Dewey's Nine Lives

NINE

Dewey and Rusty

“I was lying upside down on the front seat with my head under the dashboard and I felt something on my chest. I looked up and here’s this little orange and white kitty cat. Estimated age six to eight weeks. And he was on my chest meowing. I looked up and said, ‘Well, hey, Rusty, how are you?’ I petted him, and he laid right down on my chest, and he just stayed there. He never left.”

Part I

For those of us in northwest Iowa, Sioux City is the hub of activity. We go there for Christmas shopping, for theatre and entertainment, for business meetings and dancing and advanced medical care. The big city, we mutter in Spencer, shaking our heads. Railroad town, we say, because you can’t drive three miles in Sioux City without crossing a railroad track. Too crowded. Too much traffic.

But that’s not entirely true. The truth is that Sioux City is just different from the rest of the world out here on the high plains. Towns here are mostly flat, sunny, and open to the sky. Sioux City is dense, industrial, and tall, full of church steeples and factory towers. It’s one of those old towns, like Pittsburgh or Cleveland, that seems to have been carved by brute force out of the ground. Pittsburgh had steel. Cleveland had oil. Sioux City was built for cattle. They came a thousand head at a time down the Missouri River or on overland trails to be penned and fattened and slaughtered in the raw brick factories along the river, then shipped back out on railroad cars.

The Missouri River, the reason for the location of the town, brought other things as well: granite, grain, steel, hides, and the men who raised and built and transported them. Downtown Sioux City featured the best restaurants and hotels in the region. The warehouses of Lower Fourth Street, on the edge of downtown, were the center of vice—mostly the liquid kind—for a hundred miles around. The workingmen’s homes stretched into the hills carved by the river and its tributaries, punctuated by Catholic and Orthodox churches for the mainly Eastern European immigrants building the city one stone at a time. On a bluff sat the octagon, an old steamboat captain’s house, built so he could watch the river. On the highest hill, Rose Hill, were the mansions of the slaughter bosses and factory owners, built mostly of the rough-hewn Sioux Falls granite that was always being shipped down the river and moved out to the rest of the world.

Glenn Albertson grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the edge of Rose Hill, in the days when the factories were humming, the riverboats were running, and every ten blocks of closely built four-room houses and four-story apartment buildings felt like its own world. Glenn’s family moved often, but they always seemed to end up near Pierce Street, where the storefronts were feet from the road and often attached at the back to Victorian-era boardinghouses. In the 1950s, when Glenn was growing up, there were bakeries, barber-shops, and locally owned grocery stores on almost every corner. The kids played stickball, rode bikes, and walked to school, even in the brutally cold Sioux City winter. In the summer, they congregated on the sidewalk, watching the big color television in the window of Williams Television & Appliance Store.

They were self-sufficient, the kids of Pierce Street. Their fathers worked in the factories. Most of their mothers worked to support the family in “women’s jobs” like waitressing, sewing, and housekeeping that were the secret backbone of Midwestern America. As the family drifted through apartments, Glenn’s mother worked for a catering company, cooked for a local restaurant, and waitressed at the coffee shop in the Warrior, the grand old hotel that had been a fixture of downtown Sioux City since 1930. Eventually, she found a permanent position running the kitchen at a retirement home for women. She cooked breakfast, lunch, and dinner, with special requests taken. She started cooking at dawn and rushed home every afternoon, because she knew that as soon as her husband opened the door, he’d boom, “Is there anyone who can cook around here?” Then he’d smile and envelope her in a hug. She always had a meal ready for him, too.

Glenn’s father worked at the Albertson Tool Company. The name wasn’t a coincidence. Glenn Albertson, Sr., a soldier from the stone-quarry region of southern Indiana, married Christel Mai, a farm girl from the small town of Pierce, Nebraska, at the end of World War II. They tried to make a life in rural Nebraska but soon moved to Sioux City, about seventy miles away, in search of job opportunities. Glenn, Sr., saw a notice about the Albertson Tool Company and decided, with a name like that, the company must be his destiny. He worked at Albertson Tool, manufacturing air and electrical tools, for a few decades before leaving to become the best commercial painter around.

Glenn, Sr., was a “man’s man,” stern and strong. He worked hard labor, and he worked it hard. He stood six feet tall with two hundred fifty pounds of muscle molded by his hours lifting hammers and steel. Days, he shaped tools at the Albertson company; nights, he was a bartender and bouncer on Lower Fourth Street, the gin-joint district on the edge of downtown. He was a gregarious man with a lot of buddies, and it wasn’t uncommon for him to disappear with them for days on end. By the time Glenn, Jr., was nine years old, he knew just about every bartender in the Lower Fourth ward.

“Sit down, kid, and have a strawberry pop,” they’d say. “I’ll find your dad for you.” It wouldn’t be long before Glenn’s father would walk in and clap his son on the back, bags under his eyes and a rumpled smile on his face, but otherwise hardly worse for wear.

“Let’s go home,” he’d say. “I’m hungry.”

By eighteen, Glenn, Jr., was six feet four and two hundred sixty-five hard pounds. He was even bigger than his father, but everyone called him Tiny. When the school principal introduced him before the big football game, Glenn came out carrying the smallest guy in the school in the palm of his hand. The kid jumped down, slapped him five, and everybody laughed. Glen was a gentle giant, the big man on campus (if by campus you mean Pierce Street), and a friend to all.

Six months later, he was married, a proud (if accidental) papa, not quite graduated from high school but already pumping gas and repairing cars. The gas station where he worked was near the highest point of Court Street, a few blocks from where he grew up. From the front of the lot, he could see the ten-story buildings downtown. Beyond them, hidden from view, were the Missouri River and Lower Fourth Street, where his father spent his afternoons in the company of other hardworking men. Behind him, less than a mile away, his mother labored over the stoves of Rose Hill. When he left the gas station, he walked the same blocks he had always walked, where the kids still rode their bikes to the corner shops for soda pops and candy even if they didn’t congregate on the corner to watch television through the appliance store window anymore. It was the 1960s. Most of them had their own televisions now.

Glenn was content. He wanted nothing more than to be a good father to his boy. He was home every night to tuck him into bed. He read him books and explained how motors worked and told him that he loved him, that he was there for him, whatever he needed. He nearly froze that first winter at the gas station, with the continuous blanket of snow and the cold wind of the Upper Midwest blasting him day after day. He took a second job as a fry cook, for the extra money, but also to keep warm. After a few years, he gave up the gas station for the temperate environment of the assembly line at Sioux Tools, formerly the Albertson company.

In his spare time, he trained to be a cop. There was no police academy in Sioux City in those days. Studying to be a policeman meant experiencing it, strictly volunteer, with a senior officer. Glenn rode in a squad car for a year. He called on domestic disturbances. He was in car chases. He talked angry, drunk, and angry-drunk people out of foolish decisions. He was good. But police work didn’t pay. So when his second son was born, he took a job at his father-in-law’s insurance office. He was even better at selling insurance, he soon realized, than he had been at police work. He knew how to put people at ease. He was enormous, but he wasn’t intimidating. I am reminded of the words used to describe a commander from the Second World War, who also happened to be from Iowa: “[He] was a leader—quiet, unselfish, modest, yet very strong . . . One believed what he said; one wanted to do what he proposed.” You wanted to buy, in other words, what Glenn Albertson was selling—whether it was an insurance policy or a Sunday school lesson—because you believed in him. And you knew he believed what he said. Glenn Albertson, people could see right away, was a stand-up guy.

Honesty and openness served him well, and by the time Glenn was thirty, he was making seventy thousand dollars a year selling insurance. He had a house in the suburbs on the far side of Rose Hill, with four bedrooms, a huge deck, and a white fence that ran all the way around the yard. There was peewee football with his oldest son, Indian Guides with his middle boy, and his infant daughter to hold in his arms in the still of the night and wonder at the miracle of life. His wife tended to use the smoke alarm for her cooking timer, so Glenn often prepared the evening meals, too. He took his boys with him everywhere: on errands to the gas station or the grocery store, and almost every Saturday to the garage where he rebuilt the hot rod cars he liked to race. He even had a big happy dog named Maggie. The boys would run around with her in the neatly trimmed backyard while Glenn laughed from his big back porch and turned the burgers on the grill.

On Sunday, they went to church. Not a new-style megachurch but an old-fashioned church in a building that was beautiful for its simplicity and modesty. The services were no-frills, and the community was so small, Glenn became the Sunday school teacher for every kid in the congregation, from toddler to twelfth grade. Only three boys were interested in the basketball team, so Glenn recruited a few kids from the neighborhood, who turned out to be a Sioux City melting pot of Greek, African American, and Native American, and told them they could play basketball as long as they attended church every Sunday. Those boys became Glenn’s extended family, too. There was nothing, Glenn Albertson would have said, that hard work and a good attitude and genuine love couldn’t solve.

And then his daughter Kari got a fever.

She was only six months old, and the girls in Sunday school loved to hold her. It was a typical bone-cold winter Sunday, all fifteen kids running ragged, when one of the girls came over to Glenn and said, “Kari’s hot.”

Glenn felt his baby’s head. It was burning. “I’m taking her home,” he said.

He trundled the boys into the car and started up Rose Hill. It was snowing heavily, and the world was hazy and white. Coming around the last corner, Glenn could barely make out the vehicle blocking his driveway. He pulled around to the front, tucked his daughter deep into a blanket, and ran her up to the door.

He couldn’t reach his keys with his daughter in his arms, so he rang the doorbell. His wife was home sick, so she should have been able to let them in, but she didn’t answer.

