Love Saves The Day

Josh clicked off the television and turned to face her. Something about the abrupt silence and Joshís expression sent a flicker of panic darting through Lauraís stomach.

ďNot so great.Ē Josh took a deep breath and exhaled loudly through his nose. ďI lost my job.Ē

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6

Prudence

THE NEWSPAPER JOSH DROPPED ONTO THE KITCHEN FLOOR HAS turned vicious. At first I only darted into its folds to make sure there werenít any rats or snakes trying to hide inside it (when I lived outside, I noticed them nesting in old newspapers all the time). But now itís trying to fold itself completely over me, even when I roll onto my back and kick at it with my hind legs. So I stand, crouch down with my tail straight out for balance, and take a flying leap onto itóto show it thatIím boss. It sees how much stronger I am and slides all the way into the kitchen wall as it tries to get away, taking me along with it. But I refuse to give up the fight so easily.

The newspaper stops moving once we both hit the wall, knowing that itís been beaten. Triumphantly, I tear a few pieces off with my teeth. Josh and Laura, who are eating breakfast at the kitchen table, are so relieved to see my victory over the newspaperóand to know for sure that there are no rats or mice or snakes hiding in itóthat they burst out laughing. I return to my post by the table, rubbing my head against it and also the chair legs, so that anything else (like a rat or another vicious newspaper) that tries to get in here will know this territory is protected by a cat. Josh reaches down with one hand to pat my head, but I quickly pull back from his fingers, wrinkling my nose with distaste. He sighs and goes back to eating his breakfast.

Even though itís a Thursday, Josh isnít wearing his work clothes or shiny black feet-shoes. Thatís because the humans at his office wonít let him go there to do work anymore. Now Josh is ďworking from home,Ē although mostly what he does is talk on the phone and exercise his fingers on the cat bed in Home Office. (Is this what humans think ďworkingĒ is?) Ever since this past Friday, when Josh told Laura he lost his job, Laura has been feeding me my breakfast in the kitchen. Josh says itís too hard to concentrate on his ďworkĒ with the smell of cat food drifting in from my room next door. Obviously, Josh doesnít knowhalf of all the ways his suddenly being home inconveniencesme.

I was nervous at first about eating my breakfast where Josh and Laura eat theirs, because of what happened that night of the Seder dinner. But it turns out that it isnít so bad. Iíve learned that if Igently remind themóby standing next to the kitchen counter and meowingóto let me have little bits of milk or eggs or the cheese they melt on top of bread in the toaster, Iím more likely to get to try new things. Sarah says my meows are irresistible. Actually, what she says is that some cats have meows that arealmost musical, but I, sadly, am not one of them. I have a voice like a Lower East Side fishmonger, according to Sarah, and nobody can listen tothat for too long before giving in. I think Sarah was afraid I would be offended whenever she called me a fishmonger, because she would always scoop me up in her arms and kiss my nose and say,Donít worry, Prudence. I love your lovely atonal meows. I donít know why she thought Iíd be insulted, though. Iím not exactly sure what a fishmonger is, but it sounds like awonderful thing to be.

Josh goes over to the counter now to get some more coffee, and when I meow at him he also pours a little of his coffee cream into my Prudence-bowl to mix with my breakfast. Just as I suspected would happen, Laura hardly mixes any of my old food in anymore with theďorganicĒ food Josh buys for me. But Iím not as nervous about eating as I was that first week, and mixing the ďorganicĒ food with coffee cream makes it taste much better. Still, I use all the toes on my right paw to tilt my Prudence-bowl and spill just a little cream onto the blue rubber mat with all the cat drawings, because I hate that stupid thing.

Josh returns to the table and sits down again across from Laura, who drinks her coffee black with no cream or even sugar. I follow and rub my head against his ankle, as a reward for good behavior, and note with satisfaction that along with my scent Iíve left a few strands of my fur on the bottom of his jean leg.

ďSo whatís on the agenda for today?Ē Laura asks him.

ďThe usual,Ē Josh replies. ďPhone calls, emails. And I guess itís time for me to break the news to Abe and Zelda.Ē

Laura makes a sympathy-face.ďYikes.Ē

Josh shrugs.ďI donít think itíll be so bad. Iíve been working since I was fifteen, and this is the first job Iíve ever lost. Theyíll probably tell me I was overdue.Ē He sips from his coffee mug. ďAnd I have a call with that headhunter who tried to recruit me a couple years back.Ē

Sarah and Anise used to talk about losing jobs. Back in The Old Days, they had something called Day Jobs, which was where they worked to get money in between doing something else called Gigs. Sarah had lots of Day Jobs, like selling fruit at a farmerís market that traveled all over the city and made Sarah show up for work before the sun was even up, which was especially hard when Sarahíd had a Gig that lasted all night. She also waited for tables and clerked at a record store. Anise only had one Day Job, as a bartender, but she ended up having to do that same job in lots of different places. The reason they changed Day Jobs so much was because sometimes Gigs happened at the same time as Day Jobs, and if they had to choose which one to go to, Sarah and Anise always picked Gigsóeven though lots of times Gigs didnít even pay them. Thatís why Sarah and Anise were Flat Broke almost all the time. Sarah finally stopped doing Day Jobsand Gigs when Laura was three and Sarahís husband went away. Thatís when she knew she really had to get serious, so she opened her own record store. By then, Anise was famous and getting Gigs all the time. She didnít have to worry about Day Jobs after that.

It sounded like Sarah and Anise spent more time losing jobs than keeping them, so if itís true that this is the first time Josh ever lost a job then he reallyhas been lucky.

Laura reaches across the table to take Joshís hand, and even though thereís a slight crease in her forehead from tension, she smiles. ďSomethingíll turn up,Ē she says softly.

ďIím not worried.Ē Josh is built with eyes that are turned just a little bit down and a mouth thatís turned just a little bit up, so it always looks like heís right on the verge of being happy and also right on the verge of being sad. Now he turns the corners of his mouth all the way up until heís smiling. But his eyes donít smile at all.

As soon as I saw Josh last Friday, I knew that something unusual and bad had happened to him. I was napping on the cat bed in Home Office when he came home from work (inconsiderately) early. He noticed me there when he walked upstairs, and came over like he was going to shoo me off like he always does, but then he seemed to change his mind. He didnít smell sweaty, exactly, but he smelled like hehad been sweating more than he usually doesónot exercise-sweaty, but scared-sweaty. He also smelled like heíd stopped somewhere before coming home for a few gulps of the evil-smelling liquid that Laura and Josh keep on a special cart in the dining room. After he left Home Officeówithout even turning the light off the way he normally does on his way outóhe went downstairs, and I heard the sound of the TV going on.

I didnít know yet what terrible thing had happened to Josh. But the smell of something terrible having happened made me nervous. Then I thought about Laura, who was going to walk right into the apartment after work without knowing she should be on her guard. Against my better judgment (because Laura and I arenít exactly friends after that horrible holiday dinner), I decided to wait downstairs and try to warn her. Thatís what Sarah would want me to do. After all, Sarah loves Laura almost as much as she loves me.

But Josh ended up telling Laura right away what had happened, before I got a chance to convince her to approach him cautiously. He said that magazine companies everywhere were losing money, and when that happens the first thing they do is get rid of the people who work in marketing. Josh said they gutted his entire staff, which ishorrible! I once saw a TV show about a human gutting a fish he caught. First he cut the fish open right up the middle, and then he pulled out all its insides and threw what was left into a big container. And even though watching that made me hungry for fish (I wish I had some fish right now), hearing that Joshís office did the same thing tohumans made all my fur stand straight up. How evil the humans at Joshís office must be! It sounded like Josh was lucky to escape that place with his life, and it made me understand why he looked and smelled so awful when he got home. If I saw a thing like that with my own eyes, I donít think Iíd be able to sleep for at least a month.

I expected that Laura would throw her arms around Josh like in TV movies, and say something like,Thank God youíreokay! Instead, a crease appeared between her eyebrows. When she finally did put her arms around him, she was gentler than I would have thought sheíd be (seeing what a narrow escape Josh had) and she said, ďIím so sorry, honey.Ē

Joshís eyes over Lauraís shoulder looked worried, even though what his mouth said was, ďI donít want you to worry about anything. I know how rough things have been for you these past few months.Ē

Josh was still hugging Laura, so he couldnít see her face the way I could. He couldnít tell that it got that tight expression Laura always gets whenever Sarah is mentioned. Itís like thereís too much happening in Lauraís head for her face to show it all, so she holds all her face muscles as still as she possibly can so they wonít reveal anything. (This is something cats can do naturally without having to practice the way humans do.) ďJosh, Iímfine,Ē Laura said, and her voice sounded almost annoyed. ďYou donít need to worry about me right now.Ē

Then Josh pulled back to look into Lauraís face, and he pushed the corners of his mouth up until his own face looked more happy than sad. ďThe good news is that Iíll be getting five monthsí severance. Theyíre emailing me the agreement next week, and once Iíve signed it theyíll mail the check. And in the meantime Iíll start making calls first thing Monday morning.Ē

The crease in Lauraís forehead smoothed out, and she smiled. ďThatis good news. Five months should be plenty of time for you to find something else. You have such a great r?sum?.Ē

ďI think so,Ē Josh said, and he smiled, too.

The days have been getting longer, and when Laura or Josh pushes open the top half of one of the long windows in the living room, I can feel how much warmer the air outside is. Still, it was cool enough inside the apartment. There was really no reason for the tiny beads of sweat-water that popped up on Joshís forehead.

At first I almost felt sorry for Josh, because it sounded like what happened at his office was even worse than the things that happen at the Bad Place. That was before I knew how disruptive to all my usual routines it would be to have Josh home all the time. If Iím upstairs in my room with all the Sarah-boxes, trying to spend some quiet-time alone with my memories, Josh is also in that room, walking around in circlesólike those pigeons Laura likes watching so muchówhile he talks on the phone. I donít know why talking into the phone should have to involve walking around. I, for example, am perfectly capable of meowing as clearly and frequently as I need to from a still, sitting position. But Josh likes to walk when heís talking on the phone. Every time I try to walk over to one spot, Josh is pacing around that same exact spot, and I have to dart over and around the Sarah-boxes to get out of his way. Iím paying extra attention to what my whiskers tell me these days just to keep from getting stepped on or tripped over. (Maybe Joshís balance is so imprecise because he shaves off his own whiskers every morning.)

When I decide to go downstairs to the living room, where I couldalways count on being alone during the day, Josh comes downstairs, too. Heís still talking on the phone, opening and closing the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets without taking anything out of them (or even really looking into them) as he talks. This is particularly frustrating because a cat has every right to expect that when a human opens the refrigerator or a kitchen cabinet, heíll pull out some food and share that food with the cat. Even sitting directly in front of Josh and meowing while staring pointedly at the cabinets does nothing except cause him to walk around me without any acknowledgment, as if I were no more than a couch or coffee table in his path. Sometimes he presses down on the handle of the can opener, which then makes the whirring sound that usually means a can is being opened. And even though Iíve realized that Josh isnít really opening cans when he does this, Istill have to run in to checkójust to becompletely sureóbecause what if the one time Idonít check, Joshis opening a can of tuna or something else Iíd want to try and Iíve missed it?

Finally, when I canít bearthat frustration anymore, I go back upstairs to have a short, restful nap on top of the cat bed in Home Office. And wouldnít you know it, Josh comes back into the room just as Iíve started to doze and says, ďPrudence, Itold you, stay off the computer!Ē and shoos me away without so much as aplease or athank you. And of course Iknow that heís told me before to ďstay off,Ē but I thought he meant only at night whenheís home to use it as a scratching post. It seems perfectly obvious tome that something so warm and springy and cat-sized was intended to be used by cats for napping. If Josh is looking for something to exercise his fingers on, heís more than welcome to share my scratching post downstairs. I think heíll find he gets better results anyway, because thatís what the scratching post is meant for. And itís quieter, too.

Sudden change is always bad. Change of any kind is something to be avoided if at all possible. Even humans understand this instinctively as well as cats do, which is why they follow our example and fall into sensible habits, like always sleeping on the same side of the bed, or sitting on the same spot on the couch, or eating the same breakfast every day at the same time. As unpredictable as Sarah can be, she always does certain things the same way. Like the way she counts exactly to one hundred when she brushes her hair before getting into bed at night.

Joshís being at home all the time is avery big, and very sudden, change. Itís disrupted all my routines, and I canít remember ever having spent so much time with one human. Even Sarah, who doesnít have nearly as many human friends as Josh seems to (what with his endless phone-talking), never spent more than one full day a week at home without leaving the apartment at all, and that was only on days when she didnít have to go to work.

Donít misunderstand me. Itís nice having a human or two around the house. Even though no other human will ever be as important to me as Sarah is, a well-mannered human can be a pleasant companion. Theyíre very useful for things like opening cans of food, or cleaning a litterbox, or running a brush over your back when your fur gets too itchy (like Sarah used to do for me at least once a week), or making a spot on the couch nice and warm so that, when they stand up, it becomes the most comfortable spot in the whole room to sleep on.

But even the most useful companion can wear away your patience if they spendtoo much time just walking around and getting underfoot.

Josh settles into the chair that lives in front of the desk in Home Office. I follow and squeeze behind the desk to bat at some of the dangling wires that live back there. Josh doesnít like when I do this, either, but heís too distracted right now to notice, and itís important for me to practice my mice-fighting skills. (I got used to practicing them at exactly this time of day long before Josh started spending all his time in the apartment, and Iím trying to keep my routines as close as possible to what theyíre supposed to be.) He presses a few buttons on the telephone. It rings a few times and then Joshís mother answers. After theyíve said hello to each other, she says, ďDo you have me on speaker? You know I hate being on speaker.Ē

ďIím sorry, Ma,Ē Josh says. ďIíve been on the phone all morning and I think my hand has stiffened into a claw.Ē

Joshís hand doesnít look even a little like a claw, but his mother canít see that from the other end of the phone line. So she laughs and says, ďWhy are you calling from home in the middle of the day? Are you sick?Ē

ďThatís actually what I called to tell you.Ē Josh takes a slightly deeper breath. ďI lost my job last week.Ē

ďWhat happened?Ē She sounds alarmed, and instinctively my left ear turns in the direction of the phone, listening for any hint of sudden danger.

ďNothing, really,Ē Josh says. ďThe company was having financial trouble and they made staff cuts. I was one of them.Ē

Thereís a silence. ďYouíve never lost a job in your whole life,Ē Joshís mother finally tells him. ďYouíll find something else again before you know it. A smart boy like you has nothing to worry about.Ē

ďThanks, Ma.Ē Josh is smiling a little.

Thereís a muffled sound, and what sounds like a conversation in the background, and then Joshís mother says, ďHold on. Your father wants to talk to you.Ē

ďJosh?Ē his fatherís voice shouts from the speaker. Joshís legs shift slightly and he sits up straighter in his chair. Suddenly Iím trapped behind the desk with no way to get out until he moves. ďSorry to hear what happened. Listen, youíve been putting away fifteen percent of your take-home every month like I told you, right?Ē

ďMore than that until this past year.Ē Josh runs one hand back and forth over the top of his head. ďAlthough I took a big hit back when the market tanked. I havenít fully recovered yet.Ē

ďDonít worry about that now. You just keep that money right where it is. Lauraís job is still good?Ē

ďOh yeah. Lauraís busier than ever.Ē

ďGood, good,Ē his father repeats. ďThe two of you will be fine.Ē Then thereís another muffled pause, and he says, ďMother wants to talk to you again, so Iíll say good-bye. Give Laura our love and try not to worry too much. Youíre a smart kid. Youíll find a new job in no time.Ē

Joshís motherís voice comes out of the speaker again. While the two of them talk about Joshís sister and how sheís hoping to send the littermates to a place called Summer Camp next month, I try to figure out exactly how long ďno timeĒ is. Itís hard to be sure, because the way humans thinkabout time is so different from the way cats do. Waiting for someone to feed me tuna from an open can, or standing on the metal table at the Bad Place while they stab me with needles, is a long,long time. Sitting in my ceramic bowl in our old apartment until Sarah comes home from work to play with me is longer than anything. But sleeping in Sarahís lap while she brushes my fur or sings to me is always too shortóeven when Sarah says something like,Iím sorry, little girl, but I have to stretch my legs. Weíve been sitting like this for four hours. (This just proves again how made up human hours areóbecause if hours were real, sleeping in Sarahís lap forfour of them wouldnít go by so quickly.)

ďNo timeĒ sounds like it should happen rightnow. But when Josh and his mother say good-bye, it doesnít seem like Josh has found a new job yet. ďIím supposed to call a headhunter in a few minutes,Ē Josh tells her. ďIíll talk to you and Dad later.Ē

Thereís a difference between saying things that arenít true, and saying something thatís part of the truth but not all of it. Josh tells Laura how heís looking for a new job, and thatís true. He also says he doesnít want her to worry, and I can tell thatís true, too.

