Dewey's Nine Lives

TWO

Mr. Sir Bob Kittens (aka Ninja, aka Mr. Pumpkin Pants)

“I simply wanted to thank you for putting into such eloquent words what many of us who have loved a cat, or any animal, feel every day. They are our family, and we love them just as deeply and miss them just as desperately when they are gone.”

I’ve known a lot of cats in my life, so I know that all cats are different, even the special ones. Some cats are special because they are sweet. Some cats are special because they are survivors. Some cats are special because they were exactly what someone needed at exactly the time they needed it: a soul mate, a companion, a distraction, a friend. And some cats are just plain crazy.

That would be Mr. Sir Bob Kittens, formerly known as Ninja, who lives in an ordinary suburban house in Michigan with his family, James and Barbara Lajiness and their teenage daughter, Amanda. Mr. Kittens is not the cuddly cat. He’s the quirky cat, the cat with attitude, the one who does his own thing, usually in a way you can’t quite comprehend. Maybe that’s why he was the last kitten adopted from his litter at the Humane Society of Huron Valley in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Or maybe it was the note on his cage: NINJA, it read. Then: DOESN’T GET ALONG WITH OTHER CATS OR DOGS. Apparently, he fought them instead.

When Barbara Lajiness met Ninja, it was not love at first sight. Yes, he was gorgeous, with big amber eyes, bright orange fur, and the longest whiskers she had ever seen on a kitten. Yes, he seemed intelligent and well behaved. But he wasn’t active. He wasn’t climbing and clamoring for attention like the other kittens in the shelter. He wasn’t . . . well, he wasn’t doing anything. He was just lying alone in his big empty cage, hardly bothering to look at the strangers wandering by.

“He’s great with people,” the volunteer said when she saw Barbara looking at Ninja. “It’s just other animals he has a problem with.”

Barbara’s husband and daughter wanted him. They had sensed something special in his mischievous eyes and seemingly calm disposition. When Barbara held him, she felt it, too. A potential energy, perhaps, that seemed barely contained. So she put him down and told her daughter sorry, she wasn’t ready. The family had lost their beloved cat only a month before. Barbara didn’t tell her daughter this, but she was terrified of becoming emotionally invested in another living thing that would only end up dying on her.

But Ninja was so sleek and beautiful. And her daughter and husband were so adamant. And every time she went back to the shelter, which she never should have done but just couldn’t help it, it became more and more clear to Barbara that poor Ninja was never going to get adopted. Not in that isolation cell that made him seem like the worst inmate in the prison, and not with that sign on his cage. “He wasn’t a Mr. Cuddle, purr-like-a-freight-train cat,” Barbara recalled, “but he deserved a home. Every animal deserves a home. It was sad that no one had a place in their lives for him.” Barbara cared about saving animals, and here was a cat that obviously needed saving. He needed a good, loving, pet-free (obviously) home, and that is exactly what she could provide. She couldn’t turn away. Her whole life, largely thanks to her mother, Barbara Lajiness had never turned away from a creature in need.

“Why do you call him Ninja?” Barbara asked the volunteer as she was filling out the final paperwork and paying for his adoption.

“Don’t worry,” the volunteer replied with a smile. “You’ll see.”

Barbara’s parents divorced in 1976. She was eight years old, and even at that young age, she knew it was coming. Her parents hadn’t been getting along for years, and life at home had been uncomfortable and tense as two people who had gone separate ways struggled to make it work. Her mother was focused on the family. Her father wanted to have fun: to go drinking, to stay out late without the kids, to travel. When he came home, he was angry and frustrated with his life. Barbara had two teenage brothers, and they didn’t appreciate either his absence or his anger. For a while, everyone yelled. Then nobody talked. Barbara’s outlet, even at that young age, was the family cat, Samantha. That’s good, the little girl thought when her brothers told her their father had moved out for good. Now it might be calm in the house. What a sad, sad thought for an eight-year-old child.

But she soon found out that life without her father was far worse than she had expected, at least financially. Almost instantly, the family plummeted from a comfortable, middle-class existence to the poverty line. Her father had a steady job working for Michigan Bell, the local telephone company. Before they were married, her mother had worked for Michigan Bell, too, as a telephone operator. She gave up her job to raise her children. Eighteen years later, she discovered that even in good times, jobs for middle-aged women with skimpy résumés were scarce. In 1976, in the hardscrabble communities around Flint, Michigan, they were nonexistent. There was barely enough work for the men who had once been employed by General Motors but were losing their jobs as the company took their factories overseas. The only job Evelyn Lambert could find to support her children was at a nursing home, cooking breakfast for the residents. Her shift started at 3:00 A.M. She was paid minimum wage.