He rang again. The boys were at his side, shivering in their heavy jackets. He pulled the blanket close around his daughter. No answer.

He rang. And rang. And rang.

Finally, the door opened. It wasn’t his wife. It was one of his best friends.

“Where’s my wife?” he said.

“She’s in the shower,” his friend said.

The marriage was over at that very moment. The trust—the bedrock of Glenn’s existence—was gone. He hung around for a few months, never talked about what had happened, but the white fence and the four-bedroom house and the happy life had all dissolved into the cold of that snowy Sunday morning.

They got divorced. He moved out of the house and into a bachelor apartment, hardly a stick of furniture in the place. Soon after, he arrived early at the insurance office, to discover that his key no longer worked. His former in-laws had changed the locks.

He went back to what he knew. His father-in-law had filed to have Glenn’s insurance license revoked, so Glenn spent his days underneath cars, managing the service department at an auto dealership. He spent his nights on Lower Fourth Street, working as a bouncer and a bartender down the block from the place where his dad held court with a bottle in his hand. The second job was for the attorney’s fees to fight for custody of his children, but in the early 1970s, in Sioux City, Iowa, fathers weren’t considered rightful parents. He lost his kids, except for Sunday visitation. He lost his house. He lost his dog. He had a lot of friends, but he lost most of them in the divorce, too. He hated explaining himself, he said; he’d rather be alone. A stray cat, Chloe, showed up at his apartment and kept him company. She was a bit standoffish, but she’d curl up in his lap sometimes. Not all the time, but every now and then.

About a year later, Glenn’s oldest boy called him on a Saturday afternoon. That was rare. His boys didn’t talk to him much anymore.

“Mom’s drinking,” the boy said in his small child’s voice. “There are motorcycles in the yard.”

Glenn jumped in his car. When he pulled up at his former house, he saw four motorcycles on the lawn and a few more on the sidewalk. A biker stepped out of the front door and said, “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m her ex-husband,” Glenn said, standing in the middle of the yard.

“Then you better go.”

“I’m just here for my kids.”

A couple more bikers stepped onto the porch. Two of them stepped down to the lawn. “I don’t want any rash judgments,” Glenn said, holding out his empty hands. “There are children in that house, and I just want them safe.”

There was a kid’s baseball bat lying in the grass. Glenn didn’t notice it until one of the bikers picked it up and stepped toward him. When he started to swing, Glenn didn’t run. Instead, he stepped in, ripped the bat from the biker’s hand, and brought it down on the man’s knee. His friends leapt off the porch. If there had been one more of them, or if they’d been sober, Glenn might have been in trouble. But as a bouncer, he knew how to handle drunks. Before he had time to think, a second biker was on the ground with a dislocated elbow, and the other two were kicking their rides into gear. Glenn threw down the baseball bat, walked into his old house, retrieved his children, and drove them back to his apartment.

Three hours later, a policeman knocked on his door. It was an officer Glenn knew from his days in training.

Glenn told him the story. The policeman said, “Well, Glenn, that’s fine, but her parents are there now, and you need to take those kids home, because there’s a kidnapping charge filed against you.”

After that, life in Sioux City became unbearable for Glenn Albertson.

One day, when he was still working for his father-in-law’s insurance business, an older man had stopped Glenn on the street. “Just wanted to tell you, young man,” he said, checking out Glenn’s suit, “that you look pretty sharp. You got a minute?”

“Yes, I do,” Glenn said.

They sat down together. The man was filthy and disheveled, wearing a tattered cream-colored suit. His shoes hadn’t been shined in a long, long time.

“I used to be a banker,” the older man said, handing Glenn a business card. It read VICE PRESIDENT, FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF CHICAGO. “My father was a banker, and his father was a banker before him. Everyone I associated with was a banker. That’s all I knew. But when the Depression hit, my bank went under. I lost my job.” Glenn nodded and waited.

“What do you do, young man?”

“I sell insurance.”

“Well, I’m going to tell you something in case that doesn’t work out for you: Learn as much about as many things as you can, because that way you will never have trouble finding a job.”

Glenn thanked the man for the advice and handed him back his business card, along with some loose change. He never saw him again, and he never knew if the man had really been a banker or was just an old drunk with a business card, but his words stuck with him. Glenn never went to college, but he became a student of life. When his boys were young, he learned to cut hair at barber school. He knew police work and security. He could sell insurance, tend bar, and fix just about any make or model of car. He knew carpentry, plumbing, and just enough electrical to get out of trouble. “Learn to do.” That was his motto. “Learn and do” was his creed. But he had been born in a place where it was a short, easy path to the bottom and a long, hard road to the top, and if ever there was a time when he could have taken the lower path, it was after his divorce. He was angry enough, and hurt enough, to throw it away in a bottle of booze. Because it’s easy to learn a new trade, but it’s hard to learn a new way of life. And when the going got hard, the men of Pierce Street hit the bars. Glenn? He may have worked on Lower Fourth, but he spent his nights in a diner near his apartment instead of on a barstool. Three years later, he married a waitress there and moved with her to St. Petersburg, Florida.

“There were too many ghosts,” he said of his decision to leave Sioux City. “Too many people running around thinking they knew something. I just got tired.”

In Florida, Glenn worked construction, until the owner of the gym where he worked out, seeing how popular he was, offered him a job. Within a year, he was managing the place: selling memberships, changing pool filters, repairing the hot tub. He went to classes for six months and became a certified massage therapist. He worked seven days a week, not just for the money but because he was a blue-collar guy from Sioux City, Iowa, and he loved hard work.

When the investors pulled out, and the health club shut down, Glenn moved his family to Texas, where a friend had a contract to repaint the Dallas city schools. He was thirty-five years old, and he didn’t have a single key on his key ring. No house. No apartment. No bank account. He didn’t even own a car. But he had the important things: a wife, a new baby son, and a family dog. It was never about the job for Glenn Anderson. He could be happy doing just about anything. It was about having a family. They were all Glenn needed to feel at home.

But Texas wasn’t home. Florida had never been home either. Not really. Home was Sioux City, Iowa, where his parents had eventually purchased a small white house on a busy corner, and his kids from his first marriage were growing up in his old four-bedroom split-level ranch without him. After a few years, when the painting contract expired, Glenn and his new family moved back to northwest Iowa: back to the cold winters, the hard granite, and the questions from old friends. He went back to his old line of work, repairing cars. His wife drove regularly to visit her parents in Michigan, always taking their son along. The trips were a financial hardship, and he missed his boy terribly, but Glenn didn’t mind since it kept his wife happy. He was a year away, he figured, from the white picket fence, the big backyard, and the family home.

Her cousin was the one who spilled the beans. “She’s seeing her old high school boyfriend, you know,” the cousin told him. “She never got over him.”

Glenn didn’t know. Despite the collapse of his first marriage, Glenn Albertson was still too honest and trusting to consider the possibility that his second wife was cheating on him, too.

At least this time, he was warned. When his wife told him she was moving to Michigan and taking their child, Glenn didn’t ask why. He didn’t fight for his boy because he knew from experience that was a battle he couldn’t win. They just split the sheets and moved on.

He tried one more time. This time he married a friend, a woman he had known for more than ten years. He might have loved her, and she said she loved him, so marrying her seemed like a good thing to do. They weren’t young, so they started trying to have a child right away. After a few years of heartache and stress, she got pregnant. Then she lost the baby. For a month, they held each other and cried. Then the doctor told them she wouldn’t get another chance; they would never have a child of their own. It was devastating news.

They took in foster children, infants and young kids but also older kids who had been shuffled through the system and were desperate to form attachments to someone. Foster parenting was rewarding, but it was also hard. Glenn would dedicate himself to a child, work to create safety and security and a feeling of family, become strongly bonded and invested in his or her life, and then watch the child ushered away, often for reasons he couldn’t comprehend. They fostered eleven children. Eleven stints of joy; eleven heartbreaks. The twelfth, they decided to adopt. She was a full-blood Sioux, born to a young mother unable to care for her, and Glenn was at the hospital the day she entered the world. As soon as he saw her, he knew she was the one. His heart just opened and gobbled her up. His wife knew it, too. This is what she had been waiting for: a daughter of her own. They named her Jenny, and when they held her, it was like the world closed around them and was complete.

Or so Glenn thought. He didn’t understand the real state of his marriage until he came home early one day and overheard his wife talking to her mother in the kitchen.

“I don’t need him now,” he heard his wife say.

“Then get rid of him,” her mother replied. “You have your daughter, and you can get his money. What more do you want?”

“Nothing.”

With that one word, another door slammed shut on Glenn Albertson, in his life and in his heart. He was fifty years old, he had been married to three women for a total of twenty-four years, and what did he have to show for it? All his life, he had wanted nothing more than love, nothing more than a family. I’m not going to do it anymore, he told himself. He was done.

There are a million ways for a man to get knocked down. Not down for the count, but knocked down hard enough that when he gets back up, he isn’t the man he was before. Maybe he’s better. Maybe he’s worse. Maybe he’s worse for a while, then he gets better, and he ends up better than he ever would have been. Or maybe he gets up staggering, wounded beyond repair. After all, if there are a million ways to get knocked down, there are at least a thousand ways to get back up.

You think about things like that in northwest Iowa, a region that’s been knocked down more than a few times over the years. In my lifetime, the biggest blow was to the family farm. My father was a proud descendant of a line of farmers, but in the 1950s the advent of enormous threshers and reapers changed both the nature and finances of farming. Unable to afford the big machines, our production held steady against falling prices, undercutting our family’s foundation. Eventually, my father was forced to sell out to a neighbor, who cut down our trees, knocked down our house, and plowed under our land.