But the whole truth that Laura doesnít know is how nobody Josh talks to will ever be able to give him a new job. Thatís because Laura isnít here all day like I am and doesnít hear the phone conversations that Josh has.

Josh talks on the phone with lots of different humans, but the conversations all sound pretty similar. They begin with Josh saying how great it is to talk to the person again after so long. He asks how the other person is doing, how their kids and wives have been, and then I guess the person heís talking to must ask how Josh is, because thatís when he says,Well, I donít know if youíve heard, but†Ö

Josh sounds and looks genuinely happy at the beginnings of these conversations. But as the conversations go on, even though his voice sounds the same, his face starts to look different. He goes from having the look of a human whoís hoping for good news to the look of a human whoís still trying to sound happy even though what heís hearing has made him feel just the opposite. By the time he gets to the part where he says things like,If you hear about anything†Ö or,Iím thinking of taking on some consulting projects, so if you know anyone whoís looking to outsource†Ö thereís no happiness left in his face.

Now Josh is talking to a type of human called aďheadhunter.Ē This sounds like a strange thing to be, because why would somebody only hunt heads? Even if you could catch just a head, thatís the least-good part to eat!

The headhunter tells Josh that people are getting the ax all over town, which I guess explains how heís finding so many heads. This sounds even worse than the humans who got gutted at Joshís old job. I had no idea human jobs could be so violent. Then again, if so many people canít do their jobs anymore because their heads are getting chopped off, youíd think that would make it easier, rather than harder, for Josh to find a new one.

But what the human on the other end of the phone line says to Josh is,ďEven if I could find you something, the money wouldnít be anything close to what you were making.Ē

ďHow much less are we talking about?Ē Josh asks.

ďHalf, maybe. If that.Ē

This is the first time I realize that human jobs all give people different amounts of money. Iíd never really thought about it, but I just assumed that money was money, and any human who had a job got the same amount of money as any other human with a job. I guess it makes sense theyíd be different, though. Jobs are what humans use to get food, like hunting is what cats use. And every cat knows that sometimes you catch a mouse thatís plump and juicy, and other times the mouse you catch is so small and stringy youíre hungry again almost right away.

ďItís possible,Ē Josh says slowly, ďthat I would consider something at a reduced salary. If the opportunity for growth was there.Ē

ďThe problem is that anybody in a hiring position will figure youíll take the lower-paying job for now and then leave as soon as things pick up again. Which, letís be honest, you probably would.Ē The headhunter pauses, and I hear aglug glug sound, like heís drinking from a glass. ďThe world isnít what it was when I first reached out to you two years ago, Josh. Frankly, there were never that many publishing jobs at your level to begin with. Your business is shrinking, and I donít see it expanding again anytime soon. I wish I could give you more hope, but those are the facts.Ē

ďI know itís bad out there,Ē Josh says. ďI guess I didnít realize how bad.Ē

ďYou donít know the half of it,Ē the headhunter says. ďI talk to people every day who are out of work and whose husband or wife also losttheir job. Theyíve got kids in college and mortgage payments, and thereís no money coming in. Do you and Laura rent or own?Ē

ďWe rent,Ē Josh says.

ďWell thatís good, at least. Howís Laura doing, by the way?Ē

ďSheís great.Ē A smile flits across Joshís face. ďSheís been a rock, actually.Ē

ďYouíre a lucky man.Ē The headhunter lets out a noisy sigh. ďIíll keep my ears open. But, Josh†ÖĒ

ďYes?Ē

ďIf I were you, Iíd start thinking about how I could take my skills and experience and apply them in a different direction.Ē

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Iím sleepy by the time Josh finishes talking to the headhunter, so I go to curl up in my favorite napping spot with Sarahís dress in the back of my closet. It still smells like her, but Iíve noticed lately that the Sarah-smell is getting fainter. What will I do when her smell is completely gone? Sarah says that as long as you remember someone, theyíll always be with you. But I remember Sarah all the time, and she still hasnít come back for me. What if thatís because Iím not remembering her enough? What if I canít remember her at all anymore when I donít have anything with herSarah-smell on it?

Lately Josh has been listening to Sarahís black disks while Laura is away at her office, always turning the music off and putting everything back into the Sarah-boxes before she comes home. Itís the sound of Sarahís music that draws me downstairs after I wake up from my nap. Josh is sitting in the big chair in the living room, andas soon as I round the corner in the stairs I can tell heís upset about something by the way his shoulders are set. Resting on the coffee table is a thin stack of folded white papers held together with a paper clip.

I settle into my favorite spot on the short side of the big couch and listen to Sarahís music with Josh. From time to time he looks over at the papers on the table. After the music stops and heís returned the black disk upstairs, he takes the papers in his hand and looks through them. From the little creases around the edges, it seems like heís looked through them a few timesalready.

Even though the days are getting longer now, itís still dark outside when Laura finally comes home from work. Usually Joshís face changes as soon as he hears Lauraís key in the lock. He looks the way I probably look when Laura is putting food down for me, and I know it will be one of the best times of the whole day. But now his face doesnít change at all when Laura calls out her usual greeting and he calls back to say, ďIím in here.Ē

Laura walks into the room with two glasses of wine, and she hands one to Josh. Thatís when she sees the odd look on his face. ďIs anything wrong?Ē When Josh doesnít say anything, she asks him, ďDid something happen?Ē

Josh is quiet for a long moment while he drinks from the glass Laura handed him. Then he says,ďWhy didnít you tell me, Laur?Ē He picks up the folded stack of papers and hands them to her. ďI got my severance agreement today. Itís dated from a week before they let me go. Somebody at your firm must have known what was going on. I thoughtyou worked on contracts.Ē

Lauraís face gets as red as it did the night of that Pass Over dinner. She takes the papers Josh is holding out to her, but she doesnít unfold them or try to read them. ďJosh, I had no idea.Ē I know sheís telling the truth, because the black centers of her eyes stay the same size and nothing about her posture stiffens the way it usually does when a human isnít telling the truth. ďI never saw this. Nobody said a word to me.Ē

Itís odd, because humans donít normally look this upset when what theyíre saying is true. And thatís when I know. Laura is upsetbecause sheís telling the truth. That doesnít make any sense, and yet I feel sure Iím right.

ďWell, maybe you can help me out with a couple of questions I have, your firm being the attorney-of-record.Ē Joshís mouth twists into a shape thatís trying to be a smile but isnít quite. ďIíve looked over the vacation pay and expense-account money they owe me. And Iíll get another three months on my insurance until COBRA kicks in.Ē

ďThatís boilerplate, standard,Ē Laura tells him. ďWe just fill in the numbers based on the information the client provides.Ē The skin of her knuckles curls and tenses around her wineglass until itís whiter than the rest of her hand. Maybe sheís afraid of the kicking cobras Josh is talking about. Sarah is afraid of snakes, too, which is why I always check newspapers so carefully.

ďWhat about on the third page? It says something about waiving my rights in perpetuity and throughout the universe.Ē Josh tries again to smile. ďIs that supposed to be a joke?Ē

ďThatís also standard. Theyíre just trying to cover all their bases to avoid a lawsuit. Which was nothing you were planning to do, anyway. A nice, clean breakóthatís all they want.Ē

Josh winces when Laura says this, although I donít think she notices. ďEverything might be standard, but Iím not going to call itnice orclean,Ē he tells her. ďSo Iím okay to sign it? Should you take a couple of minutes and look through the whole thing? Youíre my lawyer, after all.Ē

Laura continues to hold the papers without unfolding them. She takes a long swallow from her wineglass.ďI canít do that,Ē she finally says.

ďReally?Ē Josh sounds like he thinks Laura is saying something not-true. ďReally?Ē

ďYour company is my client, Josh. Forget all the ethical issues and conflicts of interest. The people at my firm had to go pretty far out of their way to keep me from knowing about this. There were meetings and memos that I didnít know anything aboutóabout one ofmy clientsóand nothing ever crossed my desk. And you really donít have to worry,Ē she adds quickly, seeing how Joshís eyebrows come together to make an angry line across his forehead. ďThese severance agreements areóĒ

ďYeah, I know.Standard.Ē His voice gets louder. ďAnd I guess I donít meet the standards to get some legal advice from my wife. Maybe I should call your buddy Perryóhe seems like a nice guy.Ē

ďJosh, if I send you back with this thing all marked up, Perry willknow it was me. Heís not an idiot.Ē Lauraís voice is also getting louder. ďAnd even if somehow he didnít figure it out, I couldnít look him in the face and lie.Ē

ďIt didnít seem to bother Perry to look you in the face and lie.Ē

ďHe didnítlie. He kept client information confidential. Thatís Perryís job. Itís my job, too.Ē Lauraís eyes look hurt. Sarah says that Laura has her fatherís eyes, but Laura looks like Sarah now as she runs her fingers through her hair. ďThis is the kind of thing that could get me fired, Josh. And for what? Itís not like we can afford for you to walk away from five monthsí salary, anyway.Ē

ďYou know, I think Iíve heard enough legalese for one day.Ē Josh takes the papers back from Laura.

ďLet me call a friend at another firm. Iím sure I can findóĒ

ďDonít worry about it.Ē Joshís voice doesnít sound angry anymore. It has no expression at all. ďThereís nothing to worry about, right? Itís standard.Ē

ďIíll make some calls first thing tomorrow morning,Ē Laura says.

ďI said donít worry about it. I wouldnít want to see you get your hands dirty.Ē Josh is completely right aboutthat. Thereís nothing more disgusting than a human with dirty hands trying to touch you. He gets up and says, ďIím going upstairs to check email.Ē

Josh hands his glass back to Laura. She just stands there for a long time, holding two glasses of wine without drinking from either of them.

Most nights, Laura stays up much later than Josh. She likes to read her work papers when the apartment is quiet. But tonight, Josh is still awake in the living room when Laura gets into bed and turns on the TV. The only times Sarah ever watched the little TV in our bedroom, instead of the bigger one in the living room, was when she was too sick to get out of bed. Laura never watches TV in the bedroom, either. Not usually, anyway.

I remember one night, a year and three months ago, when Sarah came home very late from work. It was unlike her to spend so many hours in a row away from our apartment, and I was worried by the time she finally got back. Our neighbor from the buildingóthe same one who came to feed me when Sarah stopped coming home at allówas with her. Sarah was pale and her face was pinched, as if she were in pain. But when the neighbor helped Sarah get settled on the couch and hovered over her, asking if there was anything else she needed, Sarah said, ďIíll be fine, Sheila. Thanks so much again for everything.Ē

Sarah stayed in bed watching TV for the next four days, and those were probably the happiest four days Iíve ever known. I had Sarah to snuggle under the covers with, and she didnít have to go to work or anything. Iíd never had Sarah all to myself for so long.

But I wasnít happy that first night. Sarah didnít turn on any lamps after the neighbor left. She just sat on the couch with me in her lap until the sun came up. Even though she didnít say anything, I could tell that something was very wrong, and that she needed me close. In the darkness I could still see the tiny cracks in the skin around Sarahís eyes. And when the water from her eyes flowed into those cracks, that was where I licked her gently. To let the light in.

Now I follow the sound of the TV up the stairs and see Laura in bed like sheís asleep, but her legs keep kicking. They kick so hard, she almost kicks the covers right off the bed. Thatís something else Sarah used to doókick the blankets in her sleep when she was upset.

When Sarah was worried about something in her sleep, I used to curl up tight right next to her left ear and stretch out one paw to rest, very gently, on her shoulder. I didnít want to wake her, but I did want her to know that I was there with her. Sometimes my lying next to her was what made her able to fall into a deep enough sleep that she wasnít kicking anymore.

Josh is in the living room listening to one of Sarahís black disks. Heís playing the song Sarah sang to me the day we found each other, the song that has my name in it.Dear Prudence, the song says,wonít you come out to play†Ö

Iíve been trying not to gettoo close to Laura and Josh. After all, only one person can be your Most Important Person. For me, that person is Sarah. And when she comes back, I donít want anybodyóincluding meóto be confused about the way things are supposed to be.

But Laura looks so much like Sarah, lying there with her eyes closed and her legs scrunched up, that I find myself jumping onto the bed. The ache in my chest from Sarahís not being here, which Iíve been living with for so long, eases a little. Moving stealthily, so my Prudence-tags donít jingle and startle her, I settle onto the pillow next to Lauraís left ear. Curling into a ball, with my tail wrapped around my nose to keep my face warm, I reach out one paw and let it rest on Lauraís shoulder.

Laura rolls over so that sheís facing me, with her eyes still closed. Her breathing gets deeper, the way Sarahís does when sheís finally falling into a real sleep, and her arm curves out so that my tail and nose rest in the bend of her elbow. Alone in her bedroom, wearing her sleep clothes and without Josh lying next toher, Laura smells more like Sarah than ever. The TV isnít very loud, and I can still hear theDear Prudence song playing downstairs.

Hearing it now, with all the little crackles and popping sounds in the exact same places I remember, just the way it was when Sarah played this black disk in our old apartment, I drift off to sleep. In my dream Sarah is there, smiling at me and saying,Whoís my love? Whoís my little love? When a hand falls onto my back to stroke my fur, I donít know if itís real or if itís Sarahís hand in my dream. I purr deeply anyway and think,I am, Sarah. Iím your love.

7

Sarah

ITíS HARD TO IMAGINE IT NOW, BUT DOWNTOWN NEW YORK USED TO BE dead quiet at night. You could walk down Broadway from Prince to Reade without hearing anything other than the sound of the occasional taxicab and your own footsteps echoing off buildings. You could walk down Elizabeth Street at four AM with nothing to keep you company but the aroma of fresh-baked bread from mom-and-pop bakeries.

It was silent, that is, unless you knew where to go. Even back thenóbefore it became big, and then commercial, and then finally the playground of middle-class college kids and the bridge-and-tunnel crowdóthere were pockets and places where the noise went on all night. Soho lofts where an invitation and password got you into underground parties that played the kind of music youíd never hear on the radio. Bars where jukeboxes hummed all night and clubs where bands didnít start their first set until two AM. The shattering-glass sound of beer bottles, the inevitable thud of a person too drunk to stand who eventually falls down, thethump thump thump of someoneís bass turned all the way up.

Iíve always hated silence. Iíve always thought silence was like death. Quiet as death. Silent as the tomb. Dead men tell no tales. Nobody ever says the opposite. Nobody ever saysnoisy as the tomb.

Thatís what I loved so much about disco. Disco usedall the sounds,all the beats,all the instruments. Thenoise of it was always there for you. It would pick you up and spin you around and whirl you and dip you until you were almost too dizzy to stand on your own, but it never once let you fall.

Youíre probably thinking to yourself how silly disco was. Maybe you were even one of those people who wore a DISCO SUCKS T-shirt back in the day. But you only remember it that way because, by the end, the major labels thought they had a formula for it and cranked out by-the-numbers fluff, trying to make a quick cash grab. Disco never died, though. It just changed forms. And even today, if youíre at a wedding and the DJ puts on a song that gets every single personóno matter how old or youngóout onto the floor, chances are itís a dance song written sometime between 1974 and 1979.

It was 1975 when I first discovered the New York music scene. When you start coming into the City by yourself at fifteen to sneak into parties and clubs, when you move there permanently at sixteen and live in an unfinished loft above a hardware store, people assume youíre fleeing a troubled home life. Abusive parents, maybe, or some unnamed family tragedy, possibly even a grabby stepfather. When people keep making up the same story for you, it becomes easier and easier to believe itís true. Thatís why itís so important to keep your past organized. Your past is thereal truth. Your past is who you are now.

Prudence comes to sit in front of me. Little lady with her dainty white socks and black tiger stripes.ďItís important to keep your past organized,Ē I tell her. She regards me from rounded green eyes, then meows in an apparently thoughtful way.

I hadnít heard music in so long before Prudence and I found each other. Not just the music in my records, which sat for years in a storage unit, but the music in my head. It just stopped one day. I lost it. And then there was Prudence. After that, it was like floodgates opened and all that music Iíd hidden away came pouring back out.

Prudence, standing on her hind legs to swipe at dust motes in a sunbeam, is a conductor leading a symphony. Prudence curled in my lap while I stroke her little back isďIn My RoomĒ by the Beach Boys. Prudence sneaks into the bathroom and unrolls the toilet paper, spilling it all over the floor, in rhythm to ďSoul MakossaĒ by Manu Dibango.

Prudence kit-ten, Prudence kit-ten. Thatís what I hear in my mind whenever I look at her. A perfect rhythm in four/four time. The sound of a heartbeat times two. The motor of a life.

What I remember most about the house I grew up in is the silence. We had wall-to-wall carpeting in every room except the bathrooms and kitchen, so even the sounds of us walking around doing everyday things felt more like sleepwalking than living.