It wasn’t considered acceptable work for a mother. In 1976, in the small town of Fenton, Michigan, the commuter town outside Flint where the Lamberts lived, no work was considered acceptable for a mother. In Fenton, women didn’t get divorced; they didn’t work outside the home; they didn’t leave their children alone for long stretches of time. Nobody wanted even to acknowledge what had happened to Evelyn Lambert. It was too real somehow, and who knows, it might be contagious. Some of the neighbors openly pitied her, something Barbara’s mother could never stand. Others shunned her. Barbara found herself mocked at elementary school, where everyone seemed to know everything about her mom. Her friends were no longer allowed to come over and play, since there was no one to watch them. In only a few months, Barbara realized, her social status had fallen apart as quickly as the family finances. It didn’t help that her father had moved to Grand Blanc, a nearby suburb of Flint, and was spending his time and money on a woman more interested in living the way he wanted to live.

Finally, a neighbor reached out to them. Her name was Ms. Merce, and she lived a few houses down and across the street. Ms. Merce, along with a few other local women, had started an organization called Adopt-a-Pet. The local humane society, in those days, was essentially an animal disposal unit. They kept the animals only a day or two before putting them to sleep. They were killing animals by the hundreds, and Ms. Merce and her friends didn’t think that was any way for a civilized society to act. Adopt-a-Pet took in animals and kept them as long as it took to find a home. These days, no-kill animal shelters are common throughout the world. But more than thirty years ago, in Flint, Michigan, this was an incomprehensible concept. Cats and dogs were just animals, and animals didn’t have much value. They were disposable playthings that died or ran away and were replaced. Adopt-a-Pet was bucking the attitude of an entire community.

When Ms. Merce asked Evelyn if she would be an animal foster parent, Barbara’s mother was eager to volunteer. Why? Barbara hesitated for a long time before saying simply, “I guess Mom was just hardwired to help animals.” That’s probably somewhat true. Evelyn Lambert had always shown an embarrassing (at the time) level of concern for all living things. She didn’t believe in herbicide, so her lawn was full of weeds. She didn’t believe in waste, so she used old food containers as planters. She preferred herbal remedies to doctors’ visits and despised insecticides. She believed in the sanctity of life. Every life, even insects. She was wired for compassion.

But she was also clearly lonely. And aimless in her unfulfilling job. And stung by the rejection of her husband and community. And eager to make a statement by adopting a cause that her husband would never have endorsed and her small-minded neighbors would never understand. What started as a favor for Adopt-a-Pet became, seemingly overnight, a cause. Almost as quickly, the nebulous idea of “animal foster care” became ten cats of various ages, colors, and conditions living together in one small suburban house.

It was not an easy time. Money was tight. Barbara’s mother watered down the milk to stretch it for a few extra days and made a schedule every Sunday that showed exactly what could be eaten by the children while she was away at work. The biggest treat was a can of soda, which Barbara and her brother Scott had to split, and the biggest argument was always over who had drunk more than their share. Sometimes, there was barely food on the table by Friday night, even as Barbara’s father was off in the next town with another woman, eating at expensive restaurants and taking out-of-state vacations.

Barbara took on the responsibility of running the household. She felt compelled to do it, as much out of fear as love. A few weekends after her parents’ divorce, her neighbors offered to take her on a camping trip. Before the camper reached the end of the block, Barbara started screaming to be taken home. She was deathly afraid that if she left, her mother would be gone when she returned. She turned that terror, that fear of abandonment, into activity. She fed and watered the cats, emptied their litter, and cleaned their messes. She cooked meals in the microwave and washed the dishes when she and Scott were through. Every night before going to bed, she made sure everything was clean and in its proper place, so that her mother wouldn’t have to worry when she arrived home in the middle of the night. If it snowed, nine-year-old Barbara put on her jacket and shoveled the driveway so that her mother could pull right into the garage. She was working to hold their world together, in her own way, as much as her mom.

There weren’t many gifts, even at Christmas. The first year without Dad, the family waited until Christmas Eve to buy a Christmas tree because that’s when the trees were cheapest. On the way home, Barbara and her fifteen-year-old brother, Scott (the oldest brother, Mark, was eighteen and not spending much time with the family), started fighting in the backseat. As they turned into the snowy driveway, their mother starting waving at them to stop.

“Quiet down,” she yelled.

They didn’t.

“Right now. I mean it. Right now.”

The kids sat, shocked, and stared with their mother at the dark house in the silent suburban neighborhood. For a moment, there was nothing but the snow and the wind. Then they heard the tiny meow.

The next second, Evelyn Lambert was out of the car and clambering around in the snow. Her reputation as the “crazy cat lady” had already buzzed around Fenton, and if someone had an animal they didn’t want, they often left it in the Lambert front yard. Over the next few years, the family would turn into the driveway dozens of times to find a sad-eyed animal staring at their car. If it was a dog, they took it into the Adopt-a-Pet office. If it was a cat, they usually kept it because, well, that’s what the Lamberts did. They helped cats in need.

This time, it was Scott who finally found the cat. The throwers had been aiming for the cat lady’s house, no doubt, but they must have gotten the wrong address, because the wet and shivering kitten was buried in the snowbank across the street. Barbara remembers vividly the sight of her brother, a crazy smile on his face and a headband around his ears, walking up the driveway with the light from the garage reflecting off the snow and a tiny, shivering, coal-black kitten huddled inside his jacket.