In Sioux City, the same forces—the consolidation and industrialization of farming and ranching—caused changes almost as drastic. When the Missouri River was the primary artery of the Upper Midwest, the town was a major transportation hub, a rough-and-tumble crossroads where cowboys and boat captains met whiskey and women. The stockyards were some of the busiest in the world, and even in a town of 120,000 people, the cows often outnumbered the citizens ten to one. The slaughter-boss mansions on Rose Hill were built of solid granite, but so were the churches. Even Central High School, built of Sioux Falls granite in 1893, was a castle, complete with towers and turrets.

But after World War II, the Missouri River began to lose its pull. Highways replaced railroads and steamboats, decentralizing agricultural production and driving ranchers and farmers closer to their home fields. The town flooded repeatedly, until a major project was finally undertaken to change the flow of the tributaries meeting the Missouri. The slaughter business declined, along with the factories that supported it and, eventually, the population. Sioux City shrank from 120,000 people to 100,000, then down to 90,000. The airport closed a gate, dropping to a few flights a day. In time, the downtown would be revitalized and Lower Fourth Street turned into a high-end shopping and entertainment district, with even the former El Forastero motorcycle clubhouse converted to pricey condominiums. But outside downtown, the ice still cracked the steep roads, no matter how often they were repaved, and the Arctic wind tore through the storefronts on Pierce Street. Most of the Rose Hill mansions were cut up into apartments. Sioux Tools closed down. The bakery on the corner across from Glenn’s parents’ house became a late-night convenience store, its lights blaring out over the shoddy gas pumps until 3:00 A.M. Glenn’s father, a hard-drinking, hard-laughing, hardworking man of old Sioux City, developed an inoperable tumor on his liver.

Years earlier, before Glenn had his own family, his father had moved out. Glenn never knew why; he assumed it had something to do with alcohol. For a while, he thought he’d never see his father again. But when Glenn Albertson, Sr., came back three years later, he was a new man. Still a drinker and a worker, but kinder and more understanding. More appreciative of what he had at home. He romanced his wife into falling in love with him again, remarried her, and they were happy for the rest of his life. He won over his son again—Glenn had always loved his father, no matter what—and now cherished their relationship. Even when he was away in Florida and Texas, Glenn called his father every week. After his third divorce, they started a painting business together, often sharing hotel rooms for weeks at a time. They painted McGuire Air Force Base in Trenton, New Jersey. They painted the high school in Madison, Nebraska, including Glenn’s beautiful freehand mural of a dragon, the school’s mascot. When he saw Donnelly Marketing in South Sioux City, Glenn thought they’d never finish. The building was a block square and three stories high, without windows. Working side by side, just the two of them, they finished the job in only three months, complete with hand-lettering.

But the most important job Glenn ever worked was painting his father’s beloved 1984 Buick LeSabre after a hailstorm. For a week, Glenn banged out every dent while his father leaned against the wall and watched. He painted the car burgundy, slowly and exactly, even removing the gold pinstripe his father hated and replacing it with a metallic maroon. When Glenn was done, his father took the car out and showed it to all his friends. He was so amazed at what his son had done—so proud—that he wanted everyone to see it. Glenn had fought for approval all his life, and he’d finally won it at forty. A few years later, Glenn Albertson, Sr., died.

Shortly thereafter, Glenn moved in with his mother. They were both in transition: Christel Albertson from life as a wife, Glenn from decades of trying to be a husband and father. Glenn ran errands for his mother, made repairs around the house, and occasionally cooked a meal, even though his mother was by far the best cook in the neighborhood. His room was a monk’s cell, as he called it: a bed, a dresser, no radio or television, nothing on the walls. At night, he played guitar, fingering the frets for a few minutes while he developed those old calluses, the ones that help you bend the chords. During the day, he worked on New Car Row, the three blocks of Sixth Street between the railroad tracks where all the car dealerships had their showrooms. As the years passed, he worked at almost every dealership on the strip, taking comfort in the routine of inspecting, diagnosing, taking apart, and putting together. And if a Porsche had to be driven fast every now and then, just to test it for a client, well then, Glenn never complained.

He saw his adopted daughter, Jenny, every Sunday for church, followed by whatever the little girl wanted—ice cream, a walk in the park, a carousel ride. He called his other children, sent them cards on their birthdays, tried to stay in touch, but they rarely returned his calls. He felt the shame of their denial of his love, and he took his share of the blame for failing to be the father he had always meant to be. Eventually, when his guitar didn’t give him the answers he was looking for, he started counseling. He became a regular at a support group for divorced fathers, sitting in the smoke of a dozen cigarettes and hearing stories of other fathers who had been thrown out . . . or who had thrown it away. He spoke slowly, in a deep voice, offering comfort more than advice, and rarely discussing his own circumstances. One night, he mentioned that playing music had been one of the great joys of his life, and the nun who ran the group asked him to bring his guitar. He played in front of an audience, a group of misplaced husbands and forgotten fathers, for the first time in years.

Soon after, while jogging with a neighbor’s dog down a country road, he noticed a flatbed truck edging into a grove of trees.

“What’s going on?” he asked the driver.

“Farmer’s got an old car in there. We’re going to cut down some trees, haul her out, take her to the crusher.”

Glenn recognized the rusted shell: a 1953 Studebaker Commander. Seeing those curved lines, even half hidden in the trees, brought back childhood memories. Not of Sioux City, where Glenn spent the school year, but of his grandmother’s rural hometown of Pierce, Nebraska, where he had spent his summers. Pierce was a sleepy crossroads town of less than a thousand people, the kind of place where the men drove jalopies, the women baked pies, and the neighbor across the street from his grandmother’s house still mowed his lawn with a team of horses. From any room in his grandmother’s house, Glenn could hear the whistle of the steam train when it approached the intersection in the center of town, and he would run to watch it pass in a cloud of smoke. As much as he was Sioux City granite, Glenn Albertson was summers in Pierce: the long ride on his bike to the fishing hole; the rumble of the cars on the cobblestone streets; the town’s one big tree; the town’s one cop; the closeness of a people that knew each other (and were often related, if not by blood, then by their German heritage) and pulled through life together, working a neighbor’s farm one summer when the man fell sick and never asking for a dime.

His grandmother spent her days in the kitchen, talking to Glenn in a steady patter that mixed German and English the way her hands mixed flour and butter. She was never comfortable with English, so Glenn wrote her letters that she read over and over to study the language. The afternoons were spent waiting for his grandfather. Even in his sixties, the man worked long days as a carpenter, and if the first thing he did when he arrived home was grab a Salem cigarette and water the garden, Glenn knew he was worn out. If he left his 1941 Studebaker in the driveway instead of the garage, Glenn knew they were going fishing. Glenn would hold the poles, the ends sticking out the window and his dog, Spook, barking in the backseat as the gray Studebaker stormed down the dusty country roads.

When Glenn wasn’t in his grandmother’s kitchen, he was next door at the auto repair shop. Watching the mechanic there dismantle motors, Glenn fell in love with cars. By ten, he was driving his grandfather’s Studebaker. By twelve, he knew exactly how the car worked. Across the street from the repair shop was a salvage yard, owned by the mechanic’s brother, and Glenn would ride along on trips to tow tractors and trucks out of backfields and break them down for parts. One day, the tow truck passed a car lot and there, shining in the sun, was a 1953 Studebaker Commander. Someday I’m gonna get one of those, Glenn promised himself.

It wasn’t just the idea of owning a sporty car, something that said “I’m a man” to every right-minded American boy. It was the idea of making it, of being successful, of living a life a boy would be proud of. But it was also, all those years later on a country road outside Sioux City, the idea of home. There was something about a 1953 Studebaker Commander that was tied up with memories of apple strudel and fishing holes and Spook the dog in his little wagon being pulled behind a young boy’s bike.

“I want that car,” Glenn told the driver of the flatbed truck.

“I don’t think so, friend,” the driver said. “That car is rusted through. Hasn’t run in years.”

“I still want it,” Glenn said. A few hours later, the Commander was sitting in a garage just down the street from Glenn’s mother’s house. That afternoon, Glenn must have circled it twenty times, just following the lines with his eyes. It was as bad as the flatbed driver had said. Maybe worse. Glenn knew he’d found the project of a lifetime.

The first thing he did was sand off the rust. There’s nothing like an outer layer of neglect, that old dead skin, to make a car seem beyond repair. Chip away the rust, and you know what you have left. Holes can be fixed easier than people imagine. You just have to take the time to figure out where they are and how deep they go. Glenn took the time. He ground every spot of rust, until he was staring at the metal below. Then he repaired the holes. The 1953 Studebaker Commander is a mid-century sportster, reminiscent of the cars Sean Connery drove in the old James Bond movies, and Glenn bonded and sanded the car until the body was smoothly curved and secret-agent sleek.

He removed the engine. Then he dismantled the block so that the bent, broken, and rusted pieces could be inspected and thrown out if need be. He worked slowly, attending his divorced-fathers meetings in the evenings, fingering his guitar at night, saving his money for parts. He bought intake valves from an old Ford; exhaust valves from an Oldsmobile; pistons from a vintage Chevrolet. He’d walk out of the garage, light a cigarette, and stare into the night sky, thinking of his grandmother’s kitchen and his father’s beloved Buick. After a while, he’d snuff his butt and head back to work, grinding down fenders or scrubbing out cylinders. He worked every crevice, checked every flap and valve. It took more than a year, but when the engine block went back into the Studebaker, it was completely rebuilt and spotless.