By the time I was a teenager, my parents hardly spoke to each other anymore except when necessary.What are you making for dinner tonight? When is the plumber coming? Sarah, could you pass the peas?

They had been desperate for a second child. When I was eight, my mother gave birth to a baby boy who lived only ten hours. After he died, it was as if it was painful for my mother to be reminded that sheíd ever had any children at all. The only thing she wanted was a quiet home. When my junior high music teacher said I had a good voice and should maybe take private singing lessons, my mother declined on the grounds that she didnít want noise in the house all the time. Trying to stop my ďendless chatterĒ once (Iíd been asking her questions about her own childhood), my mother told me Iíd better get past my need for constant conversation, or someday when I grew up and got married myself thereíd be no end of fighting in my house. The funny thing is, I never did fight with my husband until one day just after Laura turned three. He said,I donít think I can handle this anymore. And then, the next day, he was gone. Just like that.

Eventually I got used to the silence that emanated from my mother like smoke to fill the rooms of our house and choke our words. I spent most of my time trying to disappear into it. Still, I remember nights when Iíd lie in bed and pray for rain just so I could hear the sound of it, like a round of applause, beating down on the roof above my head.

All that changed for me the day my parents gave me permission to take the train by myself to Manhattan from where we lived in White Plains. All I had to do was promise I wouldnít go farther downtown than Herald Square, where Macyís was. But the subway system, which had seemed so easy to understand when I went into the City with my mother, confused me hopelessly when I tried to figure it out on my own. I took the wrong train from Grand Central, and then another wrong train at 14th Street, and somehow I ended up on Third Avenue. The streets were mostly empty. I saw only a few bums huddled miserably in doorways, and clusters of tough-looking girls standing on street corners. Buildings, even the ones that didnít look so old, were crumbling from the disrepair of neglect.

By the time I reached Second Avenue, I knew beyond a doubt that I was nowhere near Macyís. Up ahead I saw what looked to be a newsstand with a yellow awning that inexplicably proclaimed GEM SPA (inexplicable because it didnít seem like youíd find either gems or a spa inside) and, farther down, a store whose black awning extended out onto the sidewalk. The words LOVE SAVES THE DAY were written along its side in multicolored block lettering. The storeís window was a riot of color, a delta of ruckus jutting into a sea of gray and dull brick-red. It held exotic-looking clothes and magazines and toys and more than my eye was capable of taking in all at once. I could tell that it was a secondhand store, and I knew how appalled my mother would be at the thought of my buying used clothing. But against the gunmetal silence of the street, the colors of that store window were like shouts calling me in.

I took the first dress I pulled off the rack, made by somebody called Biba, into the dressing room. It was a muted gold, interwoven with a cream-colored diamond pattern. The sleeves were long and elaborate, blousing away from tight cuffs. The body of the dress fell in pleats, in a baby-doll fashion, from just above my still-flat chest to a hem so far up my thigh that, when I exited the dressing room to look at myself in the mirror, I blushed.

ďYou should buy it,Ē I heard a voice say. A girl, barely five feet tall and weighing maybe all of ninety-five pounds, looked at me admiringly. I guessed that she was two or three years older than I was. Beautiful in an impish sort of way, with enormous hazel eyes, a snub nose like a catís, and a mouth so small it just made you look at her eyes again. Her hair was short and chopped off unevenly in a careless way that nonetheless looked deliberate. It was mostly blond except for where it had streaks of green and pink.

The girl noticed where my eyes went and, touching one of the pink streaks, she said,ďManic panic.Ē Later Iíd learn that Manic Panic was a store on St. Markís Place where they sold off beat hair colors in spray-on aerosol cans. At the time, though, I had no idea what she was talking about. She added, ďI go there a few times a week to let Snooky spray my hair, but I think I have to stop. Too many other people are doing it now.Ē

I nodded, because I wanted to look like I knew what that sentence meant. An entire trend had apparently taken root and flourished here in the City. And Iíd known nothing about it out in White Plains, where nothing ever changed except to get drabber.

ďYou shoulddefinitely buy that dress,Ē the girl repeated.

ďIím not really sure itís me,Ē I said. ďDonít you think itís much too short?Ē

The girl laughed, loud and harsh. She had a voice like a chain saw, too gritty and hard-edged to belong to someone as young and delicate-looking as she was. How many sleepless nights of cigarettes and shouting over music had gone into the making of that voice? Eventually Iíd hear her sing and come to know just how hypnotic and blissed-out she could make it sound when she wanted to. ďGirl, that dress is more you than anything youíve ever had on.Ē She aimed a dimpled smile at me. ďAnd I donít evenknow you.Ē

I laughed, too, at the absurdity of her logic.

ďWhat kind of music are you into?Ē she asked unexpectedly.

ďThe usual stuff, I guess.Ē I tried to think of something to say that would be truthful, but that also might impress her. ďIíve been listening toPet Sounds a lot lately.Ē Then I blushed again, because what could be less impressive to this girl thanPet Sounds, which had come out way back in 1966, nine years earlier?

She looked at me appraisingly.ďYou sound like you can probably sing.Ē

ďI used to,Ē I said. ďBut my parents didnít like it.Ē

The girlís face registered deep understanding, and I saw that Iíd unintentionally passed a test I hadnít realized I was taking. ďIím going to a party tonight thatíll have some really great music,Ē she told me. ďStuff nobody else is playing. You should come. Iíll meet you somewhere at midnight and we can go over together.Ē

I imagined all the insurmountable obstacles between me and a midnight party in the City. Iíd never been to a party thatstarted at midnight. The girl must have sensed something of this because she asked,ďYouíre still living at home?Ē I nodded. How old did she think I was, anyway? I waited for her to decide I was just some kid, unworthy of her time, but she said, ďLook, call your parents and tell them youíre spending the night at a friendís house. You can hang out with me the rest of the day if you donít have anything else to do. Iíll figure out something for you to wear.Ē

I looked at her dubiously. Not only was she a foot shorter than I was, but nothing she wore was anything I would ever wear. She had on a black leather jacket with a glitzy, faded panther on the back, whose metal-studded paw reached over her left shoulder. Beneath that she wore a magenta-sequined party dress over skinny black jeans and a pair of unlaced black motorcycle boots. Around her neck was a silver pendant shaped like a holster dangling from a slender silver chain. She looked tough and sexy and surprisingly girlie, but to my suburban eyes she also looked outlandish.ďSomething thatísyou,Ē she reassured me with another warm smile. ďAnd for Godís sake, buy that dress. You look incredible in it.Ē

There didnít seem to be any way to get out of buying the dress now, so I began digging around in my purse to make sure I had enough cash. ďHey,Ē I said. ďWhatís your name?Ē

ďAnise.Ē It was a name Iíd never heard before, and it was perfect for her.

ďIím Sarah.Ē

ďPleased to meet you, Sarah.Ē She made a show of solemnly shaking my hand, her own hand feeling larger in mine than it should have. ďTonightíll be fun,Ē she said. ďTrust me.Ē

The party Anise took me to was held in a loft on lower Broadway, in a building that had once been a warehouse. We had to check in with two girls holding clipboards and hand over two dollars before we were allowed to climb the stairs and enter a cavernous space filled with multicolored balloons, like a childís birthday party. The balloons were shot through with winking silver sparkles reflected from a mirrored ball that hung from the ceiling in the center of the room. The mirrored ball also caught and refracted colored lights glowing from unseen sources, lights that brightened and dimmed in time with the music. The people who packed the room were even more gorgeous than the lights, glittering in outrageous outfits reminiscent of a carnival. I felt like Iíd stumbled into the heart of a prism.

Later I would come to understand the technical aspects of what David Mancuso, the man who threw this party, had done. Most speakers back then had only one tweeter to transmit high-end frequencies. But David had eight JBL tweeters for his two speakers, grouped to hang from the ceiling in each of the four corners of the room. All I knew when I first walked into that loft, though, was that whatever Iíd thought Iíd been listening to, it wasnít music. At least, not the way music was supposed to sound. It was like Iíd been listening to music all my life with cotton in my ears. I felt like one of Platoís cave dwellers (we were readingThe Republic in my social studies class) who thought fire was sunlightóuntil they stepped outside and saw the real sun for the first time.

Everybody there felt the difference in the sound, even if they didnít know they did. You could see it in the way their bodies reacted with varying levels of tension to a hi-hat versus a cymbal versus a guitar line. You could see it in the way David controlled the mood of the room with what he played, in the way he told stories with the music he chose. Iíd never known that ďWomanĒ by Barrab?s could be followed by ďMore Than a WomanĒ by the Bee Gees and tell you things you didnít already know about what it was like to fall in love. That night was the first time I had the sense of a record as a living thing. Seven inches of God. All thatsound and all those voices compressed into its ridges and grooves, each songís pattern unique as a set of fingerprints, awaiting only the lightest caress from that tiny needle to set its music free.

David gave us what we wanted before we knew we wanted it, except that we did know it with our bodiesówhen we wanted to speed up, when we wanted to rest. The music changed depending on how we felt, and how we felt changed because of the music. It was like being at a concert or in a crowded movie theater where everybody reacts as oneólaughing, shouting, standing up to danceóexcept we couldnít see the person who was making it happen for us. He didnít have to stand, exposed, in front of a crowd the way somebody like Anise would have to when she played with her band. From his hidden booth, David performed without performing.

And before I knew it, I was dancing. Iíd never really danced before, always feeling like Iíd rather make my too-tall, too-skinny, and too-boyish body disappear than show it off in any way. But within seconds, the impulse to dance became irresistible. Anise and I danced together and then with strangers who swayed over to join us before dancing away again to form the core of a new group somewhere else. My idea of dancing was the way it was at the handful of school dances Iíd gone to, always waiting alone in a chair against the wall for someone to ask me to dance, because dancing meant one boy standing up with one girl. Here there were no partners. Here everybody danced however they wanted with whoever they wanted, yet somehow each one of us was a part of the same whole. For the first time in my life, I fit somewhere. Iíd never been much for dating, but I finally understood what girls at school had been talking about when they described the way boys they liked made them feel. It was the same way the music made me feel nowóa hot-and-cold fever rush of tingles down my body that took the air from my lungs and made my brain buzz. I was hooked.

Like the store where Iíd met Anise, the party was also called Love Saves the Day. Later Anise showed me her crumpled invitation that bore the inscription, along with images of Dal?ís melting clocks. She said there was no connection between the party and the store where weíd met. I never believed her. ďLove Saves the DayĒ was obviously a code of some kind, a sign of recognition talked about among people who understood things Iíd never imagined.

Iíd been waiting my whole life for someone to talk to me.

I heard everything in discoís four/four time after that. Walking down the street, Iíd set the heel of each foot down before the toe to create a four-count that always sounded in my head like, ďOne twothree four, one twothree four.Ē But it wasnít just what I heard, it was also what Isaw. A chair was four legs with four beats, and the seat was a hi-hat crowning the third beat, for flourish. This was what I was always doing in my mindócounting words, syllables, windows, TV screens, peopleís faces (which broke down conveniently into two ears, two eyes, two nostrils, and two lipsótwo full four/four measures). And where I couldnít make something break down into a perfect four, Iíd imagine anything extra as additional sound and textureóFrench horn, timpani, clarinet, trombone, harp, violin, anything at allóthat transformed a four/four beat into a full, orchestral song.

Laura, a few years later, lying in her crib beneath the red ribbons Mrs. Mandelbaum had festooned it with to ward off the Evil Eye, was the most beautiful music I could imagine. I would singďFly, Robin, FlyĒ as she drifted off to sleep, wanting her to dream of the two of us flying together up, up to the sky. Her faint, tiny eyebrows were the quaver running alongside the four/four rhythm of her face, and the thin wisps of her baby curls were an open hi-hat on the off-beat. Her delighted gurgles were the strings, sounding more beautiful than anything. With Laura, I didnít just hear music. Laurawas my music.

I began spending every weekend in the City with Aniseóready with an invented new social life to tell my parents about if they asked why I was suddenly out all the time, even though they never didóuntil I graduated high school a year early. (Because I was tall and somewhat shy, my elementary school teachers had thought I might ďsocializeĒ better with older kids, although it hadnít seemed to work out that way.) Once I had my diploma, it wasnít even a question what I was going to do. I moved to the City to live with Anise, where I could try to be a DJ while Anise and her band, Evil Sugar, tried to be rock stars.

For two years, Anise and I lived together in her loft on the Bowery. Music lived on the streets of New York in those days, and every neighborhood had its own rhythms. Way uptown, in Harlem and the Bronx, there were boom boxes and block parties, and DJs were playing around with sampling and remixes of disco and funk to create a new thing called hip-hop. Down on the Lower East Side, there were salsa musicians on what seemed like every street corner, and a stripped-down rock calledďpunkĒ spilling out of the doorways of places like CBGB and Monty Pythonís. Disco was everywhere. It lived downtown at David Mancusoís Loft, and farther uptownóall the way into Midtownóat places like Paradise Garage, the Gallery, New York New York, and Le Jardin. Anise and I went to Studio 54 a couple of times, but we didnít like it much. Nothing new ever happened musically there. You would never have the wild and utterly enlightening experience of hearing Arthur Russellís ďKiss Me AgainĒ for the first time at a place like 54. I picked up a matchbook from every place we went, knowing even then that this kind of life was ephemeral at best, and that Iíd never remember it later without something to anchor my memories to.

I was into disco and Anise was into punk, which probably should have made us natural enemies. But what Anise and I always had in common, right from the beginning, was that we both lovednoise. Actually, what Anise loved even more than noise was trouble. Sheíd moved to New York from a farm in Ohio when she was sixteen, three years before I did, except Anise told her parents before she left that she was pregnant. It wasnít trueóshe was still a virginóbut it wasnít enough for Anise just to go. There had to be trouble of some kind on her way out. And it must have been a lot of trouble, because it was a full year before Aniseís parents finally forgave her fornot being pregnant after sheíd told them she was.

Anise was always full of mischief. Mischief and noise andlife. She never minded if I practiced with my records while she was practicing on her guitar. The more noise the better, as far we both were concerned. When her career started taking off, and she was finally able to buy a Gibson SG up at Mannyís on 48th Street, she took the amp from her old guitar and hooked it up to my secondhand turntables in a way that made them work together. I was obsessed with mastering beat-on-beat mixing. It was one thing when the songs used drum machines. But if you wanted to throw something like Eddie Kendricks or Van Morrison into the mix, you really had to work to match the drumbeat from the end of one song with the beginning of the next, so they synced up perfectly.

Maybe it was the overlap between our two separate styles that eventually brought dance rhythms into Evil Sugarís sound. But even then, when people started accusing Anise of ďgoing discoĒ (her music wasnít disco) and ďselling outĒ (she hadnít), sheíd always drop that fifth beat, just to make the music harder to dance to. Just for the fun of making things confusing.

It was because Anise loved trouble so much that she insisted on living with no fewer than three cats. One cat by itself, Anise said, would sleep all the time. Two cats would probably learn to get along well enough and fall into each otherís rhythms of silence and sleep. But withthree cats, her theory went, at least one of them would always be up and into something. Always making mischief of some kind. I guess she was right. Aniseís three cats spent a lot of time hissing and yowling at strays through the metal bars we bought on the street from John the Communist to keep other cats (and burglars) from climbing through our windows.

Anise loved those cats like crazy. She was forever brushing and rubbing and crooning to them, or bringing home special treats for them to eat (when, God knows, it was all we could do to feed ourselves sometimes), or making up little games to play with them. Sheíd wriggle her fingers under a bedsheet for the joy of watching them pounce in mock attacks.

Aniseís music lived in her head, but her art lived in her hands. It was there in the way she played her guitar, even back when most of the people we knew in bands prided themselves onnot being able to play their instruments. But it was also there in the intricate highway of cat runs she decorated our loft with from floor to ceiling and along all the walls. Sheíd find old boards or wooden planks in the streets and bring them home to sand, saw, and varnish. Then sheíd cover them with scraps of colorful material before nailing them up. Sometimes youíd be sitting on the couch when a cat would dropóplop!óright into your lap from a board above your head, turning around once or twice before sinking into a deep nap. Anise would make new outfits for us by tearing apart and re-sewing old outfits, then use the leftover material to make clothes for the cats. Taped up all over the walls beneath and around the cat runs were Polaroids of surly-looking felines in vests or tiny feathered jackets and cunning little hats. Nobody the cats didnít like was allowed into our home, which was also Aniseís bandís rehearsal spaceówhich was one reason why Anise went through so many different band members in the early days.

Aniseís cats loved her right back. There was always at least one in her lap, purring away, whenever we were home. The oldest was named Rita. Anise had found her as a kitten in a junkyard in the middle of a pile of discarded, rusting parking meters. Then there was Lucy, a tuxedo cat with a white diamond-shaped patch on her chest. Eleanor Rigby was Aniseís youngest, a sweet calico who could never stand being alone. (No matter how far apart Anise and I were musically, one thing we could always agree on was a passionate adoration of the Beatles.)

