Dewey's Nine Lives

ONE

Dewey and Tobi

“She was a quiet cat. She was gentle and . . . she never wanted to get in any trouble with anybody, she just wanted to live and let live, you know what I mean?”

For much of the world, my beloved Spencer, Iowa, with a population of about ten thousand, is a small town. The streets, mostly numbered on a square grid that extends twenty-nine blocks north-south (with a river in the middle) and twenty-five blocks east-west, are easy to navigate. The stores, primarily extending along Grand Avenue, our main street, are sufficient without being overwhelming. The one-story library, near the corner of Grand Avenue and Third Street, in the heart of downtown, is intimate and welcoming.

But size is relative, especially in a place like Iowa, a state with one-sixth the population of Florida but almost twice as many incorporated towns. Many of us here are from even smaller towns than Spencer, like Moneta, the place I consider my hometown even though I grew up on a farm two miles away. Moneta was six blocks. It had five commercial buildings, if you include the bar and the dance hall. At its height, its population was just over two hundred people. That’s fewer people than come through the door of the Spencer Public Library every single day.

So around here, in Iowa farm country, Spencer is large. It’s the kind of town people drive to, not through. It’s the kind of town where you recognize most of your fellow citizens but don’t necessarily know their names. A town where everyone hears about the closing of a business and has an opinion, but not everyone is directly affected. When a farm goes under in Clay County, where Spencer is located, we might not remember the farmer, but we remember someone like him, and we care and understand. Whether we’re from an old line of blue-collar farmers, or one of the recent Hispanic immigrants who fill many of the rungs of the vast industrial agricultural economy, we share more than a straight-lined, carefully marked plot of earth called Spencer, Iowa. We share an attitude, a work ethic, a worldview, and a future.

But we don’t all know each other. As the director of the Spencer Public Library, that was always clear to me. I could walk through the library at any moment, on any day, and recognize the regular visitors. I knew many of their names. I had grown up with a lot of them, and often I knew their families, too. I remember, more than a decade ago, a library regular sliding toward oblivion over a series of months. I had known him since high school, and I knew his past. He had been heavily involved in drugs, kicked the habit, but was clearly in trouble again. So I called his brother, an old friend, who drove in from out of state to arrange for care. That is the blessing of a town like Spencer: Connections run deep. Help and friendship are often only a phone call away.

But the library drew visitors from nine counties—when I retired we had eighteen thousand card-carrying members, almost twice the population of Spencer—so there was no way I could know everyone. One of the many regular visitors I recognized but never knew was a woman named Yvonne Barry. She was fifteen years younger than I, so I hadn’t gone to school with her. She wasn’t from Clay County originally, so I didn’t know her family. The staff would watch the homeless man who came every morning to visit Dewey, because we wanted to make sure he was doing all right, but Yvonne was always well dressed and groomed, so there never seemed to be a reason to worry. And she was intensely quiet. She never initiated conversation. If you said, “Good morning, Yvonne,” the most you received was a whispered, “Hello.” She liked magazines, and she always checked out books. Beyond that, I knew only one thing about her: She loved Dewey. I could see that in the smile on her face every time he approached her.

Everyone thought she had a unique relationship with Dewey. I don’t know how many times someone whispered to me, in strictest confidence, “Don’t tell anybody, because they’ll be jealous, but Dewey and I have something special.” I’d smile and nod and wait for someone else to say the exact same thing. Dewey was so generous with his affection, you see, that everyone felt the connection. For them, Dewey was one of a kind. But for Dewey, they were one of three hundred . . . five hundred . . . a thousand regular friends. I thought he couldn’t possibly cherish them all.

So I assumed Yvonne was another occasional companion. She spent time with Dewey, but they didn’t run to each other. I don’t remember Dewey waiting for her. But somehow, in the course of Yvonne’s visit, they always seemed to end up together, wandering the library on a secret, silent quest, happy as clams.

It wasn’t until Dewey’s passing that Yvonne started talking. A little. For nineteen years, I had kept up a steady stream of Dewey chats with many of the library regulars. After his death, he seemed like all we could discuss. It wasn’t until the end of the initial rush, though, when the cold slog of February settled over us and the realization that Dewey was gone had dug deep into our bones, that Yvonne approached me, quietly and nervously, and talked about Dewey. She told me how much she had looked forward to seeing him. How much he had understood her. How gentle and brave he was. She told me, more than once, about the day Dewey slept on her lap for an hour, and how special that made her feel.

“That’s nice,” I told her. “Thank you.”

I appreciated her thoughtfulness, especially since I knew how hard it was for her to initiate conversation. But I was busy, and I never asked her anything more. Why should I? Dewey sat on everyone’s lap. Of course it was special.

After a few short conversations, Yvonne stopped talking. She faded back into the background, and her special moment with Dewey became just another brushstroke on the giant portrait of his life. It wasn’t until two years later, after I heard how thrilled she was that her name appeared in Dewey, that I sat down with her. By then, I had collected so many sweet but simple stories from regular library users about Dewey—stories that amounted to little more than “I can’t explain it, he just made me happy”—that I doubted there was much to this one.