His next task was to hook it all up. The drive shaft, crank shaft, wheel axles, steering column, everything had to work together. Glenn scrubbed out and rebuilt the connections bolt by bolt and joint by joint. Two years into the project, the key turned in the ignition, the engine revved, and the wheels rolled. He took the car to the corner store. He drove it to a divorced-fathers meeting, his guitar shoved in the backseat, and showed it off to his daughter Jenny, although he wouldn’t take her for a drive. Not yet—the car was still too dangerous. There were brake lights but only a partial electrical system, no paint on the sanded body. It may not have been pretty—not yet—but the Studebaker could breathe again.

A few weeks later, Glenn was under the dashboard, humming to himself and working on the wiring, when he felt something drop onto his chest. He looked up—nearly banging his head on the underside of the dash—straight into the eyes of an orange and white cat. The kitten was small, probably six or seven weeks old, and he was staring at Glenn with his head cocked to the side. Glenn had no idea where the kitten came from, but there was something about the color of his fur that reminded him of the Studebaker when they pulled it out of the weeds.

“Well, hey, Rusty, how are you?” he said, petting the kitten softly on the head.

The cat nuzzled Glenn’s palm. Then it went back to staring. Finally, it lay down on Glenn’s chest and began to purr. After a minute, Glenn shrugged and went back to work, the banging of tools and Rusty’s rolling purr the only sounds in the empty garage.

The next night, the kitten was waiting when Glenn arrived. When he held out his hand, the cat walked over and rubbed against it. “Good to see you again, Rusty,” Glenn said. Rusty looked at him with his head cocked, then meowed. “All right, all right,” Glenn said. “I hear you.” When Glenn slid under the dash, Rusty once again jumped on his chest and curled up for a nap. The next night, he was there again. After a week, Glenn realized the kitten was sleeping in the Commander, waiting for him to arrive. He started offering him sandwich meat or bites of his snacks. Rusty sniffed everything avidly; he ate most things aggressively.

“Want to come to my house, Rusty?” Glenn asked one night. He had taken to talking to Rusty like an old friend while he was tinkering. Rusty had gone from staring with that curious head tilt to talking back. The cat always seemed to have something to say.

“Not interested?” Glenn asked when Rusty didn’t follow him out the door at the end of the night. “That’s fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Glenn had a way with animals. As a child, he tried to bring home every stray that crossed his path. Jumper, an energetic Labrador, lasted only a few days before Glenn’s father took her to a friend’s farm. Glenn found a terrier bleeding on the side of the road and carried it to his basement. He gave it water and bandages, and when it survived the night, he named the dog Rocky. A year later, his old owners spotted Rocky playing with Glenn and reclaimed their dog. Soon after, Spook followed Glenn home. When Glenn’s parents moved twice without telling him—once to an apartment in the same building, once to a house down the block—it was Spook’s barking that told Glenn where to go. In Texas, he even befriended the lion owned by his friend (the lion later went to a zoo, but it was the 1970s; I guess lions lived in suburban Dallas houses back then), and the two of them would ride around together in Glenn’s Pontiac Grand Prix, the lion’s head hanging out the window on one side, his tail hanging out the other side.

So Glenn wasn’t surprised when, a few nights after his first invitation, Rusty followed him home. Unfortunately, Glenn’s mother already owned a cat. A mean, ornery, standoffish cat. The year before, Glenn had found and rescued it after five weeks trapped in an abandoned cistern—it must have licked moisture from the walls and eaten bugs to survive, which is a great story for another time—but still, that cat wouldn’t do him any favors. There was no way, just from pure territorial cussedness, it was letting Rusty into the house. Rusty was a good-size kitten, and he was the only one of the two cats with claws, but he wasn’t a fighter. Not from fear or submission, he just . . . he didn’t have an aggressive personality. He was a “live and let live” kind of cat.

Glenn apologized to Rusty, told him he could go back to the garage with the Commander, but Rusty decided to settle on the porch. He was always there when Glenn went to work, and he was always there when he came home in the evening. After dinner, they would walk together to the garage to work on the Studebaker; Glenn even considered, once or twice, bringing him to a divorced-dads meeting. That summer, the city started major repairs on Court Street, the large road beside Glenn’s mother’s house, so Rusty and Glenn got in the habit of walking nine blocks through the construction zone to Bill’s beer bar. Rusty waited outside while Glenn grabbed a drink. Half the time, when Glenn came out, Rusty had made a friend.

“This your cat?” the woman would ask—and it was almost always a woman.

“Sure is.”

“He is so cute. And friendly.”

“Yep,” Glenn said. “That’s Rusty. He’s a cool cat.”

Eventually, autumn arrived, and the days got shorter. Court Street reopened to traffic, making it too dangerous for Rusty’s walks. Glenn joined a band, just a few old friends jamming out the blues, and started spending a few nights away every week. Rusty took to jumping on the porch railing of the house, then onto the kitchen window frame to stare at the warm rooms inside. Every night, as he prepared for bed, Glenn saw Rusty watching him. When they made eye contact, the big orange cat always started meowing and scraping his paw on the glass.

“We’ve got to let him in, Mom,” Glenn said. “It’s cold out there.”

Glenn’s mom wouldn’t hear of it, not with the way that cat of hers was behaving. So when a house came up for rent two blocks away, Glenn moved out. The new house was another version of his monk’s cell, a small, unfurnished place, but at least Glenn had a roommate this time. He left a window open for Rusty, which the big cat used only when Glenn was gone. When Glenn was home, the cat always hung around. And he was especially partial to people food. Everything Glenn prepared, Rusty sniffed. If he liked the smell, he had to try it. If he liked the taste, he whined until Glenn gave him a plateful. After the dishes were washed, Glenn usually lay down on the sofa so that Rusty could climb up and knead his back with his claws. It was the world’s best massage after a hard day of work.

At his mother’s house, Glenn had played his guitar every night in bed. Half the time, he’d wake up in the morning and find the guitar cradled in his arms. “That guitar became my best friend,” Glenn told me once.

Maybe, if you want to get psychological, that’s why Rusty hated the guitar. At first, as soon as Glenn picked it up to practice a few songs, Rusty was out the window.

“It’s only rock and roll,” Glenn would call after him, laughing as he hit the first chord.

Eventually, Rusty stuck around. Whenever Glenn pulled the guitar out of its case, he sauntered over and stepped inside. Then he’d bat at the lid until it slammed shut. Glenn wasn’t sure what the cat did in there, but as long as he played guitar, Rusty stayed in the case. As soon as Glenn opened the case to put his guitar away, Rusty jumped out. When Glenn went to bed, Rusty always climbed in beside him.

Even when Rusty got lazy and stopped accompanying him to the garage, Glenn kept working, painting the Studebaker matte black, not flashy but definitely cool. He still didn’t trust all the systems, which had a tendency to misfire, but he no longer worked obsessively on the car either. Instead, Glenn spent more evenings in the backyard with Rusty. The rental was a shotgun close to the street, but the backyard was full of trees, flower beds, and Rusty’s favorite: butterflies. At two years old, Rusty was pushing twenty pounds, and he was a gentle giant, too. He might hurt a fly, but not butterflies. On the rare occasions he snatched one out of the air, he always let it go. When a tree limb broke during a storm, Glenn secured it at an angle so burly Rusty could climb for a better view. He loved to sit in the branches and watch the birds, then stare over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. Rusty knew every blade of grass in the lawn, but he never stepped off the property. Not one foot.

“I’ve watched him. That cat never leaves,” the neighbor told Glenn in amazement.

Glenn shrugged. “That’s Rusty,” he said.

He was a loyal companion. Whenever Glenn talked—about his problems and triumphs, his gripes and rewards, the funny jokes he’d heard that day—Rusty listened. And responded. Rusty could talk through a whole meal and the dishes, too, if he was in the mood. Meow-meow-meow-meow-meow. When Glenn was down, Rusty knew it. He jumped on his lap and stared at him the way he had that first day in the Studebaker Commander: with his head cocked and those deep, intelligent eyes. Then he pushed his scent whiskers into Glenn’s beard. That’s a cat question. You okay, buddy? Glenn would respond by rubbing his beard against Rusty’s face, telling him he was fine.

Rusty also helped Glenn with his daughter Jenny. Glenn had never been able to stay close to his other children; Jenny was his last chance to be the father he always wanted. On court order, she spent every other weekend with him, and he gave her everything he could. Jenny adored her father, Glenn knew, but he worried about her drifting away like his other children had. Not with Rusty around, though. Jenny loved Rusty. Every time Glenn picked her up from her mother’s house, she asked about him. When they saw each other, they started running. Jenny would hold out her arms, and Rusty would leap into them like a puppy.

Rusty was always, um, big-boned. At five, Glenn figured, the cat weighed twenty-five pounds easy, although Rusty refused to sit on a scale. Glenn thought it was all muscle, since Rusty was a forager and inveterate climber of trees, but even he had to admit that Rusty looked like a fat Buddha when he sat on his hind legs. Eight-year-old Jenny thought Rusty was flabby, and she took it upon herself to thin him down. She held his arms out in front of him, pushing them back and forth as if he were doing the cha-cha. Then she put him on his back, grabbed his legs, and pedaled them in circles as if he were riding a bicycle. She called them Rusty’s Butterball Exercises.