One winter night we woke up to all three cats pawing at her frantically, their little faces covered in black soot. The furnace in the hardware store downstairsówhich the owner sometimes left on overnight to help us keep warmóhad backed up, and our apartment was filling with soot and smoke. We would have suffocated in our sleep if it werenít for those cats. As it was, we ran around the place choking and throwing open all the windows to let fresh airin. After that, Anise doted on her cats even more.My goddesses, she called them.My saviors.

Still, Anise knew how to take care of herself. She made a point of knowing everyone in our neighborhood. Not just the kids our age, or the older residents whoíd lived there forever. She knew the hookers, the addicts, the bums who slept in parks and doorways and always called her ďTinkerbellĒ when we brought them blankets and warm winter clothing.

ďYou have to let people know who you are and that you live here, too,Ē sheíd always tell me. ďThatís how they know to leave you alone.Ē

Every so often, though, some new junkie would move into the neighborhood and learn the hard way why it didnít pay to tangle with Anise. One night, on our way to CBGB, a guy jumped in front of us and pulled out a knife. Quick as a cat, Anise snatched a board with an old nail in it off the ground and swung it at him wildly, missing the guyís eye only because he had the presence of mind to duck. Then he ran. Anise streaked after him with the board held high above her head, her six-inch heels for once not snagging on any errant cracks or stones.ďThatís right, run!Ē she shouted.ďRun, you pussy! Iím a craaaaaaaaaaazy motheróĒ

Anise had the face of an angel, but a mouth like a sewer. She may have looked petite and fragile, but you had to be tough if you wanted to be a girl fronting a rock band on the Lower East Side. I was nearly a foot taller than Anise, yet people were afraid to mess withme because ofher and not the other way around.

Every penny I could spare went into buying records. Between that and David Mancusoís record pool, which distributed demo albums from the labels to New Yorkís DJ population, by July of í77 I had a collection almost as extensive as Aniseís. Evil Sugar was taking off by then. They had a manager and a three-record deal with a label, and they were booking proper gigs.Interview magazine featured a four-page spread on them with photos of Anise in dresses sheíd made from ripped-up Tshirts, andRolling Stone did a big photo essay for their Bands to Watch issue. Anise always had thatthingóthat thing about her that made you aware of her no matter what room she was in. I was still struggling, though. No matter how many demo tapes I put together at Alphaville Studios, where Evil Sugar was recording their second album, once a club owner knew I was a girl he would almost always lose interest in hiring me.

I turned seventeen that summer, and it was brutally hot. Even the cats, who could always be counted on to snuggle up to us at night for extra warmth no matter how hot it was, became sullen. Theyíd lie on the enormous windowsills and yowl fitfully when there was no breeze to cool them.

That was the summer when I met Nick. It was too hot to stay in our apartment at night, so Anise and I started spending time at Theatre 80 on St. Markís Place. For two dollars you could see a double feature and enjoy four hours in air-conditioning. Weíd sit in the cool darkness and watch the old Hitchcock films and MGM musicals they showed three or four times in a row, until it was so late it was early.

Nick tended the polished wood bar, which dated back to 1922, in the lobby. I would see him waxing it every night, when the crowds were slow. His black hair gleamed as brightly as the wood he polished, so brightly that it seemed to cast light for its shadow. Something about the way his shoulder blades moved beneath the thin cotton of his short-sleeved shirt, and the summer-browned, lightly muscled arms ending in tapering fingers that held the rag and wood polish, entranced me. For weeks, I watched him without being noticed. When he finally looked at me for the first time, with eyes that were a dark midnight blue at the rims and faded to a white-blue at the centers, I was gobsmacked. I had never really been interested in anyone before. Anise saw my face turn red when he looked at me, and she teased me about it relentlessly. It was Anise who sat the two of us down at that bar, who ordered a round of drinks and made introductions. Anise knew everything about attracting attention, but she also knew how to recede quietly into the background and eventually leave unnoticed once I got over my shyness and Nick and I started talking.

I kissed Nick for the first time that night in the theaterís basement. It was the night of the blackout, and all ordinary rules seemed suspended. Later weíd hear about looting and riots uptown, but in our neighborhood, people threw parties and played music on the streets. I went downstairs with Nick, armed with flashlights, to look for candles. He kissed me in what had once been the bunker of a Prohibition-era mobster whoíd operated a speakeasy where the theater now stood. When Nick took me in his arms, he smelled like lemon-scented wood polish and the heat of the kinetic air outside. For the first time in nearly two years, the music in my head stopped. All I heard was the intake of my own breath in the dark, which paused for what felt like forever when Nick brought his lips to mine.

Later Anise would say that the worst thing she ever did for me as a friend was introducing me to Nick. Those two disliked each other almost as soon as we started spending time together. Nick resented how much of my time Anise took up, and Anise disliked Nick on the general principle that he wasnítserious about anything. Nick talked about wanting to be an actor and the oneďbig breakĒ that was all he needed to launch his career. Heíd drag me to tiny black-box productions all over the Lower East Side, but whenever he actually got cast in anything, something always seemed to go wrong. He didnít want to spend as much time rehearsing as the director required, or heíd have a disagreement of some kind with another cast member. Then one day he announced that he was done with acting, that photography was his new passion. I went with him to the small galleries that were starting to pop up in our neighborhood. He especially loved taking pictures of me after I got pregnant with Laura. But his approach was haphazard, and there were weeks on end when the camera heíd spent two hundred dollars onóan enormous amount for that time and placeólay discarded in a corner of Aniseís and my loft, next to my mattress. Anise had no tolerance for anybody who wanted to do something creative but lacked the discipline to see it through. Hard work and perfecting her craft were Aniseís religion.

ďBut the cats donít even like him,Ē she would say. Which was true. But it didnít matter to me.

Nick and I were married at City Hall the following summer. I clutched a small bouquet of lilies weíd paid seventy-five cents for in a bodega on our way downtown. Anise was engaged to her drummer by then (the first of what would end up being three husbands and some uncountable number of fianc?s), and Evil Sugar was getting ready to go on their first tour. They were opening for the Talking Heads, which unquestionably was a big break. Nick and I found a rent-controlled two-bedroom on the second floor of an old Stanton Street tenement for only $250 a month. Laura was born two years later, and I moved all my clothes, photos, matchbooks, and other mementos of my days with Anise into storageóbecause once Laura was born, it was like the rest of it hadnít really happened, like it had all been just a lead-up to that first moment when I held our daughter in my arms and she looked up at me with a softer, infinitely more beautiful version of Nickís blue, blue eyes.

By the time she was three and Nick had left for good, Anise was back in New York to give up the loft and move her cats and her band out to LA, which was where they were already spending at least half their time, anyway. Anise was on her way up, while I had a young daughter to support on my own and no clear idea as to how I could do that.

Sometimes, though, things work out the way theyíre supposed toóor, at least, the way it seems like theyíre supposed to. One afternoon, pushing Lauraís stroller down 9th Street between First and Second, I passed what had obviously once been a record store, now abandoned. Through the dusty windows, I could see a cat who looked a great deal like Eleanor Rigby, clawing languidly at a stack of old ízines. She turned to look at me, and although I couldnít hear her I could see her mouth say,Mew. Then she leapt nimbly from the top of the stack and disappeared around the counter into a back room.

When I tracked down the buildingís owner, my proposition was simple: If he would let me take over the store, I would give him 5 percent of my first yearís gross in lieu of rent, paid monthly, with the option of taking over the lease officially after that. Such arrangements werenít uncommon on the Lower East Side back then, when the area wasnít yet considered desirable by the mainstream and real estate wasnít at a premium. He agreed.

It was Anise who suggested naming my store Ear Wax. With the clarity of hindsight I understood that Iíd rushed into marriage with Nick when I was only eighteen because Iíd wantedófinallyóto have a real family. My father had died of a heart attack not long after I moved to the City, and my mother took their savings and his pension and bought a condo in Florida. She never invited me to visitor asked if she could come visit me, and I never pressed the point.

My marriage to Nick hadnít lasted, but now there was Laura. Laura and I would be a family. Laura would never be left alone in her room to listen to records and wonder why her own mother didnít want to talk to her.

Anise was cleaning Lucyís ears, which were always accumulating a bluish waxy buildup, the first time we talked about my record store. ďWhy donít you call it Ear Wax?Ē she said. At first I laughed, thinking she was making a joke about being immersed in ear wax up to her fingernails at that moment. But then she said, ďIím serious, Sarah. Ear Wax is a perfect name.Ē

Ear Wax Records, Ear Wax Records, I thought. And I knew she was right.

An artist friend of ours crafted an enormous papier-m?ch? ear with scratched-up old albums dangling from it, which I hung from the ceiling in the middle of the store. It remained there for as long as I owned the place.

It was easy enough to use the records Iíd been collecting in the hope of being a DJóalong with the hundreds of discards Anise donated (ďIíd just have to get rid of them anyway before I moved out west,Ē she insisted, as if what she was doing wasnít an incredibly generous favor)óas the nucleus of my fledgling store.

A few of Aniseís ďcast-offsĒ were rare imports of the Beatles on mono, and I was able to sell those to collectors right away for a small fortune. I also hired a man named Noel to act as manager. Noel was six foot two of solid muscle and always carried a baseball bat, and he was a walking encyclopedia of artists, albums, and genres. I met him at one of the larger record stores on St. Markís Place, which he was running on the ownerís behalf, and knew instantly that he was exactly what I needed as a woman trying to run a record store in that neighborhood. I lured him away from the larger store with most of the cash from those Beatles sales, and gave him free rein to ďstaff upĒ as he saw fit.

Laura and I lived happily in our six-floor walk-up on Stanton Street. There was a bodega downstairs that was open twenty-four hours, making it easy enough to run downstairs if I realized belatedly that I had no milk or peanut butter for Lauraís lunch the next day. The Verdes lived two floors above us, and as Laura grew, their second-oldest child, Maria Elena, became her closest friend. Their kids were always in our apartment, or Laura was in theirs.

And then there were the Mandelbaums in the apartment right above ours. Max Mandelbaum drove a cab, and Ida Mandelbaum kept house. They were a gregarious couple, Mr. Mandelbaumís voice so loud and powerful that you could hear it reverberating throughout the building, even when their door was closed. But he never yelled. He was never angry. He adored his wife, even after fifty years of marriage, and she adored him, too. She had a habit of sending him downstairs for a quart of milk every day when he got home, and every day he would grumble about it. ďHush, Max,Ē she always chided him. ďYou know the doctor says you need to get exercise.Ē When he returned, Mrs. Mandelbaum would say to whoever happened to be there, ďHe complains, but he likes being nagged byhis wife. Better open rebuke than hidden love.Ē And Mr. Mandelbaum would continue to grouse under his breath, but the look in his eyes belied his words.

Mrs. Mandelbaum never reallyďnaggedĒ him. Her voice was never as loud as his, and her ways were softer. But bright eyes beamed in both sets of faces, always happy to see you and eager to press whatever creature comfortsóa soft couch, hot tea, trays of strudel and bowls of hard candies, leftovers from the dinners Mrs. Mandelbaum cooked every nightówere available in their small apartment.

Mrs. Mandelbaum delighted in keeping Laura occupied with picture books or lessons on how to bake cookies while Mr. Mandelbaum would accompany me to the neighborhood butcher or baker or fruit vendors. As I made selections, he would keep a shrewd eye on the scales to make sure nobody tried to cheat me.ďA young girl like you, alone with a daughter!Ē he would exclaim. ďSomeone needs to make sure nobody takes advantage.Ē When I could finally afford to fix up Lauraís bedroom, it was Mrs. Mandelbaum who insisted on making beautiful lace curtains from ďjust a few oldschmatas I have lying around.Ē

Laura seemed as entranced with them as they were with her, although maybe she wouldnít have loved spending time with them asmuch as she did if not for their catóa brown tabby with green eyes and a white chest and paws whoíd followed them home from the butcher shop one day. ďWhat could we do?Ē Mrs. Mandelbaum liked to say. ďWe took her in. Max never could say no to a damsel in distress.Ē

As if the cat knew that Mr. Mandelbaum had been her salvation, she devoted herself to him. She would follow him from room to room, curling at his feet or in his lap as her moods dictated. She was fond of people and had a gentle disposition, although the only person she seemed to love nearly as much as Mr. Mandelbaum was Laura. Many was the time when I would come to pick her up after a late night at the store to find her curled up on the small bed in what had been their sonís bedroom, sleeping on her side with one arm thrown around the soft tabby curled up on the pillow beside her.

I knew, of course, that Laura and I were replacements for the son theyíd lost and the grandchild they would never have. Still, it was impossible not to love the Mandelbaums. We needed a family, too, Laura and I.

Every so often, Mrs. Mandelbaum would cup my chin gently in her hand and say,ďA pretty young girl like you should get out more. You should find someone to love. People werenít meant to be alone.Ē

ďIím not alone,Ē I would protest. ďI have Laura, and the two of you, and my store. How muchless alone could I be?Ē

I knew what she meant, though. I thought about Nick, who I couldnít stop loving even though I knew he was worthless. I thought about my mother with her sad, drifting eyes after she lost my infant brother. The Mandelbaums had found the strength to carry on after a similar loss. But the people in my family were different from the Mandelbaums. When we broke, we stayed broken.

The best and worst thing about owning a store is that anybody can walk in. Homeless people came in to get out of the rain. There were those who came into the store three times a day every day because they had no one else to talk to. Or else they were obsessive about checking the used bins for the latest promos and onesies that some music critic had just unloaded. I was more lenient with such people than Noel. I always made sure we had coffee and soda and, when the weather was cold, I stockpiled donated blankets and coats in our basement to distribute. I wanted to be part of a community, but more than that I wanted people to know who Laura was. She couldnítalways be in the store or at home with me or the Mandelbaums. She had to be allowed to play outside with her friends, but I slept better at night knowing there was a veritable army in place to help me keep watch.

We had plenty ofďrealĒ customers, too. Scenesters clamoring for Lydia Lunch and New Order. Kids experimenting with Latin hip-hop at Cuando on Second and Houston checked out our salsa section. DJs traveled all the way down from the Bronx to buy Schoolly D or old-school funk they could remix. A cross-dressing weed dealeróan ardent Reagan Republican with an uptown cabaret act under the name Vera Similitudeówas in at least once a week to quote Ayn Rand and buy opera records. I learned that anybody with green hair automatically wanted punk and couldnít be talked into anything else. Suburbanites came forthe latest Springsteen or Talking Heads album, and these were the people weíd have the most fun with. Theyíd break their twenty on the new Bon Jovi and leave with something by Public Image or Liquid Liquid because Iíd have it playing in the background.Whatís thiscrazy song? It doesnít sound half bad, theyíd say, before digging into their wallets for extra cash.

Running a record store was like being a DJ in some ways. On weekends, when the store was packed, I had to get a sense of the crowd. I could feel the mood shift depending on what music I decided to play over the storeís speakers. If I played the Jellybean BenitezĖproduced electro cover of Babe Ruthís ďThe Mexican,Ē every single person in the store would be dancing, and Iíd sell all the copies I had in stock.

Whenever Anise was in town, whether to promote a new album or to play Madison Square Garden, she always did aďmeet and greetĒ at my store. In interviews, she said the only place in New York sheíd buy music was at Ear Wax on 9th Street. That helped a lot, as did the mentions we started getting in the New York City guidebooks distributed to tourists.

Still, Ear Wax never made much money. Everything I could spare, after paying my rent and handing out well-earned bonuses to my staff, I reinvested. Looking back, this was probably the biggest mistake I made. But at the time I saw the store as Lauraís and my future, as our only possible future. Laura was going to go to college one day, was going to have all the things Iíd never had. I was going to make sure of it.

Women back then were first starting to enter the workforce in droves and debating the merits of day care centers and nannies. But I was able to pick my daughter up every day after school. Iíd bring her back to the record store where she could have a snack, read a book, do her homework. I got to watch Laura grow up, not just in a general sense, but in all the little ways. I could marvel at the glory of her unbound hair freed from the school dayís ponytail, or watch one small, perfect hand tracing the lovely shape of her face as she read her schoolbooks. On weekday afternoons, when the store was dead, Laura would choose records for the two of us to sing along to. She would always insist on turning the music down and surreptitiously, fading out her own singing until my voice sang alone.

On school holidays, Laura would come to the store with me hours before it opened. Weíd pull albums from the shelves and spread them all over the floor, hopscotching among the squares of cracked tile between them. Nimble and tallólight as a pigeonóshe never once brought her heel down on a record by mistake. On the nights when I worked late, Laura could stay with the Verdes orthe Mandelbaums, safe in a loving home until I came to collect her. She was a happy child, and I was happy, too. I had Laura, I had my business, I had my music. It was the happiest time of my life.