She remembers pulling the kitten out of her brother’s jacket, snuggling him to her cheek, and saying, “He smells like Hamburger Helper.”

Then she smiled. She hadn’t been expecting any presents that Christmas, but suddenly, as if by magic rather than cruelty and indifference, one had appeared.

She named the kitten Smoky. Although the Lambert house was full of cats, some adopted quickly and some around for months, Smoky was different. When Barbara held him that night, Smoky had hugged her and rubbed against her cheek. That’s when she knew he was hers. Forever. Barbara’s mother called him Black Spaghetti because he was like a limp noodle in her presence. Smoky loved his girl so much that he would let her do anything to him. She dressed him in doll clothes; she pushed him around in a stroller; she carried him on his back in her arms like a newborn baby. When she played dress-up, she wore him over her shoulders like a shawl. He was totally relaxed in her hands. The other cats slept on the first floor of the house or, in the warmer months, in the unfinished basement. Smoky curled up with Barbara every night.

She loved the other cats, too. They had been her companions in the lonely afternoons when her friends ignored her, and her mother was at work. But Smoky was her friend and confidante. She didn’t want to burden her mother, who was already burdened enough, so she told Smoky her problems. Many times, they sat together in her room with the door closed. “I’m really sad today,” she confided in him. Or “I’m scared and lonely. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” If her mother yelled at her for spilling water on the floor while washing dishes, Smoky understood it wasn’t her fault, she was only a child, and she was trying her best. When she came back from another soul-crushing visit to her father, whom she increasingly hated, Smoky snuggled against her side and purr, purr, purred. He let her pet him on the head and play with his paws. There was nothing more comforting than pushing on Smoky’s footpads and watching his claws come out and retract, come out and retract. He just stared at her, blinking slowly in that sleepy way cats do, purring deep and strong. He never complained.

He was there when, at ten years old, Barbara’s father broke the news. He had a new girlfriend by then, and they were leading a glamorous life in an upper-class suburb of Detroit: vacations, stylish clothes, wine tastings. One weekend, he took Barbara and Scott to a movie, something their mother couldn’t afford. As they were settling into their seats, he turned to Barbara and said, “I got married.”

“No, you didn’t,” she said.

“Yes, Barbara, I did. Last month.”

Barbara sat in the dark movie theatre, crying. She didn’t know what she expected, or why she was upset. Her father was married to someone else. It was done. It had already happened. She didn’t even know why it bothered her. She had known forever that he wasn’t coming back.

She didn’t talk to Smoky about it. That night, she just held him and cried. He snuggled against her and purred.

It was hard on her mother, too. It was hard to watch her husband living a fancy life; hard to watch him occasionally (very occasionally, according to Barbara) give her children things she couldn’t afford; hard to watch him find happiness with someone else. The economy in the late 1970s was bad across the nation; in Flint, Michigan, it was abominable. Jobs were disappearing, abandoned houses were burning, and the unemployment rate was spiking above 20 percent. Whole neighborhoods collapsed as General Motors closed assembly lines, and the workers were often on strike. One day, when the family took a rare trip to the Courtland Mall, someone stole the spare tire off their car. That’s how desperate the situation was in Flint. Against this backdrop of despair, Barbara’s mother struggled through community college, while working full-time and raising three children, to earn an associate’s degree in nutrition. She wanted to be in charge of a kitchen instead of just a cook, but her dreams of getting ahead were thwarted by frequent layoffs, increased competition for even the worst jobs, and the closing of one nursing home after another.

Barbara’s mother had little sympathy for the autoworkers. She didn’t like the management of General Motors, which was rapidly moving jobs to Mexico, but she didn’t particularly like the line workers, either. In nursing home kitchens, she was getting paid $3.35 an hour for backbreaking work on early morning and weekend shifts. The GM employees were making five times as much, with health insurance and benefits. The town was rife with rumors of workers who clocked in before going deer hunting, then came back to clock out for their full day’s pay. At the bus and truck plants, people said, inspectors sometimes found vodka bottles inside half-built vehicles. Every time the autoworkers went on strike, half the town was vociferously for them. The other half—a spattering of heartless executives but mostly those unemployed or working bottom-of-the-pyramid jobs—felt like Evelyn Lambert, whose constant refrain was, “What do they have to complain about?”

“I would take that job in a minute,” she said of the autoworkers, with increasing bitterness. “I’d take that pay. I’d take half that pay in a second.”