“Time for your Butterball Exercises,” she called to Rusty every Saturday morning after pancakes and syrup. He’d sort of sigh, hang his head, and trudge over, because no matter what Jenny wanted, Rusty obliged. And even after all those exercises, he curled up beside Jenny every night. He loved her; it was that simple. Loved her in a way Glenn understood, because he loved her that way, too. They were both disappointed every time her mother picked her up on Sunday night.

The years passed, with days at his mechanic jobs and evenings at his mother’s house for dinner or chores. Nights he spent with Rusty or at divorced-dads meetings, where he felt more like a counselor than a survivor. He still worked on his Studebaker Commander, slowly but steadily. Fixed the steering, aligned the gear box, painted red flames on the side. He didn’t have a final plan or destination. The Commander was a lifelong project, and he looked forward to always tinkering, always working, making it better. If a band he liked was playing, he drove down on Wednesday night to the Eagles dance hall. He had a lot of friends in the music scene, and often they’d call him up on stage to play a song or two. But he never danced. Women asked, but he shrugged them off. He didn’t want to be rude; he just didn’t have the energy. He was there for the music.

When an old friend, Norman Schwartz, decided to start a dance hall in the small town of Waterbury, Nebraska—“We’re going back to the fun days,” Norm told him. “Nothing but old rock and roll and live bands”—Glenn figured he’d volunteer as muscle, helping Norm clear debris and install the wooden floor he’d bought out of the old gym at St. Michael’s Church just before they tore it down.

“I thought you were allergic to manual labor,” Norm said, clearly joking.

“I am,” Glenn assured him, “but I’ll suffer for a friend.” They cracked a beer or three and drank to old times. He was pushing sixty, and the only women he’d ever have in his life now, Glenn figured, were his mother and daughter. His best friend, other than Norm, was a cat. A man could do worse. Much worse. So Glenn decided to retire. He figured he would head home to his Studebaker Commander, his support groups, and his nightly guitar. He’d fish when he wanted, help Norm at his dance hall, hang out with Rusty and his mom. But on his last day at work at the auto repair shop, a regular customer walked in and told him point-blank: “You’re not retiring. You’re coming to work for me.”

The woman ran a job program for special-needs adults called New Perspectives. Glenn told her, “I appreciate the offer, but I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about that line of work.”

“You’ll like it,” she said. “Just come for a look.”

New Perspectives was a series of low, concrete block buildings above a commercial strip in east Sioux City. It wasn’t much, inside or out, but the people made it special. Bobby collected bottles for redemption with enthusiasm, calling out to everyone across the room. A young woman had lost most of her brain function when she was hit by a car, but she could remember everybody’s birthday and tell them what day of the week it was going to fall on in any given year. They needed a strong man to hold Ross, a three-hundred-pound diabetic with Down syndrome, when he went into a seizure. As he walked the facility, as he met the special adults in the work program, Glenn felt a rising sense of joy and relief. He had been working all those years on his car, figuring out the systems. He’d spent all those years with Rusty, learning to live like a cat, without resentment or disappointment. He hadn’t just been killing time. He’d been working on himself. He’d been working toward something. And this was it.

“You got me,” Glenn said. “I’ll start tomorrow.”

Within a month, Glenn didn’t need to hold Ross during his seizures; he knew the man so well, he could sense when they were coming and always had a candy in his pocket to raise his blood sugar. He introduced everybody to the young woman with brain damage, because he could tell she loved showing off her birthday skills. He came in one Monday morning and told Bobby the bottle collector, “I’ve got a present for you, buddy, but you gotta do me a favor.”

“What’s that, Glenn?”

“I gotta have your hat.”

Bobby backed off. He wore the same filthy hat every day, and he wasn’t going to give it up.

“I got a brand-new hat for you, Bobby, and it’s got the tag still on it.”

Glenn showed him a bright orange hunting hat that said GRAHAM TIRE across the front. Bobby grabbed it and immediately put the brim to his nose; he had a habit of smelling everything. Then he turned away, slowly took off his filthy hat, and handed it to Glenn. When he turned back, he had the orange hat on his head and a huge smile on his face.

“We’ve been trying to get him to change that hat for two years,” the woman who had hired him said. “He wouldn’t take it off for anybody.”

After New Perspectives, Glenn cut back on his divorced-dads sessions. He started playing more seriously with the band, spending nights at the Eagles or other music clubs around town. When Storm’n Norman’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Auditorium opened, Glenn not only played guitar with the band, he carried the keg and helped drain it, too. There was no official first dance; no advertising; no sign on the building; no arrows pointing the way through rolling hills of corn to a tiny Nebraska town. But somehow, more than one hundred fifty people showed up. There was no air-conditioning, not enough bathrooms, and the only chairs were borrowed from a funeral home—they even said “funeral home” on the back—but it was a heck of a good time.

I suppose you could say that, after years of work and decades of disappointment, Glenn’s life was full. He had Rusty, his mother, his daughter Jenny, who was already in high school. He had friends and music. He worked an important job with people he loved. On the one night a month when Storm’n Norman’s was open, he did chores: unclogging toilets, tending bar, “feeding the chickens”—a euphemism for sprinkling the dance floor with no-slip wax. After a while, he noticed that a lot of women managed to coax their husbands to Storm’n Norman’s, but couldn’t convince them to dance. So he added another job: one-song dance partner for the frustrated wives of Iowa and Nebraska, the tall good-looking gentleman who swept them away and let them cut loose, at least for a minute or two. Truth be told, though, he barely saw their faces. Dancing was another way to enjoy the music, to help a stranger, and pass the time. He loved dancing—he’d almost forgotten how nice it felt—but for Glenn Albertson the dance hall, despite the bright lights, was nothing more than a sea of gray.

Until one night, sixteen years after his last divorce and ten years after Rusty broke through the scars on his heart, Glenn Albertson saw a face. He was at the bar, mixing drinks, when he looked up and noticed her across the room. She was at a table on the edge of the dance floor, talking with a couple of friends, and it was if a spotlight was shining only on her. It was just a moment, a glancing chance, but it was something Glenn had never experienced before. In the gray sea of his life, this woman seemed to glow. And then their eyes met.

“Take over, Joe,” he told his fellow bartender, “I’m gonna ask that woman to dance.”

He did. She looked up at him, hesitated, then said, “Sure.”

They walked quietly to the dance floor. She was smaller than he expected. The top of her head came only to the middle of his chest, and yet they seemed to fit together as they began to move silently across the floor. She was quiet, focused on something else perhaps, but when she looked into his face, her eyes seemed to take him in, to linger for a chorus, and then, reluctantly, to look away. When he swept her across the dance floor, she didn’t feel like an obstacle. There was no resistance, no weight. There was only the feel of her warm hand, and the memory of her eyes staring into his own.

“I’m Glenn,” he said.

“I’m Vicki,” she replied.

He swept her around the dance floor a few more times, hardly noticing the sea of gray swirling around them. “Do you live around here?”

“In Spencer,” she said.

When the song ended, he slipped his hand behind her waist. If she wanted to leave, he would let her, but she didn’t. She leaned against his arm, allowing him to hold her. Somewhere beyond them, in another world, the drummer beat time, and when the music started again, Glenn led her easily around the dance floor, holding her close as the band played something he never wanted to end.

“I had a good night,” he told Rusty, when he finally got home. “A real good night.”

The big cat looked at him, his eyes hooded and half awake, and meowed for some food.

Part II

I’ve always loved to dance. When I was a kid, Mom and Dad taught us to dance to the rhythms of the old radio in the family room of our farmhouse outside Moneta, Iowa. When I was nineteen and working in a box factory in Mankato, Minnesota, I danced my toes off every night. Dancing introduced me to my first husband, and it helped me through the dark days after my divorce. As a single mother attending college for the first time at the age of thirty, I didn’t have time for so-called “leisure” pursuits, but dancing was never simple leisure to me. Dancing, to me, was essential. When I heard the music, when I got up to dance, I felt like myself—the good self, not the self that had been through six surgeries from a botched hysterectomy and spent almost a decade married to an alcoholic. Even on the darkest nights, after tucking my daughter into bed and scrubbing down the pots and writing that last class paper, I often went into the kitchen, put on a record, and danced all by myself.

I danced all through my years at the Spencer Public Library. After closing, Dewey and I danced in the library, just the two of us, hopping around between the books. At public events, I was known to cut loose with my male friends and my dates. I went to singles dances, too, although never in Spencer. It didn’t seem right, somehow, for the town librarian to be seen cozying up to some man on a dance floor. People, as they say, would talk.

So I went out of town: the famous Roof Garden dance hall twenty miles away in the Iowa Lake Country; my friend Trudy’s favorite spots in Worthington, Minnesota; the more respectable clubs in Sioux City. I dated, but the relationships never worked out. One suitor showed me his divorce certificate on the first night. That should have been a tip-off. The next day, his wife called and threatened my life. Apparently, her husband had the same name as his uncle. The man had shown me the papers from his uncle’s divorce.

The Cowboy, a Sioux City blind date, drove me through the pens where the cows waited for slaughter because he thought they were beautiful in the moonlight. Then he took me to his house and showed me how to make bullets. A man from Minneapolis invited me for a weekend on his sailboat. A sudden storm blew in, and I got so seasick I vomited on my dress. The next morning, he told me his favorite place in the world was some spot in Italy. He asked my favorite place. I was in my thirties, and I’d never been anywhere but Iowa and Minnesota. I knew that relationship wasn’t going to work out, either.