But Yvonne’s story was different. There was something about her moment with Dewey that reminded me why I have always loved libraries. And small towns. And cats. Yvonne was so closed off, I must admit, that I didn’t learn much about her. I thought I had, at the time, but when I read this story, I realized that she remained, and always will remain, something of a mystery.

What I learned instead is how different lives can be, even when they are lived alongside each other. And how easy it is to get lost, even in a straightforward little town like Spencer, Iowa. I learned how hard it is to know someone, and how little that matters if your heart is open to their needs. We don’t have to understand; we just have to care.

That is something, once again, I learned from Dewey. That was his Magic. In the end, I guess, this is another story about him.

Yvonne grew up in Sutherland, Iowa, a town of about eight hundred people, thirty miles southwest of Spencer. Her father was what you might call a tinkerer. He worked a small rented farm near County Road M12, served in a series of low-level county government positions, and owned an old water truck that he filled from a well on their property and drove around to local feedlots. I’ve known a lot of men like him: quiet and a bit shambling, often unnoticed but always there, a good guy searching for the leg up that never arrives. Eventually, after he was voted out of office, the family drifted out of the farm lease and into a house in town. Her father took up factory work. Yvonne, five years old and the youngest of five children, took to caring for the cats that roamed their new property.

I remember those rural childhood days myself: the long, slow seasons, the hours spent playing with my brothers in the yard while my parents worked to make the farm produce. I still remember, as if it was yesterday, the afternoon my dad brought home Snowball, the first animal I ever loved. It was a hot early summer day, and I stood in the yard watching him coming closer and closer out of the knee-high corn. Dad was sweating so badly under his hat, it almost looked like tears, and as I followed his slipstream into the house, I could see he had something in his hands, even though I didn’t know what it was.

“It must have been born in the field,” he told my mother, “because there were a bunch of them hidden down there. The mother and other babies were killed by the plow. This one,” he said, holding up the kitten, which was covered in blood, “had its back legs cut off.”

Most farmers would have left the badly injured animal to die, letting nature have its way, but when my dad saw the kitten was still alive, he picked it up and rushed home. My mother, as much an animal lover as my father, took over from there, nursed it for a month with milk from a bottle. She gave it warm blankets at night, and let it stay in her sweltering kitchen by day. I watched over her shoulder as she cared for it, amazed by the kitten’s recovery. By midsummer, Snowball’s stumps had healed. A lot of people think cats are lazy, but the effort Snowball made! The determination! In no time, it seemed, she developed the ability to balance on her front two legs, with her back end held straight up. Then she learned to hop, with her rear end swinging in the air like a highfalutin lady, and her tail pointed toward the sky. I loved it. That summer, Snowball and I played together every day. I ran around the farmyard, laughing and shouting, and she hopped after me, her back end waving. In the fall, at the end of each school day, I jumped off the bus, threw down my book bag, and raced into the farmyard, yelling for her. She didn’t live long, and when she died I was inconsolable for a while, but I will never forget the way Snowball danced around that yard, in slow motion, like she was doing the jitterbug hop. Her determination, and the lesson from my parents to respect and cherish every living thing, were the lasting legacies of my summer with Snowball.

How different was five-year-old Yvonne’s experience? I don’t know. I don’t know if she played with her older siblings, or if she was left alone in the yard. I don’t know if she chose the company of cats out of loneliness or out of a natural love. I do know her parents, like a lot of farm people, didn’t think much of cats and didn’t help her care for the ones that kept appearing in their yard. “The cats were always dying or disappearing,” Yvonne told me. “It broke my heart. But my parents would never buy them food, no matter how often I asked. They said they couldn’t afford it.”

My clearest childhood memory is of my father, with that injured cat in his hands, talking with my mother. Yvonne’s clearest memory is of a photograph. She was six. Her mother wanted a picture of her kids with their favorite cats. Yvonne couldn’t find her favorite, a black-and-white kitten known as Black-and-White. Her mother told her to quit looking already and stand with her brother and sister, who were both holding up wiggling cats to the camera.

“Come on, now, smile,” her mom commanded.

“I can’t find my kitten.”

“It doesn’t matter. Just smile.”

Afterward, Yvonne stared off into the neighboring fields, biting her lip. There are flat empty spaces in Iowa, even in the towns, where you can watch the world stretch away from you. You can see forever out there if you keep looking, but eventually Yvonne turned away, walked over to her mother, and asked if she would take a picture of her with one of the other cats.

“No,” her mom said. “I’m out of film.”

“I wanted to cry,” Yvonne told me, “but I didn’t. I knew they would make fun of me.”

Ten years later, when Yvonne was sixteen, her father got a job at the Witco factory, and the family moved to Spencer. I remember venturing into Spencer when I was a teenager living in the nearby town of Hartley. It was terrifying. The girls at Spencer High School seemed so worldy, so willing to dress fashionably and talk to boys and linger on street corners, as if they were one step away from being Pink Ladies in Grease. I remember thinking they were physically bigger than us country kids, that they could crush us if they wanted. That was Spencer to me, yet I had every advantage. My grandmother lived in town, so I knew the streets and shops; I went to Hartley High School, one of the larger schools in the surrounding area; I was an outgoing, popular girl who almost never felt out of place or overwhelmed. So I can imagine what it must have been like for Yvonne, a shy girl who had never spent time in Spencer, never succeeded in school, and never been comfortable with social situations, even in Sutherland. I understood what she meant when she told me her year and a half at Spencer High School was torture.