But you couldn’t get a position in the Shop, as the auto plants were known, unless you knew someone in the Shop, and Evelyn Lambert wasn’t that lucky. So she continued to work long days for $3.35 an hour in the industrial kitchens of Flint. The hours were so long, and Evelyn was so often working multiple jobs, that there were whole weeks when Barbara didn’t see her mother. She’d be at work when Barbara came home from school, and she wouldn’t get home from her last shift until school started the next day. On her days off, she would take long walks. At the time, Barbara thought her mother was trying to escape, very briefly, from her responsibilities and frustrations. Looking back, she realized that her mother always came home from her walks carrying an armload of wood and dragging a bag full of soda cans. The wood was to heat the house in the winter. The cans were worth ten cents each at the recycling center. Between the soda can money, a religious devotion to clipping coupons, and some complicated calculations on exactly when to write checks so they would clear at the bank, Barbara’s mother kept the household afloat. She often went hungry, but everyone else got fed.

That included the cats, which usually numbered about twelve. It’s expensive to keep so many cats, especially when you’re scraping for pennies, but Barbara’s mother would never cut back on their needs, and she would let them leave only for legitimate adoptions. It would be naïve not to think that Evelyn Lambert needed those cats to give her life direction and meaning. Even twelve-year-old Barbara understood that. But she also understood that her mother cared about the cats. She understood and loved each one of them, and that love comforted her. One of Barbara’s favorite memories was seeing her mother relaxing in her favorite chair in one of her rare moments of peace, with big, lovable Harry sprawled on her lap. Harry talked constantly, and he had a great big rolling purr that never seemed to stop. Everybody called him Mr. Happy because that purr was like joy exploding out of him all the time.

Harry was Barbara’s mother’s favorite, a big sweet bear of a cat who always wanted a lap whenever Evelyn Lambert had one to offer. With that sweet personality, everyone assumed he’d be adopted right away. And he was. But two weeks later, the new owners brought him back. There was always an excuse when this happened: It scratched my sofa, it scratched my kid, its litter box stinks, or even, it’s just not like I thought it was going to be. What was the excuse for Harry? Barbara only remembers that big Harry came back.

At that time, a year or two into being a foster parent, Evelyn Lambert let the cats roam freely inside and outside the house. Then one of the cats, Rosie, ate rat poison that had been left outside by the neighbor. Barbara’s mother rushed her to the animal hospital, but it was too late. They had no choice but to put Rosie to sleep. A few weeks later, Harry wandered into the main road and was hit by a van. That was the moment that changed Evelyn Lambert’s mind. Never again did she let any of her cats out of the house. After Harry’s accident, she was a passionate advocate of keeping cats indoors. Now all the rescue agencies advocate this, of course, but in 1978 she was ahead of her time.

Fortunately, Harry survived the accident. A neighbor saw him lying on the side of the road and called the cat lady. Evelyn ran out with a blanket, eased Harry onto it as best she could, and rushed him to the veterinary clinic. Poor Harry had first been abandoned and then hit by a van, but the only effect on this kind soul was that, with a shattered hip, he walked sideways for the rest of his life. When he sat on Evelyn’s lap, her head often bobbing as she teetered on the edge of exhausted sleep, Harry’s leg always stuck out awkwardly to the side. But his injury never stopped those deep, booming purrs.

Barbara’s brother Scott also had a favorite cat. Her name was Gracie, and she was a thin gray kitten less than half the size of Happy Harry. She had been abandoned by her owner because she was incontinent and had trouble making it to the litter box. She had feline leukemia, but back then, there was no such diagnosis; the vet thought she had digestive problems. An incontinent kitten can be an issue in a house full of cats, but Scott and Barbara would do anything for their mother. They loved the cats, of course, but that love was mixed up with their pride and admiration for their mom. The passion she felt for the animals, the way she sacrificed to help them, were the defining aspects of their childhood. Everything they experienced was limited by the twin poles of passion and sacrifice; everything they did for their mother was defined by those poles. Was there a little pity, too? Perhaps. Barbara defended her mother. Always. Whenever anyone called her crazy, she told them, “Well, who else is going to do it? Who else, I ask you, is going to help those cats?”

Not once, even as a teenager, did Barbara think, If it weren’t for all these cats, I could have something more. She helped clip coupons. She went without seconds at dinner. When she was thirteen, she started volunteering at an animal clinic. The Lamberts couldn’t afford regular medical care for their cats, but by volunteering, Barbara earned free emergency care when needed.

Since Evelyn Lambert couldn’t turn Gracie away—she could never turn away any cat in need—Scott adopted her. He covered the floor and walls of the mudroom with newspaper and brought in a litter box, a food dish, a few toys, and a chair. He sat with Gracie in the mudroom for hours; he even did his homework in there. Whenever Gracie had an accident, Scott threw out the soiled newspaper and brought in a few more sheets. He didn’t think of it as a chore. It wasn’t something anyone asked him to do. He just loved the little cat.

But Gracie was sick, and without medicine (or even a correct diagnosis), she didn’t live long. She died on a freezing February night, and despite the weather, Scott was determined to bury her. He spent the next morning in the wind and ice, crying and banging at the dirt with his shovel, but the ground was frozen solid. He cursed and cried and banged until his hands and face were numb. Finally, out of frustration, he lifted the shovel over his head and slammed it down into the little crevice he had made in the icy dirt . . . and sliced right through the television antennae line.