Not that I was focused on having a man. I had fun when they were around, especially the dancing, but I didn’t spend my nights pining for them. I was too busy enjoying what I had: a meaningful job, a loyal family, great friends, and a wonderful library cat named Dewey Readmore Books. Sure, I was basically the person that answered his fan mail, but Dewey never treated me like the help. We were partners. I wasn’t giving up anything by building my life around that partnership, and especially that job. I was gaining a life of contentment and laughter, a life where I didn’t have to scatter my attention or waste my energy on something other well-meaning (and nosy) people told me I was supposed to want. Instead, I got to focus on what was important: supporting my daughter, caring for my parents, establishing deep friendships, and using my talents to build an institution that would provide for the citizens of Spencer. I was extremely happy as a mother and librarian by vocation, and a cat lover and a dancer by habit. I didn’t want to be a girlfriend, too.

Then Dewey died.

My relationship with Dewey can’t be summarized in a few sentences. I know that. And yet, I always come back to these few lines from my first book when I think of him: “Dewey was my cat. I was the person he came to for love. I was the person he came to for comfort. And I went to him for love and comfort, too. He wasn’t a substitute husband or a substitute child. I wasn’t lonely; I had plenty of friends. I wasn’t unfulfilled; I loved my job. I wasn’t looking for someone special. It wasn’t even that I saw him every day. We lived apart. We could spend whole days together and hardly see each other. But even when I didn’t see him, I knew he was there. We had chosen, I realized, to share our lives, not just tomorrow, but forever.”

But nothing lasts forever, no matter how strong your bond. Dewey was my best friend; he was my comfort and companion. He changed the library. He changed our town. And he was gone.

The job wasn’t the same after that. I had been the library director for twenty years. I had dedicated more than two decades of my life to building the organization. Now, suddenly, it didn’t feel like my library anymore. Part of that was my relationship with the library board, which had broken the moment they tried to remove Dewey because he was old. But there was also a coldness, a loneliness, an emptiness that had not existed within those walls for the nineteen years Dewey lived there.

As always, I threw myself into my work. I had projects to finish, goals I still wanted to achieve. I wanted to build on what Dewey and I had created, to continue to transform the library from a warehouse for books to a meetinghouse for souls.

I also wanted to write Dewey’s story. I felt I owed it to him, because of what he had given to me and the town of Spencer. I owed it to his fans, who deserved the whole tale. His love, his companionship, his friendship—those were the reasons more than 270 newspapers printed his obituary and more than a thousand fans wrote letters and cards. That’s why his life mattered. And that’s what I wanted to share. I felt I owed the book to the world because I believed, and I still do, that there’s an important message in Dewey’s life: Never give up. Find your place. You can change your world.

But I was sick. After Dewey’s death, I had developed an upper respiratory infection, and no matter what I tried, it would not go away. I had suffered for decades from serious illness, ever since that hysterectomy in my early twenties—a hysterectomy I didn’t even know was going to be performed until I came out of the anesthesia—damaged my immune system. Every three or four years, what started as tonsillitis ended in the hospital. It was part of my life, part of what Dewey had helped me endure.

But this time was different. This time, I was sick in heart as well as body. In December, I drove myself hard to fulfill every Dewey-related request, but bitterly cold, post-holidays January found me tired and weak. In February, the weakness moved into my muscles and lungs. By March, I was barely making it out of bed. In April, I started working from home, at partial pay, to conserve my strength. My doctor tried all sorts of treatments, but my health deteriorated further. Nausea, headaches, fevers. Most days, the only food I could keep down was saltines. My doctor performed tests. Colonoscopies, upper endoscopies, MRIs. There seemed to be no solution. I went back to work in May, but I wasn’t myself. I was sent to specialists in Sioux City and Minnesota, but driving to the appointments wore me out. By summer, I was so weak I couldn’t take a shower without having to lie down afterward for a rest.

Everyone thought I was depressed. And I was depressed. Dewey’s death, combined with my problems with the library board, had collapsed my comfortable world. But I wasn’t sick because I was depressed; I was depressed because I was sick. And nobody knew what was wrong with me. I thought, This is it. This is how I’m going to be for the rest of my life. I can’t get out of bed, I can’t go anywhere, I can’t see anybody. And then I’ll die.

Twenty years before, I had been a single mother making twenty-five thousand dollars a year. To keep my job, I had to earn a Master’s degree in library science, which required a four-hour round trip to Sioux City every weekend for ten hours of class. At the same time, my daughter—the rock of my life—was growing apart from me. Maybe it was a natural part of growing up. Or maybe it was the fact that, because of everything I had to do to support her financially, I couldn’t support her with my time. All I remembered for sure, years later, was the loneliness of my nights in the library, dead tired and struggling to complete my school papers and keep my priorities in order. I remembered the moments when it felt as if the weight was too much and the ceiling was caving in.

In those moments, Dewey came for me. He jumped on my lap; he knocked pens out of my hand; he flopped on the computer keyboard. He bumped me with his head until I relented, and then he streaked out of my office and down some dark aisle between two shelves of books. Sometimes I caught glimpses of him disappearing; sometimes, after five minutes, I still hadn’t found him. Then, just when I was ready to quit, I’d turn around and he’d be standing right behind me. And I could swear he was laughing.

Now, once again, Dewey came to me. Before my health collapsed, I had committed to writing a book, and I was no quitter. Every evening, after working as much as I could for the library, I would sit at my kitchen table and talk with my cowriter, Bret Witter, about Dewey. And the more I talked about him, the more alive he became. I could see again the way he crouched when I dangled his red yarn and how, just when I turned away, he would leap at it with all four paws. I remembered the exact way his nose twitched as he sniffed his food—and then rejected it. I laughed at the memory of the poor cat soaking wet and angry after his twice yearly baths; the way his tongue would drag as he licked his toes; how he would jam those wet paws into his ears for a good cleaning. I smiled at the way he sniffed the air vent in my office three times every day, always protecting me.

Some nights the conversations were hard. My brother’s suicide. My mother’s death. I was most terrified, I think, to talk about my mastectomy. I had kept my surgery a secret, and even a decade later, I felt vulnerable and scarred. I was afraid to admit, even to myself, that when the doctor said breast cancer, I felt my world pull away. No one would touch me; no one wanted to say those words. Only Dewey was there for me, hour after hour, day after day. Only Dewey gave me the physical contact I craved.

Some days were even harder. The first time I talked about his death—how Dewey looked into my eyes and begged, Help me, help me, as I held him in the examination room—I bawled into the telephone. It had been months, but once again I felt flattened out, stretched to the point of breaking as Dr. Beale told me, “I feel a mass. It’s an aggressive tumor. He’s in pain. There’s nothing we can do.”

But opening that door brought back other memories, too. I remembered the cold of the examination table, the worn threads of Dewey’s favorite blanket, the hum of his purring, the way he melted into my arms and laid his head against my skin. I remembered the trust in his golden eyes; the calm center beneath his terror; the closeness of our hearts as I whispered, “It’s all right, Dewey. It’s all right. Everything will be all right.”

I remembered looking into his eyes and realizing I was alone.

It might seem that, in my weakened condition, all this talking, writing, and crying would have been too much. The truth was the opposite: The book was keeping me alive. When you are so sick that turning over in bed makes you throw up; when the only thing you can keep in your stomach is a few crackers; when no one can give you any assurance at all that your health will ever improve, it’s easy to give up on the day. And once you start giving up on whole days, where does it end?

I never gave up on a day, because every day I looked forward to my evenings with Dewey. Even on the days when I could do nothing more than crawl to the bathroom, I could lie on the couch, a phone to my ear, and talk about the Dew.

As I read the early drafts of the book, I could almost feel him on my shoulder reading along. No, Dewey would say, that’s not how it was. When I heard that whisper of doubt in my mind, I would focus on that paragraph, or that sentence, or even that word. I had to get Dewey right. I knew that. He wasn’t just the heart and soul of the book; he was everything. The more I focused on the details, the more he returned to my mind and heart. And the more I felt his presence, the more sure I was that everything in the book was right. It wasn’t just the sight and sound; I was capturing the feeling of being around him—that old Dewey Magic—word by word.

In August, I made a decision. I was tired of listening to the experts. I was tired of driving two hours to explain my life history to a new doctor who couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. I was tired of falling to my knees in exhaustion at the end of the day, of pulling myself up from the sofa when the nausea overcame me. If I was going to get better, I realized, I needed to do it myself. After six months of thinking about him, I was imbued with the spirit of Dewey. I really believe that. His can-do, always-keep-going, everything-will-be-fine spirit inspired me.

I retired from the library. I didn’t slouch out a beaten woman; I went out on my terms, having accomplished all my major goals. The library board, God bless them, granted me that. With half the stress and a tenth the daily exposure to germs, I felt better immediately.

I changed my diet. I cut back on my medications. I stopped focusing on my limitations and started thinking about my strengths. I knew I needed to work my body, but I hated exercise. So I started dancing again. At first, I spent a few minutes shuffling around my living room with the music on. Then I’d collapse onto the sofa. Eventually, I started tapping my foot and swaying with the beat. After a few months—and yes, it was months—I started dancing. By myself, in the privacy of my house, but I was dancing.

By Christmas, I was well enough to start thinking about getting out on the dance floor. I wanted, though, for it to be the perfect night. My favorite local band, The Embers, at the best dance hall in the area: Storm’n Norman’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Auditorium.