Her parents gave her one thing to ease the loneliness: a cat. Just before the move to Spencer, Yvonne’s aunt May’s cat gave birth to a litter of half-Siamese kittens. As soon as Yvonne saw them, she fell in love. Somehow, she convinced her parents to let her adopt one of the half-Siamese kittens. When they arrived for the adoption, the rambunctious brood was sprinting around the yard, rumbling and tumbling and throwing dirt in one another’s faces. Yvonne was overwhelmed. She stared at them and wondered, How am I ever going to pick my cat?

Then one kitten, who must have been hiding, crept over and looked up at her with big shy eyes, as if whispering, in the quietest and sweetest voice imaginable: “Hi.”

“Okay, I’ll take you,” Yvonne whispered back.

She named the kitten Tobi. She was browner and rounder than a typical Siamese but had the luxurious softness and gorgeous blue eyes so typical of the breed. And soft wasn’t just a description of her fur. Tobi was a soft cat. Soft spoken. Soft in manner. She wasn’t courageous, either. She ran when anyone entered a room; she ran when she heard a door open anywhere in the house; she sprinted to the safety of Yvonne’s bed when she heard footsteps on the stairs. She went outside only once, running right past Yvonne as she stood in the doorway. Yvonne stepped out onto the concrete stoop and saw Tobi disappearing around the corner of her parent’s Spencer house. She ran the other way around the house and met her in the backyard. Tobi came tearing toward her and leapt straight into her arms, a look of terror on her soft little face.

“Oh, don’t do that again, kitty,” Yvonne begged. “Please don’t do that again.” It was impossible to tell who was more scared.

“Tobi was a cuddler.” That was the way Yvonne described her. “She always wanted to be on top of me. She slept in my bed every night.”

“I bet that made you feel good,” I replied.

“Yeah, it did,” she said. Then she sat looking at me, waiting for my next question.

After high school, Yvonne joined her father at the Witco plant. The factory produced handheld hydraulic tools, known as grease guns, that squirt grease into small spaces inside car engines and other machines. After her struggles at Spencer High School, the line was a relief. The work was fast-paced and physically demanding, but Yvonne was young and strong. She could fasten bolts as quickly as anyone on the line, and it didn’t require talking to her colleagues.

“It wasn’t the best job in the world,” she told me, as if uncomfortable with her obvious pride in a task well done. “But it was work.” And there is nothing better, as I well know, than meaningful work.

Yvonne didn’t have much of a social life outside the factory, but whenever she finished a shift, she could count on one thing: Tobi would be waiting. The kitten liked high places, away from kicking feet and swinging arms, and she often watched for Yvonne from the top of the bookcase. Other times, Tobi was staring from the top of the stairs when Yvonne opened the front door. If the house was empty, Tobi followed her around: to the kitchen, to the den. But when someone came home, they both headed to Yvonne’s room and closed the door. Tobi, Yvonne soon realized, spent most of the day in her bed, under her covers, waiting for the only person she felt comfortable with to return. And while the idea never consciously crossed her mind, that was exactly what Yvonne wanted: a friend who would always be there for her.

In her twenties, Yvonne moved out of her parents’ house and into a fourplex apartment house with her older sister. Tobi loved the quiet. Yvonne loved being on her own. She thrived on the assembly line, affixing small bolts to grease guns. For years, Spencer’s grid of numbered streets had intimidated her, and everyone she passed seemed like a stranger. But slowly she developed an appreciation of the patterns, and she began to recognize the faces around her. She shopped in the stores along Grand Avenue or at the new mall on the south side of town. She bought clothes at the Fashion Bug and Tobi’s favorite food, Tender Vittles, at a little locally owned pet store. One Halloween, she bought a scary mask. She put it on and tromped heavily up the stairs. She came through the door to the bedroom with a low moan—“ahhhhhhh”—and Tobi’s beautiful blue Siamese eyes popped right out of her head. She started to rear back, her fur fluffing out in fear, and Yvonne felt so bad that she tore the mask right off.

“Ah, Tobi,” she said. “It’s only me.”

Tobi stared for a few more seconds, then turned and looked away, as if to say, I knew that.

The next day, Yvonne decided to scare Tobi again. She put on the mask and stomped through the bedroom door. Tobi took one look and turned away in disgust, as if to say, Please. I know it’s you.

Yvonne laughed—“You’re a smart one, aren’t you, Tobi?”—and gave her a hug. Life was simple, but life was good. Yvonne Barry had found her comfort zone; she had found a companion; and she was happy. Her life was lived in repeated details, small moments in time. At Christmas, Yvonne built a little tunnel out of presents, and Tobi sat in that tunnel for days. “I thought she was unique. Oh, Tobi loves the Christmas tree. But then I found out a lot of other cats did that, too.”