Even back when the Lower East Side got really bad, when crack invaded in the mid-í80s and you couldnít walk farther east than Avenue A unarmed, even then our stretch of 9th Street was a nice block. Tree-lined and leafy. In the spring, Mu Shuóthe cat who lived among the interconnected basements and storefronts of our block, so named because of her passion for Chinese takeoutówould leave dandelions at the entrance to the store. Summers she took languorous naps on the sidewalk beneath dappled shade. ďMu Shuís Hamptons,Ē we used to call that patch of sidewalk. Working-class Ukrainian families lived in rent-controlled apartments above the storefronts. Old Ukrainian women would gather on front stoops to gossip at dusk.

In the storefronts themselves, the kids whoíd lived there in groups during the í70s, converting them into commune-style apartments, had either moved out or stayed behind to open shops of their own. Small affairs, like mine. A store where one person made and sold leather handicrafts. A clothing shop owned by a jazz musician. When the weather was nice, children played together outside. Laura and her friend Maria Elena often came to play in front of my store with the neighborhood kids, where I could have them within earshot.

Drug dealers and dime-store thugs proliferated on the corners of blocks all around us, but never on our block. Never on our corner. Never where my daughter and her friends played with bottle caps they found in the street while a pretty little calico cat looked on, occasionally snatching one up in her mouth and trotting down the street proudly with it, as if it were a trophy.

8

Prudence

WHEN SARAH WAS YOUNG AND THE WORLD WAS DIFFERENT from what it is today, it could be fun to have no money. Thatís what she and Anise say, anyway. Whenever they talk about all the Good Times they used to have, one of them always ends up saying,We were so young then! The world was a different place.

If you were poor when they were so young, you got to do things like live with your best friend in a huge loft that cost practically nothing. (Peanuts! Sarah says.) It would be so big that thereíd be plenty of room to set up your DJ table or for your roommateís band to rehearse, with enough space left over to put two mattresses on the floor where you and your roommate would stay up all night talking and laughing and playing with her three cats. You could go to parties or to a type of place called a ďclub,Ē where friends of yours would play records and musical instruments for other humans to dance to. If you knew the humans who worked there, they would let you eat and drink things for free.

Besides your best friend, you would know other people who did interesting things, like being actors or artists or writers, and all of you together would have fun lying on the grass at outside parks and eating hot dogs (which arenít really made from dogs). Hot dogs cost practically no money at all. Sometimes you and your roommate would save up all your money for one big meal at a restaurant called Dojo on St. Marks Place, where you would get ďthe works.Ē Or you might go to a place called Ice Cream Connection, where they made their own ice cream from honey and gave their flavors names like Panama Red (which is just regular cherry) or Acapulco Gold (which is peach).

I miss ice cream. Sarah stopped bringing it home, and Laura and Josh never seem to have any. Sometimes I wishwe were poor, so I could get to have ice cream again.

But we arenít poor, or even broke. At least, thatís what Josh is always saying. Like the other day when Laura came home from work with a bag of peaches she bought at the grocery store. Josh asked why sheíd bought peaches instead of plums, because she knows they both like plums better. And Laura said,They had peaches on sale. He kept saying she should have gotten plums and she kept saying that the peaches were on sale, until Josh said it wasnít like they were too poor to have plums instead of peaches if thatís what they wanted. Laura looked upset and confused, like sheíd thought she was doing a nice thing by bringing the peaches home and couldnít understand why Josh was making such a big deal about it. Finally, she told Josh there was a fruit stand right down the street, and if he caredso much about peaches and plums he had plenty of free time during the day to go out and buy whatever he wanted.

Thatís when Josh left the kitchen and went upstairs to Home Office, clackety-clacking extra loud on the cat bed/computer thing the way I sometimes go after my own scratching post when Iím angry about something. After he was gone, Laura noticed all the tiny crumbs Josh had left on the counter when he made his lunch earlier, and she got out a sponge and spritzy bottle. She rubbed the counter much harder than necessary to get it clean. Both humans and cats have to find ways to use our extra energy when we get ďriled up,Ē as Sarah puts it. It was a good thing Iíd jumped onto the counter earlier to eat the bits of meat and cheese Josh spilled when he made his sandwich. If Laura had seen what it looked likebefore I helped clean up, she would have been even more riled.

And last week, when Laura and Josh sat at the dining room table to go over their bills, Laura said how maybe they should try to put twice as much into savings while Josh was still getting money from his old job, even if doing that would make lifeďa little uncomfortable.Ē Josh told her they had plenty of money in savings, and Laura said,But for how long? Josh said,Weíre a long way from being broke, Laura. Iíve been saving for fifteen years. Youíve seenall the paperwork. Neither of them said anything after that. But Laura got a frown-crease in her forehead, and the skin underneath Joshís left eye twitched. It took a long time of my being in bed with Laura that night before she was able to settle into a real sleep.

Lauraís been having a lot of trouble falling asleep, especially since Josh has started coming to bed later than he used toólong after Lauraís already been there for a while, with the television flickering some old movie like Sarah used to watch when she couldnít sleep. When Josh finally does come to bed, he sleeps farther away from Laura, so thereís plenty of room for me to be there, too, but also so heís touching her less. Sometimes Laura is so tired in the morning that she forgets to do parts of her usual morning routine, like putting on lipstick after her eye makeup, or styling her hair with the gels that live in bottles on the bathroom counter. A few times sheís forgotten to take the pill she takes every morning just before giving me my breakfast. Sheís still feeding me right on time, though, every morning. Occasionally she fills my water too high like when I first came to live here. But now she just sighs instead of pressing her lips together when she sees water spilled from my jostling the bowl.

Ever since the night three weeks ago when they fought about Joshís severance agreement, things have been different between Josh and Laura. Somebody whoíd just met them might not realize anything is wrong because most of the time theyíre so polite to each other. They say each otherís names all the time, and make sure they say ďpleaseĒ and ďthank youĒ after every little thing, the way humans talk to other humans they donít know very well. (If youíre finished with the newspaper, Laura, could you please hand me the business section? Thank you. Or,Josh, could you please pick up some fresh litter for Prudence tomorrow? Thanks.)

I donít think Laura is as angry as Josh is, because she tries harder to make him talk. She keeps finding reasons to do little things she never used to bother with. If she decides to take a shower after she gets home from work, she brings the phone upstairs to Home Office and tells Josh,Hereís the phone, in case it rings while Iím in the shower. And Josh says,Thanks, without even turning to look at her. Laura waits, as if she expects Josh to say something more since she went to the trouble of bringing the phone up to him. But Josh is silent until, finally, he asks,Did you want something else, Laura? Or if Laura says,I thought Iíd order Chinese, if thatís okay with you, Josh just says,Chinese is fine. Then Laura will say something like,Or we could try that new Thai place, if you want.

Josh likes to tease Laura that you can tell sheís a lawyer by the way she negotiates over everything. If heís the one who suggests Thai food, which Laura hates (and I agree, because Thai food is way too spicy for a cat to eatówhich means they should never order it), Laura will say something like,Okay, Thai tonight, but then I get to choose for the next three nights. And Josh will respond by saying,Thai food tonight, you get to choose tomorrow, plus Iíll give you a foot rub. And Laura says,Thai food tonight, one foot rub, and you have to clean Prudenceís litterbox for the rest of the week. And Josh will squint his eyes and draw the corners of his mouth down, and say,Ooh†Ö†I donít know†Ö†I canít decide if Iím coming out ahead or not. Then they laugh and order the Thai food.

But when Laura suggests Thai food now, which should make Josh happy since heís the only one who likes it, he doesnít say anything except,Get whatever you want, Laura.

When I was much younger and had only been living with Sarah for a few months, I used to have a hard time getting my tail to do what I wanted. I would be trying to groom myself, and my tail would wriggle all over the place, pulling itself out of reach of my claws no matter how hard I tried to catch it. I would growl and snap at it, to show it how serious I was. Sometimes I even tried to chase it down, but it always remained just out of reach of my teeth, and all that happened was I wound up running in circles. I didnít get angry at it, exactly. But it was frustrating to see a part of myself doing things I didnít want or expect or understand.

Thatís what Laura and Josh remind me of now. They seem bewildered and frustrated when they look at each other, like they just canít understand the things this other humanówho they thought they were so close withóis doing or saying.

I wish I could talk in human language, so I could tell Laura that Josh is only acting so angry because his feelings are hurt, just like hers. Maybe then she would sleep better at night.

Of course, if she wasnít having trouble sleeping, she might not want me to sleep in the bed with her. And sleeping next to Laura is the best Iíve slept since the day Sarah left without telling me why.

Today is Sunday and Laura is awake earlier than she usually is on Sundaysóso early that I donít have to do any of the things I do on Sundays togently remind her to feed me breakfast at my regular time, like lying on her chest and staring straight at her face until her eyes open, or walking on top of the clock radio next to her head until it starts playing loud music. When Josh hears the clock radio on Sunday mornings, he buries his head under a pillow and says in a muffled, irritable voice,Isnít today Sunday? Canít you hit the snooze button or something? And Laura, sounding sleepy, tells him,I donít think there isa snooze button on a hungry cat.

But today Laura gets up at her usual workday time and cleans the whole apartment. I even hear the sounds of The Monster rampaging in the living room while Iím eating in the kitchen! (I realize now that Laura and Josh use The Monster to make the floors clean. Sarah used to get the same thing done with just a regular broom and rolling thing called a carpet sweeper. It seems foolish to risk all our lives by having a Monsterliving in our apartment just so we can have cleaner floors, although I do have to admit that Laura seems strong enough to control itófor now.) My heart pounding, I leave most of my food uneaten and race for my upstairs room with the Sarah-boxes as fast as four legs can carry me. But when I get there, the door is closed! I meow in my loudest ďfishmongerĒ voice, but the continual shrieking of The Monster downstairs drowns it out. When nobody responds, I jump up and latch onto the door handle with all my front toes, then let the weight of my body hang down until it drags the handle down, too, and makes the door swing open a crack. We had regular round doorknobs when I lived with Sarah in Lower East Side, but here in upper west Side the door handles are long and skinny enough for me to hold without slipping off.

Josh wanders out of his bedroomódressed to go outside in jeans, his old sneakers with the dangly shoelace, and a shirt with buttons down the frontóin time to see the door swinging open with me attached to it. He laughs. ďPoor Prudence! Did you get locked out of your favorite room?Ē

The Prudence-tags on my red collar make a tinkling sound as I drop to the floor and sit on my haunches, looking up at Josh as he looks down at me. His upper lids droop a bit as his eyes narrow, and I wonder if heís figured out the same thing I haveóthat Laura doesnít want to come into this room to clean, but also doesnít want to leave the door open for someone to see how this room is dustier than any other room in the apartment. ďAll right,Ē Josh says, ďweíll leave it open just enough for you to get in and out. Okay?Ē He reaches for the door handle and pulls the door almost-closed. Iím surprised when I have to push it open a bit wider with the sides of my belly as I pass through. Once I would have been able to fit easily into an opening this size. I realize suddenly how long itís been since I last worried about not being fed on time, and started eating all my food as soon as itís put in front of me.

ďIím off to get bagels and smoked fish,Ē Josh tells me. He smiles. ďIf youíre good, you can have some later.Ē

Joshís footsteps thud quickly down the stairs, and The Monster stops shrieking long enough for him to tell Laura that heís going out to get the bagels. She tells him not to forget to bring the shopping list they made last night.

I dart into the room and burrow into my sleeping place in the back of my closetólistening closely to be absolutely sure The Monster isnít going to come in here to threaten me or the Sarah-boxes, but mostly thinking about fish.

Joshís whole family comes over at noon to talk about money, and whoís sick and whoís well, and whoís still married to their husband or wifeóalthough theysay theyíre here for a holiday. Josh gives his mother a big hug when she comes in and says, ďHappy Motherís Day.Ē Joshís mother hugs Laura a bit longer than she hugged Josh, and rubs her hand up and down Lauraís back. ďHappy Motherís Day,Ē Laura murmurs, and Joshís mother kisses her on the cheek before letting her go.

Laura came to Sarahís and my apartment in Lower East Side a year ago for this same holiday. She also brought over bagels and fish, along with a bunch of red carnations that Sarah put in a little yellow vase in the middle of our kitchen table. The two of them sort of hugged (whenever they hugged, it was always as iftheyíd forgotten how), although Laura was less stiff than she normally was when she came to visit us. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes sparkled. She laughed when Sarah tossed the twisty-tie from the bag of bagels in my direction and I leapt to catch it with my front paws in midair. She even smiled patiently while Sarah chattered at her about the weather, and a funny thing somebody at her work had said, and whether Laura had seen any interesting movies lately.

After they finished getting plates and food on the table, I jumped right into the middle so Sarah could arrange some fish on a little Prudence-plate for me. Laura wrinkled up her nose and said,ďUgh, Mom, do you always let Prudence eat on the table?Ē

Sarahís shoulders straightened the way they do whenever she thinks Laura is criticizing the way she does things. But she just said, ďPrudence and I understand each other.Ē She stroked the back of my neck a few times before putting one hand underneath my body so she could lift me gently to the floor, setting my special plate of fish down next to me. The two of them watched me. Then Sarah picked up a fork and started putting fish onto her bagel. She glanced at Laura. ďSometimes I think Iím crazy to love her as much as I do.Ē

ďLove is love,Ē Laura said. Even though there was food in front of her, she hadnít touched it. ďWhoís to say whatís crazy?Ē The corners of her mouth turned up in just the hint of a smile, and her cheeks got pinker. She seemed shy and pleased with herself, like she had the kind of secret it makes you happy just to think about. Suddenly Sarah was looking at her more closelyóthen she smiled, and her eyes sparkled, too.

Laura isnít pink-cheeked and sparkly today. Everybody keeps looking at her out of the corners of their eyes, trying to seem as if they arenít, and Laura notices everybody doing this but pretends she doesnít. Are they all looking at her because sheís the only human whose mother isnít here for Motherís Day? But Joshís parentsí mothers arenít here, either, and nobodyís watchingthem, so that canít be right. Still, Josh is being nicer to Laura than heís been these past few weeks, sitting on the arm of the couch next to her and putting an arm around her shoulders. She doesnít move away, but she also doesnít touch his leg or look up into his face like she used to.

The dining room table has been set up with a huge mound of bagels in a straw basket I didnít know we had, along with containers of soft cheeses and platters of different kinds of smoked fish. After thelast holiday, I know better than to jump onto the table and demand someóno matter how tempting all that wonderful fish smells. I look up anxiously into Lauraís and Joshís faces as everybody piles their plates with food to take back into the living room. (Joshís father doesnít pile his plate quite as high as everyone else, because Joshís mother tells him, ďAbe, remember what Dr. Stern said about your cholesterol.Ē) I even rub my right cheek hard against the table leg, carefully scraping my teeth against it to get them extra clean, so everyone can tell by my scent that this ismy food place right now. But nobody seems to notice how politely Iím waiting. At least the littermates are better behaved than they were the last time. Robert bends down to put his face (too) close to mine and, holding out one hand, says, ďHere, kitty. Can I pet you?Ē But the hand heís holding out doesnít have any fish in it, so I flinch away in disgust, raising my right front paw with the claws extended as a warning.

Once the littermates have their food arranged on plates (and why shouldthey get to have fish beforeI do?), they race upstairs to eat and watch TV in Laura and Joshís bedroom. Normally food isnever allowed upstairs.ďThatís what I asked them to give me for Motherís Day,Ē Erica says drily. ďOne quiet meal with grown-ups.Ē Then she sighs. ďI was hoping Jeff might send some of the money he owes so I could swing camp for them this summer.Ē She looks at Josh, whoís now sitting next to Laura on thecouch, but not so close that their arms touch. ďRemember how much we loved Pine Crest?Ē

ďEight weeks in the mountains away from our parents.Ē Josh smiles. ďWhat could be better?Ē

ďEight weeks in the suburbs with no kids,Ē Joshís mother says, and everybody laughs.

Josh turns to look at Laura.ďDid you ever go to summer camp?Ē

ďMe?Ē Laura seems surprised. She scrunches her eyebrows and turns up one side of her mouth, as if she thinks this question is foolish. ďLower East Side kids didnít go to summer camp. Unless you count roller skating through an open fire hydrant as camp.Ē She grins. ďWe used to call it urban waterskiing.Ē

ďSo what did your mother do with you when school was out?Ē Joshís mother asks.