Storm’n Norman’s was a very cool, almost secret dance club located in a former high school gym in a small town two hours from Spencer. You would never just wander into Storm’n Norman’s by accident because when I say Waterbury, Nebraska, was small, I mean two blocks and one stop sign in the middle of nowhere small. I used to think it was a one-dog town, because I’d always see the same spotted mutt standing in the middle of the town’s one intersection, but I walked the main street one afternoon and realized there were probably as many dogs in Waterbury as people. In a way, it reminded me of my hometown of Moneta, Iowa, which was a hearty five hundred people when I lived there in the 1950s but had since become so small (fewer than fifty people) that it was no longer even incorporated as a town. Moneta died when its heart, the redbrick Moneta School, was shut down by the state of Iowa in 1959. Waterbury hadn’t died when its own school was closed by the state of Nebraska, but it was clearly limping along. There couldn’t have been more than eighty people in town, and the only business (other than Storm’n Norman’s) was the Buzzsaw Bar.

Storm’n Norman’s didn’t look like much from the outside. The former school gym was a squat, gray concrete block building on the edge of town, half hidden behind a clump of trees. The parking lot was the gravel road out front and a strip of grass. A wooden ramp led to the entrance, which was a plain metal door. Inside, a narrow hallway ended at the old gymnasium ticket window. Jeanette, Norman’s wife, was usually collecting entrance fees.

Past the window, through a narrow door, you could look across the dance floor and catch your first glimpse of the stage. It was just a plain wooden auditorium stage, the kind built in just about every schoolhouse in America between about 1916 and 1983, except for the front end of a 1955 Chevy sticking out of the middle. The Chevy was black, with flames on the sides, and when the band hit a button, the engine would rev and the wheels would turn.

The Chevy set the mood, because when you’re stepping through the doorway into Storm’n Norman’s Rock N Roll Auditorium, it was like a gorgeous new world—the world of 1955—exploded into life around you. The room was wide open and windowless, lit by hidden lamps and twenty strings of lights that connected above a disco ball in the middle of the high ceiling. The lights led your eyes down to the walls, where three 1950s American roadsters, two hot pink, sat on platforms twenty feet high. Underneath were signed guitars, statues, and black-and-white photographs of Marilyn, Elvis, and James Dean. Follow the walls around the room and you noticed first, over the entrance door, a vintage Chevy dashboard, then the rows of original, polished wooden gymnasium bleachers, perfect for lounging, along the back wall. There were two plain bars, in opposite corners, but the seating beside the wooden dance floor was neatly aligned and reminiscent of school tables and diner booths. Even the original basketball goals were still hanging from the walls. It was like walking into the idealized memory of your high school prom, but all grown up with nothing to prove. When two hundred people were crammed into Storm’n Norman’s and a great band was belting classic rock and blues, there was no better place in the world.

I was determined to be there. I was determined to hear the Embers play. And I wasn’t planning to be a wallflower, either. I was going to dance. Not to find a man, mind you, but to prove I could get off my sofa, heal my wounded body, and enjoy the rest of my life.

And that’s how on March 15, 2008, sixteen months after Dewey’s death sent my health into a spiral, I found myself riding toward Waterbury, Nebraska, with two of my best friends, Trudy and Faith. I still wasn’t healthy—I was terribly weak, and I had to roll down the window a few times to keep from being queasy on the drive over—but I kept that to myself. I was tired of talking about my illness, tired of people asking how I felt, tired of trying to explain. I just wanted to enjoy myself, and the best way to do that was to pretend that everything was fine. Besides, I had talked Trudy and Faith into driving down from Minnesota, and there was no way I was turning back on them now.

We arrived early (a minor miracle with always-running-late Faith along), since I needed to sit, and tables next to the dance floor filled up fast. I didn’t know what to expect, after a year in bed, but I could feel the energy in the room. As soon as the Embers launched into their playlist, my toes started tapping. By the second band break, I had danced with four men. I’ve always been small—just over five feet tall with a thin frame—but during my illness, I’d dropped to ninety-five pounds. I was too weak to climb stairs and standing made me dizzy. But there was something about dancing. As long as I was moving, and as long as I didn’t complicate things by talking, my body felt strong. It was between songs, when the music stopped, that I started to collapse. When a guy asked for a second dance, I could barely force out the words, “Sorry, too tired,” before wandering back to the table.

It was during one of my breaks, while trying to catch my breath, that he appeared. I don’t remember him approaching. I’m sure I’d never seen him before, not even for a moment. I just looked up, and there he was, standing over me. He held out his hand and asked me to dance.

“Sure,” I said.

He was tall and broad-shouldered but surprisingly light on the dance floor. We moved easily together, swept along by the music. I appreciated that he didn’t try to stand too close, that he didn’t try to push me around the floor, that he didn’t feel the need to say something silly—or anything at all. We just drifted together, in a way that felt as natural as the sun. It must have been halfway through the song before I looked into his face. He was strikingly handsome, with an easy smile and a casual elegance beneath his bald head and well-groomed beard. But it was his eyes that startled me. They were the most gentle and caring eyes I had ever seen. And they were focused on me. Not the generic dance partner, but the real me inside. I knew, just by looking into them, that if he found out how sick I was, he’d take me straight back to my seat.

But for once, I didn’t want to sit down. So when the music stopped, and I felt his arm slide around my waist, I leaned back and let him support my weight. He noticed something was wrong—I could see the concern in his eyes—but he didn’t say anything. He just held me up. When the music started again, he pushed me into a two-step.

“I have to sit down,” I said reluctantly, after four songs.

He escorted me to the table and sat across from me. Trudy and Faith, my protective friends, peppered him with questions. I was in a fog, unable to catch my breath, and his answers seemed to float away on the music, leaving only his good-natured smile. When the earth started to spin, I reached for my water glass, missed, and knocked it across the table. He reached over and scooped it up, found a rag and wiped down the table. We danced a few more songs, I’m not sure how many, because I only remember the music winding down and the crowd beginning to disperse.

“I’m gonna take off,” he said. He grabbed my hand and kissed it. “It was a pleasure meeting you.”

I was still thanking him for a lovely evening when I realized he had come around the table and was kissing me on the cheek. That normally would have put me off, a stranger being so forward, but my only thought as he disappeared into the crowd was, Well, that was nice.

“What was his name?” I asked my friends when we were outside and the cool March air had cleared my head. “Was it Paul?”

“For goodness’ sakes, Vicki,” Trudy said. “His name was Glenn.”

I may not have remembered his name, but there was something about this Glenn fellow I just couldn’t forget. Something that lifted my spirits, that made me think of him whenever my mind started to wander. Something that made the feel of his hands spring to mind at the strangest times.

That something was his eyes. It may sound strange, but when I looked into Glenn Albertson’s eyes that night at Storm’n Norman’s, I thought of Dewey. When I pulled Dewey out of the library book drop, wrapped him in a blanket, and held him against my chest, he was ice cold. His paws were literally frozen, and he barely had a pulse. He didn’t know me, but he lifted his head and looked into my eyes with affection. I looked into his eyes and saw openness and trust.

I knew Glenn was a gentleman, because he never pushed me or tried to dance too close. I knew he was a thoughtful man, because of the way he supported me between songs. I knew he was a kind man, because of the way he spoke to my friends. But there was something else in his eyes. There was the calmness of the old soul, and an honest affection. Like Dewey, he wasn’t just looking at me, he was seeing me. And he was letting me see him. Not just the kindness, but what lurked behind it: the fear and hurt, but also a deep sense of contentment and pride.

Dewey sent him, I thought, when I saw those eyes. It was just a moment, a sudden flash, before I realized it was merely a matter of similarity—they were alike, Dewey and Glenn. But the thought stuck with me. Dewey sent him. I knew it wasn’t possible, but love is so wrapped up and complicated, so heartfelt and illogical, what can we really ever know for sure?

I knew one thing for sure: I wanted to see him again. So I called Norman’s wife, Jeanette. “I met a fellow named Glenn at your place last week,” I told her. “Tall with a beard, nice smile, good dancer.”

“I know him,” Jeanette said.

“Is he a good guy or a bad guy?”

“Oh, he’s a good guy,” Jeanette said, getting excited. “A really good guy.” I didn’t know Glenn had been helping out at the dance hall for years. I didn’t know he had been friends with Jeanette and Norman since high school. At that point, I didn’t know much about him at all, only that he was the most open and attentive man I’d ever met.

“I can set this up,” Jeanette said, getting excited. “I used to do this all the time in high school. I’m really good at it. I can call him if you want.”

A few hours later, Glenn called me. We talked for a half an hour, then longer a few nights later. Pretty soon, we were talking every night, then two or three times a day. We talked about everything—our work, our cats (although I never mentioned the book), even the biggies: politics and religion. When it was time for the next Storm’n Norman dance, we were both eager to see each other again. Just for the dancing, I told myself, he’s such a good dancer. But my nervous energy as Trudy, Faith, and I took the long drive to Waterbury, Nebraska, told me that wasn’t true. There were so many butterflies in my stomach, I could have lifted right out of the car.

We were late because of Faith (being on Faith time, we call it), and there was a line at the ticket window. When the couples cleared, I saw him standing on the other side of the door, waiting for me. He was wearing a nice pair of black jeans and a tucked-in black button-down shirt, and I could tell just by the way he held himself that he had spent a few extra minutes getting ready for the night. Then I saw the red rose in his hand, and the butterflies vanished. I walked up and, without hesitation, kissed him on the cheek. I can’t remember what we said. I only remember dancing, because it was like we’d been doing it together all our lives. Somewhere in the middle of the night, when the band hit the opening chords of Ronnie Milsap’s “Lost in the 50s Tonight,” I remember looking into his eyes and seeing for the hundredth time the warmth—and an invitation. I’m open, they said. I’m here. I’m for you. I’m never going to hurt you.