In the evening, in her bedroom, she spun Tobi in a swivel chair, the little cat lunging at her hand every time she passed by. Even decades later, Yvonne smiled at the memory. Tobi loved that swivel chair. And if Tobi loved it, then Yvonne loved it.

When the local economy turned sour in the mid-1980s, and Yvonne lost several of her weekly shifts, she moved back in with her parents. I don’t know how Yvonne really felt about this, because she wouldn’t say, but I don’t think it was much of a change. “My rent was too high” was all she told me. “I asked my parents if I could come back, and they said okay.

“Sometimes, my dad wiggled his finger under his newspaper,” she continued. “Tobi would jump for it, and dad would laugh. We called it the old newspaper game. But mostly, you know, with my parents, Tobi just sat on the back of the chair, staring out the window while dad read the paper.”

I don’t know what to make of a story like that. Was there more laughter and fun in that house than I imagined? Did Tobi break through a quiet man’s shell? Or was the old newspaper game a brief moment of levity in an otherwise quiet and dusty world? I want to hear the laughter, but I can’t help but imagine the hours and days and weeks—even months, if I understood Yvonne’s inflections correctly—between rounds of the old newspaper game. I can’t help but imagine an older man sitting silently in his chair, a newspaper shielding him from view; a little cat looking away to stare out the window; and a young woman watching them, half hidden in the doorway. Yvonne’s siblings had moved out, and I can’t believe much more than emptiness filled the long hours in the quiet house. Her mother read romance novels in her bedroom. Her father watched baseball on television. Yvonne and Tobi slunk upstairs, as quiet as mice, to play spin-the-cat-on-the-chair.

But then, only a couple blocks away, there was Dewey.

A library is more than a storeroom for books. In fact, most of the smart librarians I know believe one of its primary functions doesn’t involve books at all. That function is openness and availability. In a world where many people feel displaced by society, a library is a free place to go. How many times have you heard an impoverished child, now successfully grown up, say a library saved his life? Yes, the knowledge stored in the books, and now on the computers, expanded his universe beyond the narrow slice of world he inhabited. But the library also provided something else: space. If there was fighting at home, the child could escape into silence. If he felt neglected, he could find human interaction. It’s not even necessary, in a library, to talk to anyone. That’s a wonderful thing about the way people are wired. Often, it’s enough to simply be in the presence of one another, even if we never say a word.

When I became the director of the Spencer Public Library, my first priority was to make the library more open, accessible, and friendly. New books and materials were part of my plan, but I also wanted to change the attitude. I wanted people to feel comfortable in our space, like they were part of a community instead of visitors to a municipal building. I had the walls painted brighter colors and the imposing black furniture replaced with more comfortable tables and chairs. I started a fund to buy artwork for the walls and sculpture for the tops of the shelves. I instructed the staff to smile at every visitor and say hello. When Dewey appeared in the book return box less than six months later, I saw immediately he would fit perfectly with the plan. I knew he was a calm kitten; I knew he would never cause problems. But I thought he would just be background, like another piece of artwork to make the library feel like a home.

But Dewey had no intention of being background. From the second his paws healed (he suffered frostbite in the book return box) and he could walk the library without discomfort, Dewey insisted on being front and center. The paradox for a librarian is that, for a library to work, you can’t be too friendly. You want people to feel welcome, but you don’t want them to feel hassled. A library is not a social environment. You can enter anytime, but you only have to be as involved as you want. It’s your choice. If you want conversation, you can chat all day. If you want anonymity, the library promises that, too. Many people, especially those who are marginalized or nervous in social situations, love the library’s mix of privacy and public space—the chance to be surrounded by people without the pressure of interacting with them.

This can create a conundrum for librarians in the case of, for instance, Bill Mullenberg. For decades, Bill was the principal of Spencer High School, a job that was not only respected and important but required him to talk with hundreds of people every week. I know retirement was difficult for him, because it is always hard to leave behind your life’s work. But Bill’s transition was made much harder by the death of his beloved wife.

After she died, he started coming to the library every morning to read the newspaper—and I knew it wasn’t to save the subscription cost. Bill was lonely at home by himself, and he wanted a place to go. What was the staff to do? We said hi, but it would have been against the ethos of a library to force the conversation past small talk. Besides, we were busy. Spencer didn’t pay us to be friends or therapists; everyone on staff had to work forty hours every week, at least, just to keep the place running.

That’s when Dewey waltzed in. As a cat, he didn’t have the social limitations of a librarian. And as our social director and official greeter, he didn’t have other work to keep him busy in the back offices. Dewey thought nothing of walking up to strangers and jumping on their laps. If they pushed him away, he’d come back two or three times, until he got the message he wasn’t wanted. Then he’d walk away, no harm done. A pushy cat, after all, is not nearly as annoying as an overly “helpful” librarian, because there’s no feeling that they are judging you or pressuring you or asking you about things you’d rather not share.

The effect when a visitor embraced Dewey’s presence, however, was profound. Within a month of Bill accepting Dewey as a lap mate, Bill’s demeanor changed. For one thing, he was smiling. I think the first time I’d seen him smile since his wife died was the second or third time Dewey jumped into his lap, pushed aside the newspaper, and demanded affection. Now he was smiling all the time, just as he had in his old job. He was interacting more with the staff, and he was staying longer each morning to hang out and chat. Watching Bill, I realized for the first time that Dewey was more than fuzzy artwork walking around the floor.