Laura shrugs.ďMostly I helped out at her record store, or stayed with neighbors in our building. Some mornings sheíd take me with her to the thievesí market on Astor Place to buy back records shoplifters had stolen. Then weíd go to Kiev for chocolate blintzes. Thatís only until I was about nine or ten,Ē Laura adds, in a way that makes it seem like she wants to change the subject. ďAfter that I started taking summer classes to help me prepare for the tests to get into Stuyvesant.Ē

Joshís fatherís eyebrows raise and he lets out a low whistle. My ears prick up at the sound, thinking maybe heís calling me over to give me some fish. I run to stand next to the chair where heís sitting and rub my cheeks vigorously against its sides. But all he does is say, ďYour mother caredabout your education. Stuyvesantís one helluva prestigious high school.Ē

ďBelieve me, I know.Ē Laura gives a short laugh. ďThose tests werenot easy.Ē

ďSo, wait,Ē Josh says. ďYou would have been nine in, what, í89?Ē When Laura nods, he says, ďThat must have been a great summer to hang out in a record store. You hadMind Bomb by The The,Paulís Boutique, the PoguesíPeace and Love.Ē

Lauraís face as she looks at him is perplexed but also affectionate for the first time in a long time. ďHow can you possibly know all that right off the top of your head?Ē

Josh grins.ďYou knew you married a geek.Ē

ďHey,Ē Erica interrupts. ďDidnítBleach come out that summer?Ē

ďThatís right!Ē Josh turns to face Laura again. ďWhat did your mother think of early Nirvana?Ē

ďOh, I donít know.Ē Laura takes a bite of her bagel, and I watch enviously as the fish goes into her mouth. But when nobody else says anything, waiting for her to answer, she swallows and tells Josh, ďShe wasnít all that interested in them at first. It wasnít her kind of music. But Anise came into town and dragged her to see them at the Pyramid Club. It was the first time theyíd played New York, and Kurt Cobain got into a brawl with one of the bouncers. That was on Tuesday night.Ē Thereís a kind of unwilling respect in Lauraís smile. ďWednesday morning she called her distributer and had him overnight her a gazillion copies ofBleach. By the time the store closed on Sunday sheíd sold out.Ē

Joshís father stands and carries his empty plate into the kitchen. I sink to my belly and put my nose between my front paws, disappointed that he didnít think to give me any fish. ďThe Lower East Side was so violent back then,Ē he says. ďRemember, Zelda? Every time you read about it in the papers, it was nothing but muggings, arson, and drug dealers.Ē He comes back to the living room and settles again into the chair.

ďYou were taking your life in your hands just driving through that neighborhood,Ē Joshís mother agrees. ďItís surprising your mother decided to raise a child alone down there.Ē

ďMa,Ē Josh says. Thereís a warning in his voice.

ďNo, thatís okay,Ē Laura says. ďIt was different if you actually lived there,Ē she tells his parents. ďMy mother made a point of getting to know people, so thereíd always be someone to keep an eye out for me. I remember one time, I was twelve and riding my bike along Fourteenth and Second, and some older kid tried to sell me drugs. These hookers who knew my mother justdescended on him.Ē She laughs. ďOne of them insisted on walking me back to the store so she could deliver me to my mother personally.Ē

Even though Lauraís words seem friendly at first, thereís a hard, protective sound to her voice. As if she doesnít want Joshís parents to think anything bad about Sarah. This is odd, because Sarah says Laura will never stop being angry at her for the record store or where she decided to raise Laura.She blames the record store for everything, Sarah once told Anise. Then she sighed and said,Actually, she blames me.

As Laura talks, though, she starts to sound softer and her shoulders relax. The ache in my chest from Sarahís being away thrums and eases as I listen to her, and I hope sheíll keep talking about Sarah this way. Itís nice to hear different memories of Sarah than the ones I already have. Maybe if Laura says enough of her different memories, weíll have remembered Sarah enough for her to come back and always be with us.

Josh likes listening to her, too. His eyes get shinier and donít move away from her face at all while she speaks. His posture (and Lauraís, too) is more relaxed, so that now his arm and leg brush lightly against hers without either of them noticing muchóin the old, comfortable way they used to be together before they started being angry all the time.

But his parents look horrified at what Laura has just said, and Laura realizes this. Her face turns bright red, and she gives a laugh that sounds like a dogís yelp. ďIt was completely different on Ninth west of A, though, where my momís store was,Ē she adds quickly. ďThat street was always quiet. The street we lived on was nice, too†ÖĒ Lauraís voice trails off and when she speaks again, her voice is casual. ďHow did we get on this subject, anyway?Ē She looks at Erica, whoís sitting next to Joshís mother on the smaller couch. ďWe were talking about your plans for the kids this summer.Ē

ďI have something lined up for them through their school three days a week, but I donít know what to do with them the other two.Ē Erica looks glum.

ďI can take them two days a week, if you want,Ē Josh says.

Erica hesitates. You can tell by her face how badly she wants to say yes, but she doesnít want to say so right away. ďAre you sure? I know you have†Ö†other things to do.Ē

ďSure!Ē Josh says. ďI could use some time out of the house, anyway. Itíll be fun.Ē

Lauraís nostrils widen just a little. She gets up and starts taking empty plates into the kitchen, her fingers gripping them tightly. I follow her and, thinking Icertainly deserve a reward for the admirable patience Iíve shown all afternoon, I stand next to the counter and meow at her in the loudest, firmest voice I have. She salvages a small piece of fish from someoneís plate and puts it on the floor for me.

I gobble it down quicklyóbut, really, I deserve better than that, seeing as Iíve waited so long to try some. When Laura starts scraping the rest of the food from the plates into the garbage disposal, I paw at her leg and meow more insistently. Thatís when she turns to look down at me and says, ďDonít push your luck.Ē

After everybody leaves, Josh carries the plates and platters of leftover fish into the kitchen. The fish goes into plastic wrap and the platters go into the sink. Iímstill hoping Josh will give me some fishólike hepromisedóbut instead he puts on a pair of springy yellow gloves and turns the faucet on. Steam and little rainbow soap bubbles rise into the air. Normally Iíd love to jump and try to catch a few, but I donít want to take my eyes off that fish.

Laura comes in with the glasses everybody drank from and sets them down next to the sink.ďGood!Ē Josh says cheerfully. ďYou can help me dry.Ē

Laura picks up a towel and stands next to him. From the set of her back itís clear that something is bothering her. ďWhatís wrong?Ē Josh asks, as he hands her a washed plate.

Lauraís towel rubs the wet platter so hard it squeaks. ďI just think we shouldíve at least discussed it before you committed to taking the kids two days a week.Ē She sets the dried platter into a metal rack next to the sink.

Josh hands her another one.ďWhatís the big deal? I have the time, and I reallydo need to get out. Iím going crazy sitting here alone every day.Ē

Lauraís elbow moves rapidly up and down as she dries. ďWhat about looking for a job?Ē

Joshís laugh is brief and harsh. ďTrust me,Ē he says, ďthree days a week is plenty of time to make phone calls nobody returns and send emails nobody responds to.Ē

ďBut what if somebody wants to schedule an interview one of the days when you have the kids?Ē Laura takes the next plate from his gloved hand. ďOr what if youget a job in a few weeks and donít have time for them anymore?Ē

ďThen Erica and I will make other arrangements. Thatís a bridge we can cross if and when we get to it.Ē Josh turns off the faucet. The yellow gloves make a snapping sound as he peels them off and turns to face Laura. ďLaura, in the next two minutes my parents wouldíve offered to take the kids. At their age they shouldnít be driving into the city twice a week or running around after two little kids all day. My family needs help, and Iím in a position to offer it. I shouldíve discussed it with you first. Youíre right about that, and Iím sorry. But I really donít see what the problem is.Ē

ďIím your family, too,Ē Laura says quietly, and it occurs to me for the first time that sheís rightóLaura and Joshare a family. Iíd thought of them as being more like roommatesólike Anise and Sarah, or like Sarah and meóbecause their schedules are so different and they donít act like the families on TV shows. But Laura and Josh are a family, and for a moment Iím distracted from the thought of all that fish as I wonder what that makesme in their lives.ďIíd like to think that I get to be a part of family decisions,Ē she adds.

Joshís face wavers, and I think maybe heís about to say something nice to her. But then his face hardens again. ďIím not the only one around here deciding things unilaterally.Ē

Laura folds the towel neatly in half and slides it through the handle of the refrigerator, where it hangs to dry.ďIím going upstairs to change,Ē she tells him, and walks out of the kitchen.

Josh sighs after she leaves, his eyes roaming around the room until they fall on me, still waiting by the counter.ďI promised you some fish, didnít I?Ē he asks, like it just occurred to himólike I hadnítclearly been trying to remind him of this all afternoon! He takes a nice fat slice of the smoked fish out of its plastic wrap and puts it in the palm of his hand, which is shaking slightly. Then he bends down, holding his hand out toward me.ďCome on, Prudence,Ē he says in an encouraging voice. ďHere you go.Ē

Iím confused, because what does Josh expect me to do? Eat the fish right out of his hand? But then Iíd have to touch him! Why canít he just put it on the floor for me, or on a little Prudence-plate (which would be best)?

ďCome on, Prudence,Ē Josh says again. His mouth twists. ďIíd like to be on good terms with at least one woman in this house.Ē

What house? What is he talking about? Raising my right paw carefully, I try batting at the fish in his hand, hoping to make it fall to the floor. But it stays right where it is.

And thatís when Josh does the oddest thing. He starts singing to me, just like Sarah used to.ďPrudence, Prudence, give me your answer, do.Ē I look into his face, bewildered. Thatís when he straightens up and starts moving around the kitchen, turning in circles as he kicks out his feet and waves his hands. Heís dancing! He does a funny little dance around the kitchen, dangling the piece of fish between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. I follow his movements, trying to stay near the fish but away from his feet. Even my whiskers are having a hard time helping me stay balanced as he sings, more loudly this time,ďIím half CRA-zy, all for the love of you.Ē Now he throws himself down on one knee with the other leg bent, draping the fish across his bent leg.ďIt wonít be a stylish marriage, I canít afford a carriage. But youíll look sweet, on the seat, of a bicycle built for twoooooooo!Ē

He puts one hand on his chest and throws the other into the air as he holds the last note for a long time. It looks like heís having a good time, actually, as silly as all this dancing around is. Even I have to admit heís kind of entertaining right now. While heís distracted, I come close enough to pull the fish off his leg with my teeth. He strokes my back cautiously as I eat, and Iím so happy to finally have my fish, I donít even try to stop him.

We both look up as we hear an unexpected sound. Itís Laura, standing in the doorway of the kitchen. Her lips are pressed together, but this time itís because sheís trying to hold back laughter. Her shoulders are shaking with the effort. When sheís calmed down a bit, she says, ďThat was pretty adorable.Ē

Josh ducks his head with fake modesty.ďWell, I try.Ē

He stands back up, and the two of them look at each otherís eyes. Heís breathing a bit harder than normal because of all that dancing around.

Laura walks across the room toward him.ďIím sorry,Ē she says, and wraps both arms tightly around Joshís waist. ďAbout everything. Not just today.Ē

ďIím sorry,Ē Josh tells her. For a moment, I wonder if theyíre going to start arguing about whoís sorrier. He pulls back to look into her face. ďYou know how crazy I am about you.Ē He grins. ďIím even crazy about how much you love your job.Ē

Laura leans her head against his chest.ďIím pretty crazy about you, too.Ē

ďThen weíre two lucky people,Ē he says, and kisses the top of her head.

I hear the puckering sound of their lips coming together. I continue to eat my fish as the two of them go upstairs to their bedroom. Itís dark outside before they come back down.

9

Prudence

THERE WAS ONE DAY IN EARLY JUNE THAT WAS DIFFERENT FOR SARAH from all the other days in the year. She would always spend it listening to the same two songs over and over. The first song is on a black disk from one of Sarahís favorite bands, and in it the man whoís singing asks if he fell in love with you, would you (notyou, but theďyouĒ in the song) promise to be true? The other song is by a woman. Inthat song the woman keeps saying to dim all the lights so she can dance the night away. Sarah never danced when she listened to this song, though, and she kept all the lights just as bright as they always were. Sheíd take out some dried old flowers from a metal box that she kept in the closet, and lie on the couch with a pillow Anise made for her out of her wedding dress. The pillow is covered in dark marks that Sarah says are water stains it got from being outside in the rain once, a long time ago.

Even though itís not really that pretty anymoreóand even though she only takes it out once a yearóthis pillow meant a lot to Sarah. She would run her fingers over the material while her music played, and then, finally, sheíd stretch out on the couch to nap on it. Iíd curl up next to her, nudging at herhand with the top of my head until she started petting me and scratching behind my ears the way I like. I could tell when she finally fell asleep, because her hand would stop moving and rest along the fur of my back. Thatís when I would fall asleep, too, stretching out one paw to rest on Sarahís shoulder, so we were still touching each other even though we were sleeping.

I found that pillow today in one of the Sarah-boxes. It was stuck under a bunch of rolled-up posters and a pair of small bongo drums Sarah used to let me play with sometimes, laughing and calling me aďhep cat.Ē I had to use all my toes to pry the pillow free so I could lie on it and think about Sarah, and about how she said that if you remember someone, theyíll always be with you. But when I opened my eyes, I didnít see Sarah anywhere.

I donít know exactly which day in June was so important to Sarah, so I donít know whether itís come and gone already. I guess itís a holiday just for Sarah and not for other humans, because as we get farther into June the only thing thatís different here is the days keep getting longer, and Laura and Josh are running the air conditioner more frequently. In Lower East Side, our cold air came from a box stuck into the living room wall. If I pressed my ear to it, I could hear things happening outside or, sometimes, the sound of birds nesting in it from the other side of the wall. It was frustrating for me, to be able to hear thecheep cheep! of birds without being able to get at them. But it was even more frustrating for Sarah, who had to bang our side of the box with her hand until the birds flew away. She said their feathers clogged up the motor that made the cold air come out.

Here the cold air comes from vents up near the ceiling. It blows all the way down to the floor, though, and sometimes the sudden blast when it comes on tickles my ears until I have to scratch at them with my hind paws. On the days when Josh is home and not out with the littermates, he likes to make the air much cooler than most cats (including me) would find comfortable. But when heís not looking, Laura spins a little knob on the living room wall that makes the air warmer. She said something once about how expensive it is to keep the cold air running all the time (evenair costs money in Upper West Side?), but Josh says that it gets too hot for him on the days when he has to be here.

I keep waiting for Laura to talk more about Sarah, like she did on Motherís Day. I thought maybe Laura would remember the June day that was so special to Sarah, and come upstairs like I did to look through the Sarah-boxes for Sarahís wedding-dress pillow. But Josh is the only one other than me who spends any time in my room, and he only comes in to look through Sarahís black disks for music to play and then put back before Laura gets home from work. I thought maybe he would play one of Sarahís two special songs, but he hasnít so far.

I wish I could figure out how to get Laura to talk about Sarah again. Sometimes when I look at her I get confused and think Iím looking at Sarah. Itís what Sarah used to call ďa trick of the lightĒ that makes some passing expression on Lauraís face, or the angle from which I see the curl of her eyelashes, so perfect and convincing in its Sarah-ness. But I donít know if thatís because Laura really looks so much like Sarah, or if itís because Iím starting to forget what Sarah really looked like. I catch myself watching Laura the way I used to watch Sarahóher hair changing colors in the sunlight, her chin that trembles just a little right before she starts laughing at something Iíve done, her long fingers (that feel nice in my fur sometimes) when she throws me a bottle cap or plastic straw to play with. Iíve noticed that Laura has more of my scent mixed in with her own, which is even more confusingóbecause itísSarah whoís supposed to smell like me and be my Most Important Person.

Sometimes I catch myself without any pain in my chest at all from Sarahís not being here. I have to remind myself to feel itóeven though it hurtsóbecauseideas donít mean anything if you donít also feel them with your body. What if I were to forget about Sarah altogether? Already thereís so much I canít remember. I can remember the first time Laura ever touched me, and when she first gave me the dress with the Sarah-smell for me to sleep on, and eventhe first time I met her when I was a kitten. I know I had lots of firsts with Sarah, too, but sheís been gone for such a long,long time. Sometimes I can remember things about her so clearly, itís like I just saw her yesterday. Other times, no matter how hard I close my eyes and try to think, I canít remember anything at all. I remember theidea of Sarah, and all her warmth and gentleness and beautiful singing music, but the memory of the idea doesnít bring any specific feeling with it to my chest or belly.

I wish I could ask Laura how much she remembers about Sarah. Does she remember the way Sarah smells?I can, but maybe thatís only because the things in the Sarah-boxes still smell like her. They wonít smell like her forever, though, and what will I do then? Every day their Sarah-smell is getting fainter.

Iíve noticed Laura holding the picture of Sarah that used to live with us in our old apartment, and that now lives in the living room here. Sheíll stare at it for a while before putting it down, and her expression is almost questioning, as if thereís something sheíd like to know that she thinks she can figure out if only she looks at that picture long enough. If she hears Josh coming into the room, she quickly puts the photo back down and walks a few steps away from it. Is Laura, too, having a hard time remembering little things about Sarah, now that sheís been gone for so long?