At that moment, the phone rang. It was Adopt-a-Pet. Someone had thrown a kitten into the Dumpster behind the local pizzeria. She was in surgery because the tops of her ears and half her tail had frozen during the night. Despite the amputations, she was expected to survive. The operation was paid for, but there was no money or space for the hospital to keep the kitten after she woke up from the anesthesia. Barbara’s mom didn’t hesitate. “We’ll take her,” she said. “We’ll be right over.”

That cat was never adopted either. Her name was Amber, and she lived with Barbara’s mother for nineteen years. She was stocky and shaped like a sausage, with little cups for ears and hardly any tail, but everybody who knew Amber adored her. Despite the terrible cruelty that led her to the pizzeria Dumpster, she always loved people. She would cuddle on any lap and purr, purr, purr. She was sweet and affectionate, but she was also tough. She was the house’s school marm; she didn’t let anyone get away with anything. The only female cat who stayed longer than a few weeks, Amber was queen, and everyone knew it. As Barbara recalls, in a house with twelve cats, Amber ate first, drank first, did anything she wanted first. She was the boss, and she had too much respect for Barbara’s mother to let any of the other cats misbehave. The house had a large unfinished basement the cats were herded into periodically while the living areas were given a thorough cleaning. Amber made sure all the cats followed orders. She made sure they tried to amuse themselves in the crowded basement. Then, one by one, she sent the boys up the stairs to meow at the door. When Amber came to the door, cleaning time was over. When the queen spoke, even Evelyn Lambert listened.

So there was Harry for Evelyn; Gracie for Scott; Amber for everyone; and for Barbara, of course, there was Smoky. While Evelyn was working, or collecting cans, or just plain exhausted, Smoky was there. No matter what Barbara needed, no matter why, he was always there.

In the end, they were a family, the Lamberts and their cats: a determined mother, a couple of hardworking kids, three permanent cats—Smoky, Harry, and Amber—and a revolving cast of visitors that gave the family an extra reason to pull together. Maybe it wasn’t a traditional family, but it was full of love, something that can’t be said often enough. There were hard times, of course, especially as the children grew up. In her last year of high school, Barbara grew weary of her mother’s complaints about work and her incessant need to be right. (Her mother later admitted she was scared to admit she was wrong about anything because she didn’t want Barbara to know she was weak. She thought everything might fall apart.) She was tired of the poverty and the struggle. She didn’t understand why her mother didn’t just get a better job, why they had to be so different from everyone else, why she had to spend her childhood as the bucktoothed girl with the hand-me-down jeans and the crazy cat-lady mom.

When she graduated from high school and moved to Flint for community college, she didn’t speak to her mother for a month. But it didn’t take Barbara long to figure out how cruel the world can be and how difficult it is to improve yourself, especially when you were exhausted from the daily struggle to survive. Often, she longed for the comfort of home and her old life: Smoky’s head on her arm, Harry’s constant purring, Amber’s sweet meows. “Normal” life, outside the bounds of cats and poverty, was a little too . . . normal. She craved the company of her cats. But even more, she worried about her mother. She felt obligated to her. Barbara had never known a day in her life when she felt her father loved her. Her mother was the parent who stayed. She was the one who loved her, every minute of every day.

She watched as her mother lost Harry, then Amber. She watched as foster parenting of kittens became so admired, and popular, that Adopt-A-Cat didn’t need Evelyn anymore. She went home to her old room and noticed that Smoky, as sweet as ever, had gone completely gray around the muzzle. He still loved her as fervently as before, but he, too, had become old and tired—as tired as Evelyn Lambert had always been. Barbara felt the tears as she held him, remembering their life together. She had by then stopped thinking of her childhood as a curse and had learned to embrace her eccentric mother, her hand-me-down jeans, her buckteeth (which were mostly in her mind anyway), and her outsider status as valuable lessons in perseverance and love. She had never, even in her darkest moments, stopped cherishing the cats. She cherished every moment with Smoky until the day he died and was buried, like all the other kittens who never found love outside the Lambert home, beneath the old apple trees at the back of the yard.

But if the house of cats ultimately took on a patina of charm for Barbara Lajiness, life never got any easier for her mother. On the day Barbara graduated from high school, her mother lost another job. Eleven years later, when Barbara married and settled in Ann Arbor, her mother was still working as a cook in a Flint, Michigan, retirement home. Her car died and she couldn’t afford to fix it, so she walked to and from work every day. Every weekend, Barbara drove to Flint to take her grocery shopping. It was a struggle, always a struggle. Every day since her divorce was a fight to survive.