After Dewey arrived, visits to the library increased dramatically. I’m not sure he brought people through the door for their first visit, but I think he convinced them to come back. Yvonne, for instance, didn’t visit the library until Dewey was four or five months old. She had read the article about him in the Spencer Daily Reporter shortly after his rescue, but it wasn’t until summer that she decided to stop in. By then, Dewey was half grown. With his bushy tail, brilliant copper fur, and magnificent ruff, he already looked like the pampered, patrolling King of the Library. Which he was. Cool, confident Dewey was completely at ease in his surroundings. The first time Yvonne saw him, he was strutting around as if he owned the place.

What a beautiful cat, she thought.

I don’t know how they met. I assume Dewey approached Yvonne, because that’s what he always did, but she may well have been drawn to him. He was easy to talk to, for lack of a better phrase, since there’s no social pressure in petting a cat. It wasn’t until they were well into their relationship that I noticed, in passing, that Dewey was usually at her side. He rubbed her leg, sniffed her hand when she petted him, listened to her whispered greetings. When she wadded a piece of paper into a ball and threw it to him, he pounced on it, rolled on his back, and kicked it into the air with his back legs. So she threw more.

She bought him trinkets at the mall, the same toys she bought for Tobi. She liked to hold the toys out at different heights and make Dewey leap for them. One day, she held a toy at head height, about five feet off the floor. “Come on, Dewey,” she told him. “You can do it.”

Dewey stared up at the toy, then looked down. He can’t do it, Yvonne thought. Then Dewey turned and sprang—like a rocket, as Yvonne remembered it, just like a rocket—and grabbed the toy out of her hand. She stared at him in amazement, then started to laugh. “You fooled me, Dewey,” she said. “You fooled me.”

In November, she came to Dewey’s first birthday party. She’s not in the video, but I’m not surprised. Yvonne is one of those people who stands beside you for an hour until you look over and say, “Oh, I didn’t see you there.” She is the quiet but industrious worker who never seems to come out of his office; the neighbor you rarely see; the woman on the bus who never looks up from her book. It’s wrong to think of this as sad, or unfulfilling, because who are we to judge anyone’s internal life? How are we to know what a person’s days are like? Emily Dickinson’s neighbors thought of her as a sad spinster living quietly in her parents’ house, when in fact she was one of the greatest poets in the history of the English language and a frequent correspondent with the most accomplished writers of her day. Shyness isn’t a problem, after all; it’s a personality type.

Dewey, of course, was exactly the opposite. Watching him in that birthday video is to see a true ham at work. Children were crowded around him, jostling for position, but Dewey never seemed startled. No matter how much they grabbed and shrieked, he enjoyed the attention. He lapped it up almost as fervently as he licked his mouse-shaped, cream cheese-covered cat food birthday cake. Dewey didn’t have a problem biting into that cake right in front of his adoring crowd. And I bet, after the video was turned off, he did something just as magical: He walked up to Yvonne—or at least made eye contact with her—and made her feel special for coming.

I know for a fact that happened a year later, at a library party in 1989. About two hundred people came to celebrate the reopening of the library—it had been closed briefly for remodeling—and I was busy giving tours of the improvements. Yvonne was there, on the edge of the crowd, probably feeling like she was back in high school, because anonymity in a library is a blessing but anonymity at a party is awkward and unsettling. Her discomfort ended, however, when she saw Dewey weaving through the crowd. No one was paying attention to him, and that fact clearly irked him to no end. Then he spotted Yvonne and waltzed over. She picked him up. She held him to her heart. Dewey put his head on her shoulder and started purring.

“Someone took a picture of us,” Yvonne told me several times in our conversations. “I don’t know who it was, but they took a picture of us. It was only my back. It was Dewey’s face. But there was a picture of us together.”

I don’t want to make too much of Dewey’s relationship with Yvonne. I don’t want to imply that her life was centered around the library. I know she led a circumscribed existence, and I know she was no Emily Dickinson, but I also know that Yvonne Barry has kept a large piece of her soul hidden from view. I know she corresponded regularly with friends. I know, like most of us, she had a love-hate relationship with her job. She was proud of her work but increasingly frustrated at being passed over for higher-paying positions. I know she loved her family, and beneath their silences was a complex and multifaceted web of relationships. What those facets were . . . they’re hers to keep, as she has chosen, for herself alone.

What she shared with me was Tobi. I think Dewey, perhaps because he was so different from her, was Yvonne’s social outlet. Tobi was Yvonne’s best friend. She loved to be with Dewey, but she loved Tobi. And Tobi loved her in return. More than anything in the world, Tobi cared about Yvonne Barry, and she was excited whenever Yvonne walked through the door. Tobi and Yvonne weren’t opposites, you see, they were soul mates. When Yvonne told me, “She was a quiet cat. She was gentle. She never wanted to get in any trouble with anybody; she just wanted to live and let live, you know what I mean?” my first thought was, She could be talking about herself.