It was so hard when Sarah went away! But now that Iím losing even my memories of her, it feels like sheís going away all over again. Lauraís probably the only one who can help me with this. But Laura never talks about Sarah at all.

Two days a week, Josh takes a train up to Washington Heights, where his sister lives, so he can take care of the littermates. He always smells like them when he comes homeólike fruit-juice Popsicles and potato chips and too-sweet chewing gum. He also has the good smell of outside air, the way Sarah used to when she came home from one of the long walks around Lower East Side she liked to take in nice weather. Even when Josh left the apartment every day to go to hisoffice, he didnít smell as much like outside as he does now.

Josh likes to take the littermates on what he callsďfield trips.Ē At first I was a little jealous, because I know how muchI would love to play in a field. Iíve never seen one in real life, but Iíve seen them on TV. Theyíre big stretches of grass and trees, and even though I canít smell all the wonderful smells Iím sure are there, I can tell just by looking at the TV pictures that there would be no end of things to do or chase or pounce on.

But, other than one time when they went to see Great Lawn in Central Park, the places they go donít sound like fields at all. One day Josh took them to Museum of Natural History, and another time he took them to an indoor place where they could paint their own ceramic plates and pots. In between making phone calls to try and get a new job, Josh also calls humans he knows who have litters of their own, trying to get ideas for new things he can do with Abbie and Robert.

ďI thought Iíd take the kids down to the Lower East Side next week,Ē he tells Laura one night, after sheís come home from work.

Lauraís eyebrows come together. ďReally?Ē

ďItís not like Manhattan ends at Fourteenth Street,Ē Josh says in a dry voice.

Laura doesnít seem to like this idea. Iím not sure why, though, because going back to Lower East Side soundswonderful. Maybe Sarah is there someplace, waiting for me! And even if sheís notóeven if sheís still doing whatever it is she went off to doóI bet smelling all those familiar Lower East Side smells again would make me remember all kinds of things about her.

I have no way of asking Josh to take me with him if he decides to go to Lower East Side, but I try to give him hints by jumping into the cloth shoulder bag ofďsuppliesĒólike games and fruit-juice boxesóthat he takes with him whenever he spends time with the littermates. Sometimes I have to push little toys and plastic-wrapped packets of tissues out of the bag and onto the floor to make room for myself (it still surprises me how not-skinny Iívebecome). Josh always laughs when he sees me curled up in his bag with just my head poking out of the unzippered top, but he also always lifts me out of the bag and puts me back on the floor. It was foolish to let Josh trick me with fish and silly singing into not hissing at him when he touches me, because now heís not hesitant about picking me up. If he were, heíd have no choice but to let me stay in that bag and go with him to wherever he takes the littermates.

Josh laughs at some of the things I do (as if I were here toentertain humans!), but heís also been laughing and smiling a lot more in general. I guess I wasnít paying close enough attention to him before to notice the small changes in his posture and expressions that showed how unhappy he was becoming, being in the apartment all the time. Humans like spending time with other humans. Sarah was always happiest when both Anise and I were there to keep her company. Now Joshís shoulders are straighter than theyíve been since before he lost his job, and even his face looks different. Itís darker from spending time outdoors under the sun, and there are tiny brown freckles on the skin of his nose.

ďI didnít expect to love being with them as much as I do,Ē Josh says to Laura one night.

ďIím sure they love being with you, too,Ē Laura tells him with a smile.

Josh and Laura order a pizza tonight, because Josh says heís too exhausted from running around in the heat all day to even think about what they should do for dinner. Laura is tired, too. Sheís been staying up very late againólater even than she used to when I first came to live here. She isnít spending time with her work papers, and the pink marks on the sides of her nose have begun to fade. (Maybe sheís not reading as many papers at her office, either. She doesnít have nearly as many little ink smudges on her fingers as she used to.) Mostly what she does now is put the TV on low and let her eyes go unfocused, as if sheís thinking hard about something. Sheís also started putting little bits of food beside her on the couch and making apss-pss-pss sound that calls me over to come eat them. Lots of times I donít bother moving off the couch after Iím done. I stretch out and settle into a deep sleep, and lately this has become the most restful sleeping I do.

Laura doesnít put any pizza cheese (Ilove pizza cheese!) on the couch next to her as she and Josh eat, but she does drop a bit onto the floor for me. Normally, when a pizza comes to our door, the man who lives behind the counter downstairs calls us on the phone to announce that the pizzaís on the way up. He didnít tonight, though, and when the doorbell rang, Laura said, ďThatís odd, Thomas must be away from the desk.Ē She and Josh are eating the pizza anyway, which I definitely wonít do. Itís always bad when things are different from the way they usually are, but when the thing thatís different is with yourfood, thatís the worst of all. So, ignoring the cheese Laura and Josh keep dropping onto the floor (as if they expect me to eat thenext piece when I didnít eat thelast one!), I devote myself instead to pushing the little plastic caps from their soda bottles around the coffee table with my front right paw.

ďSo whatíd you and the kids do today?Ē Laura asks as they eat.

ďWe went down to Katzís. I had an urge for corned beef.Ē Josh drinks from his glass and puts it back on the table. ďThen we walked around for a while and went over to Alphaville Studios on Avenue A.Ē He looks at Laura curiously. ďDo you know the place?Ē

Laura stops chewing, but swallows hard before Josh notices.ďOf course,Ē she finally says.

ďI figured you would. Evil Sugar recorded their first few albums there.Ē Josh sprinkles garlic powder onto his pizza slice. ďI never realized how cheap it is to book studio time there. They even let a lot of the bands leave their equipment set up so they donít have to pay an arm and a leg lugging it back and forth. And they have programs for neighborhood kids who are interested in music. Theyíre good people down thereóitís a real asset to the community.Ē

Laura is chewing slowly. She tries to sound casual when she speaks, like sheís just asking the questions a human normally would at this point in the conversation, but she doesnít quite succeed. ďWhat made you think of going there?Ē

ďI thought Abbie and Robert might get a kick out of seeing the inside of a recording studio. You know how kids like that kind of thing. I used to know one of their techs, and it turns out heís still there. He mustíve been thereforever. Heís got this beard practically down to his knees.Ē I try to imagine what a human with no arm and no leg and a long, long beard might look like. Before I can get a picture in my head, though, Joshís cheeks turn a shade of pink so deep, itís almost red. ďAnd,Ē he says in the kind of voice humans use when theyíre confessing to something they think they should feel guilty about, ďIíve been looking through some of your motherís old albums. I keep seeing Alphaville Studios in the liner notes.Ē

This time Laura puts the plate with her half-eaten pizza slice down on the coffee table and turns to look straight at him. But before she can say anything, Josh rushes ahead with,ďLook, you promised way back in March that we could look through your motherís albums at home. I havenít pushed it. Iíve been trying to give you space to get things done on your own schedule. But those boxes canít just sit up thereforever, Laura. At some point youíll need to figure out what you want to keep and what you want to toss or put into storage. And Iíd hopedĒóhis voice gets softeróďthat weíd find something else to do with that room.Ē

Why canít those boxes sit up there? Who are they hurting? Itís not like Josh doesnít have lots of his own ďjunkĒ filling up Home Office. Why canít there beone room in this whole huge apartment just for me and allmy stuff? A spot in the middle of my back stings with an itch, and I turn to attack it angrily with my teeth.

ďI donít know, Josh.Ē I see the dark centers of Lauraís eyes widen in a flicker of panic. ďThings are just so†Ö†unsettled†Ö†right now.Ē

ďThe history of the world is people having children under less-than-perfect circumstances,Ē he tells her, gently.

Theyíre discussing something else now, and I donít understand what it is. All I understand is that if Laura doesnít find a reason to care about the things in the Sarah-boxes, Josh is going to make her send them away. I get distracted, and my right pawówhich is still batting at the plastic soda-bottle capóhits Joshís glass of soda harder than I expected and sends it spilling all over the coffee table.

Josh and Laura both cry,ďPrudence!Ē and jump up to get paper towels from the kitchen. I leap to the floor and crouch there. Really, this istheir fault for leaving a bottle cap right next to a full glass and then distracting me with odd conversations. Still, humans tend to blame cats for things that arenít really the catís fault. Neither of them scoops me up to kiss my head the way Sarah did that time when I spilled a full glass in Lower East Side, but at least they donít yell at me. They just wipe up all the soda and throw the dirty paper towels into the tall trash can that lives in the kitchen. By the time theyíre sitting on the couch again, I can tell that Laura has decided to talk about something else.

ďSo howwas Alphaville?Ē she asks Joshóand she mustreally want to change the subject from the mysterious threat Josh had brought up, because I could tell how much she didnít like hearing Josh talk about this Alphaville place. ďDid the kids have a good time?Ē

Josh hesitates and throws her a quick look. But he just says,ďThey did. Although from what the guy I know there was telling me, they may not be around much longer. The landlordís trying to sell the building. The tenants in the apartments upstairs are up in arms about it.Ē

ďThatís a shame,Ē Laura says, and thereís real sympathy in her voice. ďBut thatís what happens sometimes.Ē

ďI donít know,Ē Josh says thoughtfully. ďIt sounds like thereís something sketchy going on. I thought Iíd poke around online tomorrow and see what I can find out.Ē

ďIs it really that strange? Real estate changes hands every day in this city. Itís not like you can do anything about it.Ē

ďI donít know,Ē Josh says again. ďIf thereís something shady about the deal and getting press would help them out, itís not like I donít know a ton of music journalists. Thatíd be a place to start, anyway.Ē

ďBut if there really is something Ďsketchyí going on,Ē Laura argues, and I can tell sheís trying hard to come up with a reason why Josh shouldnít care about this anymore, ďwouldnít the music press already be on top of it?Ē

ďNot necessarily,Ē Josh says. ďAlphavilleís pretty much fallen off the radar over the last decade or so. Itís been a while since any major albums came out of that place. Now they mostly serve the community and young bands that havenít signed with labels yet.Ē Josh stretches his arms above his head and yawns. ďIím beat. All that walking in the heat today really did me in. I think Iíll go take a shower.Ē

Laura smiles and nods, but as soon as Joshís back is turned, her smile goes away. Then she sighs and pushes her fingers through her hair, the way Sarah always did when she was thinking about something she didnít want to think about anymore.

I can hear the shower running in Josh and Lauraís bathroom as I work my way frantically through the Sarah-boxes. I know I canít stop Josh or Laura if they do decide to make these boxes go away, but there has to besomething I can do. I spin around in jumpy circles as I go from box to box, my plumper belly knocking things out of the boxes and onto the floor. Normally Iídhate the idea of things going out of the boxes theyíre supposed to be in, but this is an emergency. I have more important things to worry about right now.

Suddenly, out of the corner of my left eye, I see a rat on the floor!A rat! An enormous black rat with bright-red eyes and a long skinny tail! I havenít seen one (except for in bad dreams) since that day when I lost my littermates, and Sarah and I found each other. I know how easily I can kill mice, but a rat is something else altogetheróand this rat ishuge! I spin around to face it head-on, my fur puffing all the way up, and with the force of the jump I take backward, I knock one of the Sarah-boxes onto its side where it lands with a terrificcrash! My heart is pounding, and by the sudden brightness of the room, I can tell that the dark centers of my own eyes must have gotten as big as they possibly can.

The rat doesnít move. It just sits there, completely still, not even twitching its whiskers. I creep toward itówith my back still arched and my fur still puffedóand bat at its head with my right paw, taking a jump back immediately. But the rat still doesnít do anything. Once again I creep slowly toward it and bat at its head, and the rat is still motionless. This time, when I hit it, I leave my paw there for a moment. The rat feels strange. And thatís when my fur starts to relax. This isnít a real rat at all. Itís a fake, made out of something soft and springy.

I hear Lauraís footsteps coming up the stairs. ďAre you okay, Prudence?Ē she calls. ďWhatís all the ruckus up there?Ē If my reaction when I saw the fake rat was bad, itís nothing compared with Lauraís. When she comes into my room and sees it sitting in the middle of the floor, her face turns stark white and she screams!

I know that a fake rat canít hurt her, but I jump defensively in front of Laura anyway, letting her know that no ratóreal or fakeówill ever be able to get close to her as long asIím here.

Lauraís shriek of terror is so loud that Josh hears it in the shower. I hear the scrape of the shower curtain being thrown back, and then Joshís running footsteps pound down the hall. ďLaura!Ē he yells. ďLaura, what happened? Are you okay?Ē

Josh runs all the way into the doorway of my room and stands there, dripping wet, holding a towel around his waist with one hand. In the other is the baseball bat he keeps next to his side of the bed. But Laura is chuckling now, breathing hard with one hand on the spot right above her heart, which is probably pounding like mine was.ďGood lord!Ē she says. ďI thought I saw a rat!Ē She squats down on her heels, stroking my head with one hand and picking the fake rat up with the other, its rubbery tail dangling down her arm.

ďWhatis that thing?Ē Josh asks her.

Laura turns it over in her hand.ďMy mom used to get a lot of swag from the record labels. Most of it was silly stuffólike mini lava lamps and key chainsóand sheíd give it to me.This, I believeĒóshe lets the fake rat hang from her fingers by its tailóďwas something she got when they releasedHot Rats on CD.Ē

ďZappa.Ē Josh smiles and turns to rest his baseball bat against the wall, pushing away the wet hair thatís fallen into his eyes. ďThat was a great album.Ē

Laura stands and laughs again.ďNot for me, it wasnít. This thing lasted exactly one day in my room. I woke up in the middle of the night and was sure I saw a rat on my dresser. It took my mother hours to calm me down enough to fall back asleep. The next day she brought it back to her store.Ē

I keep my eyes intently on the fake rat hanging from Lauraís hand as Josh puts one armóthe one that isnít holding his towel upóaround her shoulders. ďYou should give it to Prudence,Ē he says. ďI think she wants to play with it.Ē

Laura leans her head against his shoulder and looks up into his face.ďYou think?Ē Now Josh is looking into Lauraís face, too. Without looking away from him, she tosses the fake rat in my direction. ďHere you go, Prudence,Ē she murmurs.

Josh keeps his arm around her as they leave the room. I swipe at the fake rat with my claws a few times. But silly toys arenít what Iím thinking about right now.

10

Laura

THE WOMAN ON THE SUBWAY WAS MIDDLE-AGED AND FORMIDABLE. Short but sturdily built, she had caramel-colored hair and red fingernails so long they arced gently half an inch from the tips of her fingers. She spoke emphatically to the man standing in front of her. Also middle-aged, tall and slender, his head seemed too large for his frame. It bent slightly toward the woman, like a flower beginning to droop on its stem.ďLa gente cambia,Ē the woman said, aiming one red nail in the direction of his face.ďLa gente cambia.Ē And then, in heavily accented English,ďYou donít know me. You donít know me at all.Ē The man didnít do much in the way of response aside from nodding his head dolefully from time to time. Whether because this conversation pertained to him in particular (could they be splitting up, this middle-aged couple in this very public subway car?), or in silent acknowledgment of the fickle mystery of the human heart, was impossible for Laura, seated half the carís length away from them, to discern.

The two of them clung to the steel bar above their heads, the occasional lurches of the train throwing them slightly off-balance but otherwise not disrupting their conversation. All around Laura, seated and standing, people shivered in the too-chilled air-conditioning as they tapped on BlackBerrys (which Laura knew she should be doing, but wasnít) or fiddled with iPods, or stared blankly into the middle distance. The train stopped, and a hotwhoosh of fetid air from the station entered the open doors along with a black-haired man dressed in a waiterís uniform. It was a muggy July day, and faint yellow circles had begun to form at the armpits of his white jacket. He wheeled a linen-draped cart covered with plastic-wrapped platters of fruits and pastries, pasta salads and sandwiches.Somebody catering an after-hours meeting, Laura thought.Somebody who still has a budget to do things like that. The people who had to move to accommodate the cart looked at the waiter in minor annoyance, and he returned their looks with a vaguely apologetic expression on his sweat-slick face that said,Sorry, but I gotta work, too. Then everybody went back to what they had been doing, the middle-aged woman continuing to harangue the middle-aged man even as one corner of the cart dug into the flesh of her hip.

The woman was right, Laura acknowledged. People did change. Or maybe it was just that, over time, you started to notice different things. Sheíd been thinking about how dramatically Josh had changed these past few weeks, since heíd become involved in the cause of saving Alphaville Studios along with the apartment building on Avenue A. Except, Laura conceded, with the uneasiness of someone whoís deliberately shut her eyes to an unpleasant truth she now has to face, the real change had been happening slowly over the past few months. Once sheíd thought Josh exempt, somehow, from the vicissitudes that threatened people like her, whose lives werenít as charmed as his own. Now she realized what she should have seen in a hundreddifferent ways, in small gestures and offhand remarks. Josh was frustrated. The ďchangedĒ Josh sheíd seen during the last few weeks was merely the confident, energetic, pleasantly busy Josh sheíd first met just under a year and a half ago.