When Evelyn retired at age sixty-five, Barbara moved her mother to a small apartment a few blocks from her house in Ann Arbor. Harry, Amber, and Smoky had passed away, and the only cat left from the great Lambert foster home of Fenton, Michigan, was Bonkers, an older cat that had been abandoned by a neighbor a few years before. Bonkers was a fluffy black cat with a white chest and a calm disposition. She preferred lying about, mostly in the sun or on someone’s lap. She wouldn’t hurt anything, with the possible exception of walls, which she was always running straight into with her head. That’s why they called her Bonkers. Sweet, harmless Bonkers.

Unfortunately, the apartment complex didn’t allow pets. So Barbara and her husband, James, took in Bonkers, leaving Evelyn Lambert truly alone for the first time in her life. Almost every day, she came over to their house, but it wasn’t really to see her, Barbara knew. Evelyn Lambert wanted to spend time with Bonkers. She would sit on the porch or in the big living room chair, petting Bonkers and staring down at his back as if staring into the past. She told her daughter, “I’m sick, sweetie. You know I’m sick,” but Barbara figured it was depression. Evelyn missed the house she had struggled to keep through all the tough times. She missed her garden and her cat cemetery and her lifetime of memories. What could she see, when she looked back on her life, but a path carved out by heartbreak and disappointment? What could she possibly find in the future? Evelyn Lambert had moved from a house full of love, as well as struggle, to a lonely apartment in a new city where they wouldn’t even let her keep her beloved cat.

“I don’t feel well,” she said. “You don’t understand.”

Barbara figured, in time, her mother would adjust. Harry. Amber. Gracie. Smoky. She had always found a way to survive; she had always discovered a purpose. But she called one morning and told Barbara, “I can’t take it anymore, sweetie. Death has been sitting in the apartment with me.”

Barbara rushed over. Her mother was in severe pain. She had been awake all night. “Why didn’t you call me?” Barbara kept asking as they rushed to the emergency room. “Why didn’t you call me in the middle of the night?”

“I didn’t want to wake you.”

It was breast cancer, untreated for years, and it had metastasized into her spine and legs. There was nothing they could do but ease the pain, which Barbara realized her mother had been secretly carrying for years. The doctors gave her medicine and sent her home, but the suffering was too much, the cancer too ferocious, the damage too severe. Within a month, she was back in the hospital.

“How’s Bonkers?” she asked Barbara as she struggled for breath. She was so weak, she could barely form the words.

Barbara swept a piece of her mother’s gray hair from her forehead. “Bonkers is fine,” she lied, fighting tears. The truth was that Bonkers was gone. Barbara had spent the previous evening looking for her, but the cat was nowhere to be found.

Barbara’s mother nodded, smiled weakly, and closed her eyes. “Bonkers,” she muttered under her breath. The next day, no longer conscious or able to breathe on her own, she was placed on a ventilator. She had told Barbara repeatedly that she didn’t want to survive like that, with a machine keeping her alive. But she didn’t have a living will. She hadn’t given her written consent. After a vehement argument, which hurt Barbara as much as anything in her life ever had, the doctors agreed to remove the ventilator. The morphine would keep her comfortable, but it wouldn’t prolong her life. She had only a few days to live. Barbara sat on the bed for the rest of the day, watching her mother die.

That night, Barbara Lajiness had a dream. Her mother and Bonkers were together, waving at her from the distance. They were in some vague, undefined place, but her mother was mouthing the words, Everything’s fine, don’t worry, everything’s fine.

The next morning, Barbara walked onto her porch to retrieve the morning paper and glanced into the neighbor’s driveway. There, in the shadow under a pickup truck that never moved, was Bonkers. Barbara didn’t need to step any closer to know that Bonkers had gone off to die, and that she had passed away peacefully in her sleep. She stood on her porch in the cold morning sun, looking at Bonkers and bawling, her coffee cup steaming in her hands.

Finally, she called James. They buried Bonkers in the backyard, under a lilac bush Barbara’s mother had helped her return to life with fertilizer and eggshells.

The next day, Evelyn Lambert passed away. She was only sixty-six years old.

It’s not easy for Barbara Lajiness to talk about her mother. Even eight years later, with a loving husband and a wonderful daughter and the hilarious companionship of Ninja, now known as Mr. Sir Bob Kittens, she has to stop every sentence or two to wipe away the tears.

“I admire her,” Barbara says. “There are a lot of things I could criticize about her life, but having done that, having put other lives ahead of her own, kitty’s lives . . . that’s pretty admirable. No matter what anyone can say about her and the choices she made, she cared about everyone and everything else to a fault.”

“Do you think she cared too much?”

“Sometimes I think so but, you know, I’m not sure if you can ever really care too much. She really cared about everything that didn’t have a voice. She really cared. When I was a kid, the town decided to do this mosquito spraying, and these trucks would drive around with orange lights on top and spray something that was supposed to kill the mosquitoes. A few weeks into it, my mom said to me, ‘Do you hear that?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t hear anything.’ She said, ‘That’s because it’s killing more than just the mosquitoes. It’s killing all the bugs. That’s why you don’t hear the birds anymore.’”

Barbara pauses to compose herself. “My mom, she was pretty smart, you know?”