They were also dedicated to each other. “I never took any trips overnight,” Yvonne told me, “because I couldn’t bring myself to leave Tobi.” They traveled together once, to visit her sister Dorothy in Minneapolis. For the first fifteen miles, Tobi screamed and slammed her face against the bars of her cage. It wasn’t until Milford, Iowa, that she realized she wasn’t going to the veterinarian’s office and settled down. For a few miles, she meowed at Yvonne, as if hoping for an explanation. But how can a cat understand a concept like Minnesota? Eventually, she slunk to the back of her carrier and lay down . . . for five hours. In Minneapolis, Tobi went straight to the guest bedroom. She used her litter, ate her Tender Vittles, and hid under the bedcovers until Yvonne came in each night. Then Tobi climbed up and nestled against Yvonne’s neck, overjoyed to have her best friend back. “I love you, Tobi,” Yvonne whispered, snuggling up to her cat. Except for the drive, it was like any other weekend of their lives.

It’s tempting to say that’s the reason Yvonne love Tobi so much: The cat was the only constant in her life. But, in reality, I think Yvonne’s life was mostly constants. The same job on the assembly line, doing the same task. The same errands. The same meals. The same silent evenings at home with her parents. Even her life with Dewey had a comforting familiarity because she knew he would always be there. They may not have had a lot of excitement, but Tobi and Yvonne had their routine. They had each other. And that was enough.

But there’s one thing about cats we must all face: Most of the time, we outlive them. Thirteen years of love was a small slice of life for Yvonne, but it was a lifetime for Tobi. By 1990, the cat was visibly slowing down, and her arthritis made it difficult to climb up and down the stairs. Her fur thinned, and more and more often, Yvonne came home to find Tobi curled so tightly in their bed that she didn’t want to wake up.

Around the same time, Yvonne discovered the Bible. She says the catalyst was the buildup to the first Gulf War. The threat of violence made her anxious and unsure about the future, and she felt unhappiness bearing down like a weight. I have no reason to doubt that, but there might have been other pains more difficult for a quiet person to discuss. Like her frustration with the Witco plant, where management refused to promote her to a better position even though she knew she could handle the work. And the soreness in her knees, caused by standing for eight hours a day at the assembly line. And her mother’s deteriorating health. And couldn’t part of it have been, with as much as Tobi meant to her, the inevitable and obvious decline of her beloved cat?

As war approached, and Tobi’s health faltered, Yvonne’s religious reading increased. She had initially been drawn to biblical prophecies of war and destruction, but it was the hope and comfort of the Lord that ultimately inspired her. Six months after picking up the Bible for the first time, as the troop carriers rolled across the Iraqi border and explosions blackened the Baghdad sky, Yvonne Barry knelt beside her bed and asked Jesus to enter her heart.

“I felt like I had stuck my finger in a light socket,” she said of that moment. “I felt so different, and after that, I had the most peaceful night’s sleep of my life. And I knew something had changed.”

Yvonne began reading her Bible for at least an hour every day. She started attending First Baptist Church twice on Sundays and every Thursday for prayer group. There was often a group activity of some sort at the church, and Yvonne found herself drawn to their communion. On quiet nights at home, she sought comfort in the Book. Sometimes Tobi was there, curled at her side, but the cat spent most of her time sleeping in a hooded basket, which Yvonne filled with sheep’s wool to keep her warm. Yvonne heard Fancy Feast helped cats live longer, so she started buying Fancy Feast instead of Tender Vittles, even though she couldn’t really afford it. She adored Tobi; she cared for her as she always had. But after dinner, instead of spinning Tobi in her swivel chair, Yvonne went back to her Bible, leaving Tobi more and more on her own.

And then, a year after Yvonne became a Christian, Tobi started stumbling. One summer evening, she fell in the bedroom and urinated on herself. She looked up at Yvonne, scared to death, begging her to explain. Yvonne took her to Dr. Esterly, who gave her the bad news. Tobi’s liver had failed. The vet could keep her alive for a few days, but she would be in a great deal of pain.

Yvonne looked at the floor. “I don’t want that,” she whispered.

She held Tobi in her arms. She stroked her as Dr. Esterly prepared the needle. The cat laid her head against Yvonne’s elbow and closed her eyes, as if she felt safe and comfortable with her friend. When she felt the prick, Tobi let out a terrible yowl, but she didn’t bolt. She simply looked up into Yvonne’s face, terrified, wondering, then slumped over and slipped away. Yvonne, with the help of her father, buried her in a far corner of their backyard.

She had so many happy memories. The Christmas tree. The spinning chair. The nights together in bed. But that last yowl, a sound unlike any Tobi had ever made . . . it was something Yvonne could not forget. It tore her, and a great rush of guilt came flooding out. Tobi dedicated her life to Yvonne, but in her last years, when Tobi was old and sick and needed her most, Yvonne felt she had turned away. She hadn’t spun her in the swivel chair; she hadn’t built Christmas present tunnels; she hadn’t noticed how sick Tobi was getting.