“My favorite song,” Glenn said, as the band sang “shoo-bop, shoobe-bop, so real, so right.”

“Mine, too,” I said. Then I laid my head against his chest, just over his heart, and thought: I’m home.

If I had known then about his three marriages and five children? Well, I’ve got to admit, I still would have been interested in Glenn Albertson. Maybe if I’d known before the first dance, things might have been different. But after the second night? At that point, there was no turning back. Even as we got to know each other over the coming weeks, and even as his life unspooled before me, I never doubted his character. One divorce is a mistake. Three divorces? That’s when you stop pointing the finger at other people and start looking at yourself. But Glenn had done that work. That’s why, the more I found out about his life, the more extraordinary he became. I had met plenty of guys who were closed off, who ran from their emotions and couldn’t talk about much beyond sports. Glenn had gone through more than any of them, and yet he was willing to share that pain with me. He could lift me like a feather; he could take apart and repair my car; he could give me a wonderful massage and even cut my hair; he could give me a rose and a kiss and make me feel like the most beautiful woman in Iowa. But most important, he could be honest with me. He could show me his heart.

To ponder Glenn’s life, though, is to ignore the biggest obstacle to our relationship: I was dead serious about my single life. I had lived it for so long, I had no intention of leaving. As my old saying goes (or went): “I only want a man if I can hang him in my closet, like an old suit I can pull out when I want to dance.” And I meant it. At almost sixty years old, with more than thirty years happily single, I didn’t even want to contemplate bringing a man into my life. I had given the library and my daughter everything I had, and I felt pride and satisfaction in what I had accomplished. I was close to my family, especially my father, who needed me more than ever since my mother’s death. I had great friends I’d known for decades, and who I could count on for love, support, and a belly-busting laugh. I had my daughter. And grandchildren. I made shadow boxes and had planned fourteen weddings (and counting), from the flowers to the invitations to the first song. I was retired, but I still served on several statewide library boards, so I traveled regularly. I will always remember tumbling into a taxi cab in New Orleans after a night of drinking and dancing with professional friends. The driver, after a few minutes, turned to us and said, “I can’t believe you’re librarians. You’re having so much fun.”

Of course we had fun! Librarians aren’t ladies with bun hairdos who always say shush. We’re highly educated men and women who manage businesses. We fight censorship. We are early adopters of e-books and computer networks. We market, we educate, we create. Our jobs are challenging and complex, even more so with a cat on staff, and that’s why we love them so much.

I may not have been a working librarian anymore, and I may not have had Dewey anymore, but as long as I had my health, I was content. I had always packed as much living as I could into my days and appreciated my privacy at night. I could eat when I felt hungry, go to bed when I felt tired, and watch whatever I wanted on television. Why, oh why, would I want to risk all that for a man?

And yet, I was being swept away. And enjoying it! Sure, I tried to pull back a few times, to convince myself I didn’t need this kind of relationship, but that feeling never seemed to last more than an hour or two. Glenn would call (we were up to seven calls a day at one point), and I’d always give in. Not to his pressure, or even to his charm, but to his tenderness. To his understanding. To his obvious love. When I talked about Dewey, I knew he didn’t just listen. He asked questions. He understood. Some men would have been turned off by my love of a cat, but I always had the sense Glenn saw who I really was, and he liked what he saw.

And, of course, he had an important cat in his life, too. I knew that because of how much he talked about Rusty. He was a smart cat, he told me. He knew his name. He would come when called. I would like him. He always snuggled with strangers, guaranteed. And he wasn’t just a shy house cat. Oh no. Rusty was quirky. He slept in a guitar case and ate nachos. He fought pit bulls but caught and released butterflies. Whenever Glenn yelled, “It’s time for a bath, Rusty,” he ran. Not away from the tub but toward it. Rusty loved water. Rusty would spread out in a bathtub full of water and luxuriate.

“You gotta see it,” Glenn said. “It’s something.”

I think that’s how he coaxed me to his house the first time, with the promise of meeting Rusty. I was still weak from my illness, and as soon as I sat down on Glenn’s sofa for a rest, Rusty came right up and started rubbing against my legs. Soon, he was in my lap. He was a massive boy, at least three times the weight of Dewey. But he was a teddy bear, too, just like Glenn. Meeting Rusty confirmed all my instincts about the man I was, dare I say it, beginning to love.

After getting the nod from Rusty, Glenn took me to meet his mom. She was in her eighties, still living in her own house, still mowing her own grass. It could have been awkward, I suppose, meeting my boyfriend’s beloved mother, except for one thing: She had followed Dewey’s life in the newspaper for years. So I told her stories about Dewey: how he climbed into the jacket of a disabled girl and made her smile; how he entertained the children left in the library “day care” by their working parents; how he rode the left shoulder (always the left!) of the homeless man who came to the library every day for the sole purpose of talking to our cat. She listened. She smiled. She offered me coffee and homemade cake. I could tell Dewey’s Magic was still at work, and it was working on both our hearts. How could I not love someone who loved Dewey? How could she not trust Dewey’s mom?

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.

Find your place. Be happy with what you have. Treat everyone well. Live a good life. It isn’t about material things; it’s about love. And you can never anticipate love.

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.

Find your place. That’s one of the lessons Dewey taught me. We all have a place where we will thrive. By the summer of 2009—when the book tours finally slowed and I started to think about writing this book—it was clear that Page Turner had mellowed out and found his place. He had been so unsure and frantic those first few months, I could now see, because life on the street had been hard. He ran from every creak because, I had no doubt, he had been hurt out there. He gulped food because he had been starving. On the day we took him home, I’m not sure he was ready to believe in anyone. But he had trusted Glenn. Just like Rusty, Page Turner could see the gentleness and love in the man’s soul.

Sure, he’s spoiled now. He interrupts our dinner until we give him a few bites to eat. He licks the bottom of the cheese container that comes with my soft pretzel (my nightly vice!). He attacks my feet when I’m trying to sleep, lounges on my keyboard when I’m trying to write, and does nothing on Saturdays but watch NASCAR with Glenn. You may think this is somehow bad for him—unhealthy, unproductive, unnatural, and all the other insults that have been hurled at my treatment of Dewey since that book was published—but I know Page Turner is happy. At six weeks old, he was shivering in the middle of a Spencer street, filthy dirty, with ice clumps and sticks matted in his fur. Now he lives in a house with two people who adore him. He has cat food whenever he wants. He sleeps in a warm bed. He has toys to play with—even the kind with annoying bells!— and a microwave to watch. He hates strangers—I didn’t see him for four days the first time my grandchildren came for a visit—but he has a little hidey-hole behind the suitcases in my closet where he can go whenever he feels afraid. He doesn’t go outside, but in the summer we open a window so he can watch and listen and fantasize about the birds in the garden.

My friends think Page Turner looks like Dewey. I don’t see it. They are both fluffy orange cats, but Page is a different shape (that would be 100 percent round). He’s bigger than Dewey. And although his eyes are changing from green to Dewey’s golden amber, they don’t look anything like Dewey’s eyes. Page is not an old soul. He is not wise. He is an energetic, sometimes naughty, often exasperating klutz. He makes me laugh and shake my head and wonder, What the heck will that cat do next? He’s warm and loving and, let’s face it, he gives Glenn and me something to focus on. Something that’s ours. Together.

I’m not saying Page Turner is the child Glenn always wanted to have around. He’s not even a new version of Rusty, if the truth be known. Rusty was Glenn’s companion when he didn’t want any company. For a while, he was the glue that held Glenn’s life together. But they’ve both moved on. Whenever Glenn visits him now, Rusty looks him over, like he’s checking his old friend’s condition. They meow at each other—yes, Glenn meows—and Rusty hops into Glenn’s arms and mashes his cheek into Glenn’s beard. Then Rusty wanders off to his new life. He’s an easygoing cat, the kind that can be happy almost anywhere, and he’s found his place in Jenny’s home.

And Glenn? Well, he’s a sucker for Page Turner. Whenever we’re away overnight, he’s the one asking, “Have you called to check on Page? Is he all right?” He’s the one always buying him little gifts and giving him extra bites of food. And please, do not ask to see pictures. Glenn has more than five hundred photographs of Page Turner stored on his camera, and he’ll show you each one. He’s got Page Turner’s pictures on his cell phone, and I swear he changes the screen saver every day.

Rusty was Glenn’s friend and confidante. Page Turner . . . he’s more like Glenn’s grandchild. And no, I’m not saying he’s literally a grandchild or that he’s a replacement for something Glenn was missing. Life, love, and desire are never that simple. Happiness is never something you can calculate. At its best, it’s something that catches you unaware and that you never fully understand.

All I’m saying, I suppose, is that Dewey was the wise and caring cat, the one who helped me and the town of Spencer through some very tough times. Rusty was the cool dude that wandered in at the right time. Page Turner is a perpetual child. He’s fun. He’s foolish. He’s dependent. And I wouldn’t want him any other way.

So, no, Page Turner didn’t help me get over the loss of Dewey. Time did that. Page Turner just eased me into the next part of my life. The part with Glenn. And grandkids. And travel. And good health that I do have to constantly monitor and for that reason will always cherish. We’ve built a new life together, Glenn and I. We’ve bought a house. Page Turner made that house a home and our little trio a family.

What more should we ever ask of our cats?