” Lucia has no explanation for this. “Ernie sent me with this.”
Lucia’s fingers don’t touch mine, but there is something smooth in my palm. It’s a river rock, scrupulously painted with white flowers and an orange cat. It reads: “For Daisy, Our Friend.”
“It’s so silly—”
“—I love it more than if you gave me a yacht.” I tell the truth. “Lucia, it’s enchanting. It’s perfect. It will find a place of honor on my—”
“—I’m sure people give you all sorts of stupid trinkets—”
“—no, you don’t understand. This is a treasure.”
I write letters all day telling people how they shine. I blow donors’ cover and call them out on their hairy holiness. I am the scamp who shows sequin-ladies and moneyed Muppets that they are agents of the angels. I hide behind cattails. I take notes on everyone’s tiny tales. I am the mirror. I am the reminder.
I am holding a river rock from a diabetic cat and a bench scientist. For the moment, I recognize the ragged threads at the back of the tapestry.
“Thank you, Lucia.”
“No, thank you, Daisy.”
“Would you like to visit Dumpling?”
“If it’s not too much trouble.”

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ANGELA TOWNSEND is the Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Chautauqua, Paris Lit Up, The Penn Review, The Razor, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Terrain.org, and The Westchester Review, among others.

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