That night, she went to prayer meeting. Her eyes were puffy and red, and the tears were still on her cheeks. Her fellow worshippers kept asking, “Are you okay, Yvonne? What’s the matter?”

“My cat died today,” she told them.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” they said, patting her on the arm. Then, with nothing more to say, they walked away. They meant well, Yvonne knew. They were good people. But they didn’t understand. To them, it was just a cat. Like the rest of us, they didn’t even know Tobi’s name.

The next day, when she visited the Spencer Public Library, Yvonne didn’t feel any better. In fact, she felt worse. More guilty. More alone. She had no desire, she realized, to even browse the library books. Instead, she went straight to a chair, sat down, and thought about Tobi.

A minute later, Dewey came around the corner and walked slowly toward her. Every time he had seen her, for at least the last few years, Dewey had meowed and run to the women’s bathroom door. Yvonne would open the door, and Dewey would jump on the sink and meow until she turned on the water. After staring at the column of water for half a minute, he’d bat it with his paw, jump back in shock, then creep forward and repeat the process again. And again. And again. It was their special game, a ritual that had developed over a hundred mornings spent together. And Dewey did it every single time.

But not this time. This time, Dewey stopped, cocked his head, and stared at her. Then he sprang into her lap, nuzzled her softly with his head, and curled up in her arms. She stroked him gently, occasionally wiping away a tear, until his breathing became gentle and relaxed. Within minutes, he was asleep.

She kept petting him, slowly and gently. After a while, the weight of her sadness seemed to lighten, and then lift, until, finally, it felt as if it were floating away. It wasn’t just that Dewey realized how much she hurt. It wasn’t just that he knew her, or that he was a friend. As she watched Dewey sleeping, she felt her guilt disappear. She had done her best for Tobi, she realized. She had loved her little cat. She wasn’t required to spend every minute proving that. There was nothing wrong with having a life of her own. It was time, for both of their sakes, to let Tobi go.

My friend Bret Witter, who helps me with these books, has a pet peeve (pun intended). He hates when people ask him, “So why was Dewey so special?”

“Vicki spent two hundred eighty-eight pages trying to explain that,” he says. “If I could summarize it for you in a sentence, she would have written a greeting card instead.”

He thought that was clever. Then he realized the question always made him think of something that happened in his own life, something that didn’t involve cats or libraries or even Iowa but that might provide a short answer nonetheless. So he’d crack about the greeting card, then tell a story about growing up with a severely mentally and physically handicapped kid in his hometown of Huntsville, Alabama. The boy went to his school and his church, so by the time the incident happened in seventh grade, Bret had spent time with him six days a week, nine months a year, for seven years. In that whole time, the boy, who was too handicapped to speak, had never gotten emotional, never expressed happiness or frustration, never brought attention to himself in any way.

Then one day, in the middle of Sunday school, he started screaming. He pushed over a chair, picked up a container of pencils, and, with an exaggerated motion, began throwing them wildly around the room. The other kids sat at the table, staring. The Sunday school teacher, after some initial hesitation, began yelling at him to settle down, to be careful, to stop disrupting the class. The boy kept screaming. The teacher was about to throw him out of the room when, all of a sudden, a kid named Tim stood up, walked over, put his arm around the boy “like he was a human being,” as Bret always tells it, and said, “It’s all right, Kyle. Everything is okay.”

And Kyle calmed down. He stopped flailing, dropped the pencils, and started crying. And Bret thought, I wish I had done that. I wish I had understood what Kyle needed.

That’s Dewey. He always seemed to understand, and he always knew what to do. I’m not suggesting Dewey was the same as the boy who reached out—Dewey was a cat, after all—but he had an empathy that was rare. He sensed the moment, and he responded. That’s what makes people, and animals, special. Seeing. Caring. Loving. Doing.

It’s not easy. Most of the time, we are so busy and distracted that we don’t even realize we missed the opportunity. I can look back now and see that the first ritual Yvonne developed with Dewey, before the bathroom-water-swatting, was catnip. Every day, she clipped fresh catnip out of her yard and placed it on the library carpet. Dewey always rushed over to sniff it. After a few deep snorts, he plowed his head into it, chewing wildly, his mouth flapping and his tongue lapping at the air. He rubbed his back on the floor so the little green leaves stuck in his fur. He rolled onto his stomach and pushed his chin against the carpet, slithering like the Grinch stealing Christmas presents. Yvonne always knelt beside him, laughing and whispering, “You really love that catnip, Dewey. You really love that catnip, don’t you?” as he flailed his legs in a series of wild kicks until, finally, he collapsed exhausted onto the floor, his legs spread out in every direction and his belly pointed toward the sky.

Then one day, with Dewey in full catnip conniption (the library staff called it the Dewey Mambo), Yvonne looked up and saw me staring at her. I didn’t say anything, but a few days later, I stopped her and said, “Yvonne, please don’t bring Dewey so much catnip. I know he enjoys it, but it’s not good for him.”

She didn’t say anything. She just looked down and walked away. I only meant for her to cut her gift back to, for instance, once a week, but she never brought another leaf of catnip to the library.