Barbara knows she bottles things up, that she doesn’t confront her feelings, that she still has an overwhelming fear of those she loves leaving her behind. For two years after her mother and Bonkers died, she couldn’t bring herself to adopt another cat. She had a strong marriage, a wonderful daughter, a steady job, and a nice house. The simple things, some people might call them, the things you don’t cherish enough unless you’ve lived without them. The family had several fish, a few hamsters, and a turtle, but they didn’t have a cat. Barbara was happy, comfortable, loved, but she didn’t want to risk a cat. She didn’t want to lose another one. She didn’t want to open herself to another cat only to have it die on her. But nine-year-old Amanda really wanted a cat, and how can a mother refuse?

So they adopted a kitten named Max. He was wonderfully loving, with an endearing habit of sleeping on top of the refrigerator with his tail hanging over the side. But two years later, when he was four years old, Max collapsed. He was walking across the kitchen when, suddenly, he fell over and started trembling wildly, racked with the tremors of a grand mal seizure. Barbara saw it happen and started to panic. Max was so young, so healthy, and he was dying in front of her. It was her nightmare come true. As James frantically made telephone calls, Barbara held her writhing cat. His eyes were glazing over, his eyelids fluttering, his heart pounding wildly. Before she thought about what she was doing, she yelled to her daughter.

Amanda came running. She saw Max shaking and bleeding from the mouth. She started to scream and cry. It was a lot for an eleven-year-old, but when James and Barbara came home an hour later with the news that Max had died, Amanda rushed to her mother.

“Thank you, Mom,” she said. “I got to say good-bye to Max while he was alive.” She was a strong girl, Barbara realized, seeing for the first time in her well-adjusted daughter the frightened little girl she herself had once been, the one who had struggled so long and so quietly in a broken home.

It took only a month, and three protracted visits to see him at the humane society, before Barbara adopted Ninja. She wasn’t ready, but her family, especially her husband, was lost without a furry companion. Maybe, she thought, I can just live with him in the house. For Amanda and James. Maybe I can just treat Ninja like so many other people treat their cats: like animals who happen to share their space.

Her husband, James, was head over heels for Ninja. He would carry him into the kitchen in the morning, cradling him like a baby. He would ask if Barbara wanted to pet him, and she’d say, “No. Not yet. I like him, but we haven’t created a bond.” She just kept pushing Ninja away, over and over.

When he contracted a virus at twelve weeks old, Barbara rushed him to the vet. She was standing in the office, watching the doctor examine him, when she suddenly broke into tears, just as she had all those years ago when the camper pulled away from her house and she suddenly became convinced her mother would disappear while she was gone.

“I just lost a cat,” she sobbed. “I can’t lose this one, too. I just can’t. You have to help him.”

The veterinarian put her arm around Barbara’s shoulders. “Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s only a cold.”

Barbara had discovered why her cat was named Ninja on the first or second day, when she opened a door and discovered him crouching at the end of the hall. Completely startled, the kitten sprang up onto his hind legs with his front legs straight out in front of him like an off-balance zombie. He stood like that for a few seconds, watching her. Then he started jumping sideways toward her, waving his arms from side to side in a sort of demented karate move. He jumped all the way down the hall, his neck cocked crazily to the side, his front paws never touching the ground. It was the strangest thing she had ever seen, and it was no accident. Ninja, Barbara soon realized, did his bizarre karate dance whenever he was startled . . . or scared . . . or annoyed . . . or excited. Amanda’s teenager drama, in particular, got his ninja juices flowing. Whenever Barbara heard her daughter yell, “Oh my god, Ninja,” she knew exactly what was happening. The cat was doing his demented jumping moves on her.

Ninja wasn’t a fighter, though. He was just weird. He was all swagger, no bite. And that name, after Barbara finally acknowledged the depth of their bond, just didn’t seem right. Appropriate, maybe, but not right. Ninja, after all, was his prison name.

So Barbara started thinking about a new name. One night, she and Amanda were watching a nature program about bobcats. Ninja’s face, they realized, kinda sorta resembled a bobcat’s face.

“But he can’t be a bobcat,” Amanda said. “He has to be a bobkitten.”

Bob Kitten. Good, but not quite regal enough. So Barbara dubbed him Sir Bob Kittens.

At his next vet’s visit, Barbara told the assistant they had changed Ninja’s name. It was now Mr. Sir Bob Kittens. And yes, that was official. Put it on the form.

Of course, one name isn’t big enough for a cat like Mr. Sir Bob Kittens, even if that name does have four parts. Soon he was also Mr. Pumpkin Pants. Because he’s an orange kitten with big furry thighs, of course. Mr. Sparkle Pants followed soon after. Same reason: the thighs. By the time Barbara’s husband dubbed him Fluffalicious (fluffy and delicious, I guess), Amanda thought her parents were totally weird. But they didn’t mind. They loved Mr. Sparkle Pumpkin Kitten Pants.