At the time, I thought I was doing the right thing, because that catnip was wearing Dewey out. He would go absolutely bonkers for twenty minutes, then Yvonne would leave and Dewey would pass out for hours. That cat was catatonic. It didn’t seem fair. Yvonne was enjoying Dewey’s company, but his other friends weren’t getting a chance.

In hindsight, I should have been more delicate in handling the catnip incident. I should have understood that this wasn’t just a habit for Yvonne, it was an important part of her day. Instead of examining the root of the behavior, I looked at the outward actions and told her to stop. Instead of putting my arm around her, I pushed her away.

But Dewey—he never did that. A thousand times, in a thousand different ways, Dewey was there when people needed him. He did it for dozens of people, I’m sure, who have never opened up to me. He did it for Bill Mullenburg, and he did it for Yvonne, exactly as Tim had done it with Kyle in Bret’s Sunday school class. When no one else understood, Dewey made the gesture. He didn’t understand the root causes, of course, but he sensed something was wrong. And out of animal instinct, he acted. In his own way, Dewey put his arm around Yvonne and said, It’s all right. You are one of us. You will be fine.

I’m not saying Dewey changed Yvonne’s life. I think he eased her sorrow, but he by no means ended it. A month after Tobi’s passing, Yvonne lost her temper on the assembly line and was not only fired but escorted out of the building. She had been frustrated by management for a long time, but I can’t help but believe the last straw was the pain of Tobi’s death.

It didn’t stop there. A few years later, her mother died of colon cancer. Two years after that, Yvonne was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She drove six hours to Iowa City, for six months, to receive treatment. By the time she beat the cancer, her legs had given way. She had stood in the same position on the assembly line eight hours a day, five days a week, for years, and the effort had worn down her knees.

But she still had her faith. She still had her routines. And she still had Dewey. He lived fifteen years after Tobi’s death, and for all those years, Yvonne Barry came to the library several times each week to see him. If you had asked me at the time, I would not have said their relationship was particularly special. Many people came into the library every week, and almost all of them stopped to visit with Dewey. How was I to know the difference between those who thought Dewey was cute, and those who needed and valued his friendship and love?

After Dewey’s memorial service, Yvonne told me about the day Dewey sat on her lap and comforted her. It still meant something to her, more than a decade later. And I was touched. Until that moment, I didn’t know Yvonne had ever had a cat of her own. I didn’t know what Tobi meant to her, but I knew Dewey had comforted her, as he had always comforted me, simply by being present in her life. Little moments can mean everything. They can change a life. Dewey taught me that. Yvonne’s story (once I took the time to listen) confirmed it. That moment on her lap epitomized Dewey’s understanding and friendship, his effect on the people of Spencer, Iowa, in a way I had never considered before.

I didn’t notice when Yvonne stopped coming to the library after Dewey’s death. I knew her visits had become less frequent, but she disappeared just as she appeared: like a shadow, without a sound. By the time I went to visit her two years after Dewey’s death, she was living in a rehabilitation facility with a brace on her right leg. She was only in her fifties, but the doctors weren’t sure she would walk again. Even if she recovered, she had no place to go. Her father was in the nursing home next door, and the family house had been sold. Yvonne told the new owners, “Don’t dig down in that corner of the yard because that’s where my Tobi is buried.”

“Tobi’s still down there,” she told me. “At least her body anyway.”

There was a Bible on her nightstand and a scripture taped to her wall. Her father was in Yvonne’s room in a wheelchair, a frail old man who had lost his ability to hear and see. She introduced us, but beyond that, Yvonne hardly seemed to notice he was there. Instead, she showed me a small figurine of a Siamese cat, which she kept on a tray beside her bed. Her aunt Marge had given it to her, in honor of Tobi. No, she didn’t have any photographs of Tobi to share. Her sister had put all of Yvonne’s belongings into storage, and she didn’t have the key. If I needed a photograph, she said, there was always the one of her and Dewey, taken at the library party twenty years before. Someone, somewhere, probably had a copy.

When I asked her about Dewey, she smiled. She told me about the women’s bathroom, and his birthday party, and finally about the afternoon he spent on her lap. Then she looked down and shook her head sadly.

“I went to the library several times to see his grave,” she said. “I’ve been inside. I looked around. It just doesn’t seem the same. No Dewey. I mean, I saw the statue of him and I thought, That’s nice, it looks just like Dewey, but it wasn’t like Dewey was really there.

“I don’t go to that place anymore. It was that cat, you know. Dewey, he’d always be there. Even if he was hiding somewhere, I’d just say to myself, ‘Well, I’ll see him next time.’ But then I went and no Dewey. I looked at the place where he used to sit and it was empty and I thought, Well, nothing to do here. It just feels like a building with books in it now.”

I wanted to ask her more, to figure something out, to learn something profound about cats and libraries and the crosscurrents of loneliness and love underneath the surface of even the most peaceful towns and the most peaceful lives. I wanted to know her because, in the end, it felt as if she was barely present in her own story.

But Yvonne just smiled. Was she thinking of that moment with Dewey on her lap? Or was she thinking of something else, something deeper that she would never share, and that only she would ever understand?

“He was my Dewey Boy.” That’s all she said. “Big Dew.”