The relationship wasn’t perfect. As Barbara always said, Mr. Kittens was a character, not a cuddler. He was always in the room with Barbara, but he preferred to lounge in a cozy spot ten feet away, as if it was a mere accident they ended up in the same space together. He only cuddled if he was in the mood, which was not that often and therefore extra special when it happened. He was a quiet cat, full of twitches and quirks but not much need for vocal communication. He almost never purred or meowed. Only if he really, really needed something would he bother to speak to Mom and Dad. That usually happened when he smelled his favorite treat: bacon. As soon as he smelled bacon, he bounced into the room on his hind legs, swinging his front legs in that demented ninja dance. If the bacon was really crispy, just the way he liked it, he went absolutely nuts. One day, James made the mistake of giving him bacon on the dining room table. After that, he bounced up on the table for his dinner every night. He wouldn’t eat anywhere else.

He was a good kid, though. Really he was. Yes, he grabbed Barbara’s legs and tried to trip her every time she walked up the basement stairs. He liked the surprise, the way she yelled when she nearly fell and broke her neck. Yes, he laid on James’s laptop whenever James tried to work. Even if he closed the lid on him, the cat wouldn’t move. He’d just lie there, hanging out both ends like a kitten gyro, a big goofy grin on his face. But Mr. Sir Bob Kittens was more than the class clown. Every morning, when Amanda was getting ready for school, he walked around her room, sniffing everything. He was like a big brother, standoffish and proud, not above a few tasteless jokes but always watching out for his little sister.

Or maybe Barbara just liked to imagine that. Maybe the morning sniffathon was just another part of Mr. Sir Bob Kittens’s daily routine, because Mr. Sir Bob Kittens was a cat who liked his routines. Every morning, he woke Barbara at exactly 5:00 A.M. for his breakfast. That was fine during the week, when Barbara had to get up for work, but not so nice on the weekends. Especially since she didn’t even get a thank-you nuzzle. Mr. Kittens preferred James, who always wandered in as the coffee was perking, for his morning dose of petting. He loved being petted in the morning . . . but only in the morning . . . and only by James, a routine that began in those first weeks when Barbara was trying to keep from loving the new kitten too much.

Yes, he was a handful. Yes, he was wild. But look at it a different way. His mad scramble for bacon, his crazed eyes, his fear of loud noises and aluminum foil, his extra furry pumpkin-pants thighs, and especially his demented karate dancing—they were hilarious. Who wouldn’t fall in love with a cat like Mr. Kittens? Despite his aversion to cuddling, Mr. Sir Bob Kittens was as close to Barbara as Smoky or Harry or Amber or Max or any of the other cats in her life had ever been. When she felt sick, he looked at her. When she felt weak one morning, he put his front paws on her knees and meowed in concern. When it was Barbara’s turn to collapse in the kitchen, falling first into the table, then clinging desperately to a chair, then slumping helplessly to the floor, Mr. Kittens was there to climb on her knees, look her in the eyes as she blacked out, and scream as loudly as he could.

The cause was bleeding ulcers. One had ruptured a blood vessel, and Barbara had lost three pints of blood. A short course of medicine and a new diet cured the problem, but during a follow-up exam, the doctors detected something not as easily treated: breast cancer, the disease that had killed her mom. Barbara’s comfortable life, the one she had worked so hard to craft out of a childhood of disappointment, came crashing down around her. She had surgery, followed by radiation. When the doctors told her chemo was recommended, but was her option, she thought of her mother in those terrible last days. Barbara was forty-one; she didn’t want to be on a ventilator at forty-five, with her daughter standing beside her hospital bed, watching her die.

She chose the chemo. She’s still on it. She has lost her hair, but she figures, hey, that’s five months without shaving her legs. And a great excuse for getting out of all that dreadful holiday stuff. Her daughter, a typical teenager, used to tell her she looked embarrassing and needed some makeup, but now, so what? Who cares? Every day could be your last. If it makes you happy, don’t regret it. She eats cupcakes, not all the time but sometimes, and she doesn’t feel any guilt. She appreciates them instead. She tries to appreciate everything, even Mr. Kittens nudging her out of bed at 5:00 A.M. every morning. She feeds him and pets him—yes, he sometimes lets her pet him now—and sits in the kitchen and marvels at the morning and the coffee and how very cute Mr. Sir Bob Kittens really is.

She has her husband, James. Her marriage, always strong, is stronger now. She has her daughter, Amanda, and the overwhelming desire to see her grow up. She has Mr. Sir Bob Kittens, who has started sleeping at her feet when she’s recovering from her treatment and even, occasionally, cuddling up beside her chest. He may not be the world’s best cuddler, but through these simple acts, she knows he cares. She knows that life is good.

And when life is bad? Well, Barbara Lajiness still gets to see Mr. Sir Bob Kittens up on his hind legs, swinging his forelegs and hopping down the hall in that wild, wonderful, demented karate dance.

How could anyone, anywhere, not laugh at that?