Sheíd been certain his interest in the building would fade after a few days. Instead, Josh had committed himself full-time to the project, making endless phone calls, creating a blog and Facebook pages, sending out a steady stream of emails. Heíd pressed his niece and nephew into service, bringingthem to the apartment once a week to clip together press releases and informational one-sheets that would be packaged and mailed to reporters, music journalists, city council members, congressmen, anybody who might choose to get involved. Even Prudence had gotten caught up in the frenetic activity,making sudden wild leaps onto the small folding table Josh had set up in his overcrowded home office (heíd had to move a few boxes of his own into their spare bedroom to accommodate it), scattering orderly stacks of papers in all directions. ďLook, Prudence is helping!Ē Robert would shriek, and he and Abbie would collapse into uncontrollable laughing fitsóespecially when Prudence would accidentally get a mailing label stuck to the bottom of one paw and walk around shaking her paw furiously, assuming an air of injured dignity and refusing to let anybody close enough to pull the stickeroff for her.

ďItís one of those Mitchell-Lama buildings,Ē Josh had told Laura a few days after heíd first gone there with the children. ďYou know, those middle-income apartment buildings they started putting up in the fifties.Ē

Laura did know. She and Sarah had moved into a Mitchell-Lama complex farther uptown back in theí90s, when theyíd left the Lower East Side.

ďAnyway, now the building owner is trying to opt out of the program so he can sell to a developer whoíll reset the rents to Ďmarket rate.í Which would basically quadruple or even quintuple what the tenants are paying. A lot of them are elderly and on fixed incomes, or war veterans. Thereís a cop who lives in the building, and the new rent would be twice what he takes home in a month!Ē

Laura was only half listening. Of all the buildings in Manhattan, she wondered, why did Josh have to pickthis building to worry about? She remembered Sarah, on the day theyíd gone to Alphaville Studios, adjusting a set of headphones to fit over Lauraís ears and saying,This way we can hear ourselves while we record, so weíll know what we sound like. Laura had asked,But wonít we know what we sound like just by listening to ourselves? And Sarah had explained that the way you sounded to yourself and the way you sounded to other people were two very different things.

ďThe buildingís property value has been assessed at seven-point-five million,Ē Josh had continued, ďand the tenantsí association has raised ten million from city subsidies and a handful of private donations. They want to buy the building themselves so they can keep the rents where they are. But the landlord has an offer of fifteen million from a developer, and heís holding out.Ē

Laura had tried to quell the beginnings of panic as she listened to him talk.ďItís a terrible thing,Ē sheíd said. ďBut this is just whathappens in this city, Josh. Thereís not even any point in fighting it. One way or another, the developers always win.Ē

ďAnd the music studio!Ē Josh exclaimed, as if she hadnít spoken. ďDo you know how many great artists rehearsed and recorded there? Evil Sugar, Dizzy Gillespie, Tom Waits, the Ramones, Richard Hell. And the space is still in use! This isnít just gentrification, this is decapitalization of the arts in New York.Ē He was pacing the room in hisexcitement.ďClarence Clemons, Nile Rodgers, Dylan,all the sessions guys who backed up the big-name performers on their albums and played in clubs all over town. The list is endless!Ē

It was an uncanny thing, Laura thought, to hear the exact same words her dead mother might have used coming from her husbandís mouth.

ďBut, Josh,Ē sheíd tried again. ďThis is a lost cause. Surely, you can see that. You and I,we arenot a lost cause.We need someplace to live, too, and we canít live here forever on my salary alone. The last of your severance is coming up in two months.Ē

ďLaura,Ē Josh had replied, and his frustration was evident in the way he said her name. ďIíve worn my fingers down to nubs making phone calls and sending out r?sum?s. And at this point, nobodyís making any major hiring decisions until after Labor Day, anyway. At least this way I could possibly make some new contacts, or maybe itíll lead to something else.Ē Josh had paused to give Prudence, whoíd taken up diligent residence in front of the couch, a dollop of tuna salad from his half-eaten sandwich. ďIt beats the hell out of sitting around here doing nothing.Ē

ďMaybe you could try writing again,Ē Laura had suggested. ďIsnít that what you did when you first moved to New York? You know people at so many different magazines†ÖĒ

ďOh please, Laura. I couldnít make it as a writer back when people were actually hiring writers. It wonít happen for me now when everybodyís scaling back.Ē Heíd taken her hand and said, ďLook, I donít want you to think Iím trying to put the whole burden on you. Iswear Iím going to find something else. And I know itíll be tight, but we can manage on your salary and whatís left of our savings until then. Whatís that expression?Safe as houses? Isnít your job at the firm safe as houses?Ē

ďYeah,Ē Laura said. ďSafe as houses.Ē

White-shoe firms like Lauraís had traditionally never engaged in major layoffs the way other companies did. In part this was a point of prideóof maintaining public confidence and public appearancesóand in part it was a practical matter. Large cases were apt to spring up on short notice, and then youíd want partners and associates whose skills you knew you could rely on. Sometimes a firm would grow so large and unwieldy that it would collapse under its own weight, sucking everyone into its vortex like a black hole. Typically, though, jobs like Lauraísóeven during recessions and downturnsóhad been safe.

But now uneasy whispers and rumors were afloat, tales of large corporate firms like Lauraís that were actually laying associates off. Laura wasnít sure precisely when the early-morning phone calls from recruiters had stopped coming in; she only knew that one morning, when the phones were unusually quiet, sheíd realized with a start that it had been some time since anybody had called to ďfeel her outĒ about her willingness to move elsewhere. At Neuman Daines, the new class of first-year associates, who in the past had always started their employment the September following their law school graduations, had seen their start dates deferred until the following spring. A handful of associates who fell onto the lower end of the billable-hours-per-month scale had been told, in the most civilized way possible, that it would be best for all concerned if they were employed elsewhere within, say, the next two months. Perry had never exactly been a jovial person, but Laura had detected an undercurrent of strain lately in their interactions. She didnít know whether it had to with her personally, or with the firmís larger financial outlook, but whatever its source, it was disturbing.

Nothing had been the same since Joshís company had gone through its own round of layoffs. As soon as Laura had seen the severance agreement in Joshís hand, sheíd known what had happened. A ďChinese wallĒ had been erected around her at the firm. She had been deliberately excluded from anything related to Joshís company, the paperwork the firm was preparing for it, and everything else associated with it. It was foolish, Laura knew, to take such a thing personally. Had she gone to Perry and confronted him with it, if sheíd said something like,How could you not tell me? she knew exactly what Perryís response would be.You knew what you were getting into when you started dating a client, he would say.You knew there might be complications. Probably he would have thrown in some pithy quote from the Talmud about choices and consequences for good measure. And of course he would be right. The only thing to be gained by bringing it up would be to appear na?ve and overly emotional. Just another woman in business who couldnít separate the personal from the professional.

Still, the thing hurt. Laura would look at her co-workers, particularly the other fifth-years, and wonder who had known what and when. How long before Laura had they known that her home life was about to turn upside down? What had they said about her when her name was mentioned? Growing up, Laura had always had a keen sense of being differentótall and white in an elementary school where few children were either. She had spent most of her adult life trying to fit in, and since marrying Josh sheíd nearly convinced herself that this was something she no longer gave much thought to. Yet, as it turned out, it had taken very little for that feeling to come rushing back, to make her wonder if every hushed conversation that ended abruptly when she entered a room had been about her, the oddity, the one who wasnít quite the same as the others, the associate foolish enough to marry a clientósomething no other Neuman Daines associatehad done in the entire hundred-year history of the firm.

Laura remembered a little joke of her motherís, something like,Youíre not paranoid if they really are all against you. Laura didnít want to be paranoid, but she couldnít help noticing that where sheíd typically racked up anywhere from 200 to 240 billable hours a month, in the past two months sheíd barely broken 160. While technically this wouldnít affect her salary, her bonuses this year would undoubtedly be smaller than in previous yearsóand bonuses accounted for nearly half of what she earned.

It wasnít that Laura had slacked off or was unwilling to take on the work. Work wasnít being sent her way. It could be that there wasnít as much work to go around as there had been in flusher times. She suspected that some of the other associates might be ďhoardingĒ work, although it was nothingshe could set out to discover and prove without making herself appear even more paranoid than she already felt. Maybe Perry wasnít looking out for her the way he used to. Maybe Perry was somebody elseís rabbi these days, although she couldnít beso far out of the loop as to be unaware of something like that, if it had truly occurred.

Unless, she would think grimly, she was.

Laura had fallen into the habit of staying up late thinking about these things, telling Josh she was staying up to go over work papers the way she always had, but actually turning everything over in her mind. Frequently she found herself encouraging Prudence to join her for company, placing a morsel of tuna or cheese, or some other much-loved treat, on the couch until Prudence was lured into settling down next to her. Once the cat had fallen asleep, Laura would gently comb the tips of her fingernails through the fur of Prudenceís back, which was what had first suggested the cat brush sheíd spontaneously stopped for on the way home from work today. Only a few months ago (had it really only been a few months?), Sarah must have stroked Prudence in much the same way Laura did now. Laura would look at her long fingersófingers that, under different circumstances, might have moved with ease across a turntable or a musical instrument or a typewriteróand think,I have my motherís hands.

As a child, on hot July days like this one, with school out and her mother busy at the store, Laura had spent a great deal of time in one of the ladder-backed chairs in the Mandelbaumsí kitchen with Honey in her lap. Mrs. Mandelbaum would chop a frozen banana into a bowl, sprinkle a teaspoon of sugar over it, then mix it with sour cream taken from what she insisted on calling, to Lauraís amusement, ďthe icebox.Ē Honey would lick the sugared cream from Lauraís fingers with her raspy tongue while Mrs. Mandelbaum prepared dinner and Mr. Mandelbaum rested in his overstuffed living room chair only a few feet away, listening to the big-band albums that Sarah scavenged from her store to bring back for him.

Once, listening to an album by the Count Basie Orchestra, Mr. Mandelbaum had closed his eyes and said,ďAh, this takes me back.Ē Calling into the kitchen, ďIda, do you remember this one?Ē

ďOf course I do,Ē Mrs. Mandelbaum had answered. She thwacked a chicken breast cleanly in half with a cleaver. ďNorm Zuckerman and I danced to this at the Roseland Ballroom in 1937.Ē

Mr. Mandelbaum grumbled something under his breath that sounded likeNorm Zuckerman followed by a bad word in Yiddish. But Mrs. Mandelbaum had been unperturbed, her deft hands massaging spices into the chicken as she smiled and told Laura,ďMister Bigshot in there might not have thought much of me at first, but plenty of boys had eyes for me in those days. Believe you me.Ē

ďNo wonder,Ē Mr. Mandelbaum snorted. ďYou had the shortest skirts and longest legs on the whole Lower East Side.Ē

ďStop it, Max! Youíre filling her head with nonsense.Ē Mrs. Mandelbaum slid the chicken into the oven and ran her hands under the faucet. ďIíll put the leftovers in the icebox and bring them up later when your mother comes home,Ē she told Laura. ďNothing beats cold chicken at the end of a hot day.Ē She wiped her hands on her apron. ďDonít listen to what he says. My mother used to measure my skirts with a ruler before I went out. If they were shorter than two inches below my knee, I had to go back upstairs and change.Ē

ďAh, but those were some knees.Ē Mr. Mandelbaum smiled from his chair. ďThey still are, you know. Nobody has knees like my wifeís.Ē Mrs. Mandelbaum had pretended not to hear him, but a pleasant blush spread across her wrinkled cheeks.

Laura, rubbing her knuckles gently behind Honeyís ear, had considered this, unable to imagine what it would be like to have such a strict mother. Sarah had never been especially prone to discipline, had never once raised her hand to Laura or enforced punishments of any kind. ďDo you have any pictures of what your dresses looked like back then?Ē

ďDo we have anypictures?Ē Mr. Mandelbaumís voice was always powerful. Sometimes Laura could hear him from the hallway in front of her own apartment, all the way downstairs. But even Honey opened her eyes wider at how loud his voice sounded now. ďIda, bring out the photo albums.Ē

Mrs. Mandelbaum had gone to the linen closet in the front hall, pulling out several thick albums. Sheíd spread them out on the linoleum kitchen table, and Mr. Mandelbaum came in to join them. Laura marveled at the tiny hats and long beads women had worn back then as Mr. and Mrs. Mandelbaum told stories about this relative and that friend. Finally, Honey had crept from Lauraís lap onto the table and sat smack in the middle of an open photo album, rubbing her head against Mr. Mandelbaumís cheek and swishing her tail across Lauraís hand. ďHoney, in her infinite wisdom, is here to remind us that all good things must come to an end,Ē Mr. Mandelbaum declared. Then Mrs. Mandelbaum had put the albums back in the linen closet and begun preparations for a strudel with Lauraís help (ďA girl is never too young to learn how to cook,Ē she always said), and Mr. Mandelbaum returned to the living room where he continued to listen to Count Basie until dinner was ready.

Later, after theyíd eaten, Laura would fall asleep in the bed that had once belonged to their son, Honey clasped in her arms and purring contentedly. It was from Honey that Laura had learned the trick of sleepily half closing her eyes in a series of slow blinks in order to make a cat fall asleep. At some point Sarah would close the record store and come to carry her downstairs to her own bed, although Laura would be too deeply asleep to remember this part. Sheíd always slept well with Honey snoring softly beside her.

If she squinted now, sitting on the couch with Prudence, she could almost imagine that it was Honey sleeping next to her once again. The two of them looked somewhat alike, both slim brown tabbies (although Prudence seemed to be getting plumper latelyóor was Laura imagining things?) with black tiger stripes. Prudence even had a hint of the same tiny black patch on the white fur of her lower jaw that Mrs. Mandelbaum had referred to as ďHoneyís beauty mark.Ē

Of course, Prudence and Honey were very different creatures. Honey hadnít been nearly as comical as Prudence, with her funny little airs of self-importance and the peremptory way she was apt to demand food (a thing Honey had never done). And Prudence was far more aloof than Honey had ever been, Honey who was so gentle and who had turned huge, green, adoring eyes upon you the second you reached down to stroke her head.Sweet as a piece of honey cake, Mr. Mandelbaum had always said. Laura remembered now, with a sudden shock at having ever forgotten, that Mr. Mandelbaum had also sung theďDaisy BellĒ song to Honeyóexcept, of course, heíd sung,Ho-ney, Ho-ney, give me your answer do†Ö

Honey and Mr. Mandelbaum and everything else sheíd loved had been lost to exactly the same inexorable forces Josh was now trying to combat. Mr. Mandelbaum himself had talked about friends forced from their tenements in the West Sixties back in 1959, when the buildings were leveled to clear space for Lincoln Center. It was the inevitable life cycle of a large city. A few tenderhearted people would wring their hands and write piteous op-ed pieces for the local newspapers, and some poor sap would be trotted out before the cameras to share his tale of woe for the evening news. But in the end, the buildings came down, the rents went up, and sooner or later everybody forgot. Cities had no memories. Only people did, and even people would forget eventually.

Andthis was the thing, of all possible things, that Josh had chosen to fixate on.This was where Josh was putting all his time and energy instead of focusing on what he should have been focused onóhimself and Laura and the future the two of them would have together. Laura wanted her life to move in one direction: forward. And here Josh was, dragging her back into the past.

All of it had become so jumbled in her mind that by the time sheíd knocked on Perryís office door that morning, she wasnít sure if she was there for Josh, on a pretext to talk to Perry at length about something, or to assuage her own conscience when it came to the dim view sheíd taken of Joshís efforts. Probably, she told herself, it was some combination of both.

From her customary seat across from Perryís desk, Laura could see the framed photograph of Perry with his wife and two daughters taken at the older oneís Bat Mitzvah two years earlier. Laura had attended alone and been seated with the handful of other people Perry had invited from the firm. She had been the only third-year associate. Next year, she would attend the younger girlís Bat Mitzvah with Josh.If Iím invited†Ö

ďWhat can you tell me about Mitchell-Lama statutes and regulations?Ē sheíd asked Perry, after pleasantries had been exchanged.

Perryís bushy eyebrows rose. ďAre you working on an opinion letter for a client?Ē

Laura hated lying, knew she wasnít any good at it. ďSomething like that,Ē she hedged, and felt her cheeks grow warm.

Perry nodded, then leaned back in his leather chair.ďWell†ÖĒ The tips of his fingers steepled across his stomach in the professorial air many of the younger associates found irritating, although Laura had always secretly loved it. ďMitchell-Lama is a type of subsidized housing program that was proposed by state senator MacNeil Mitchell and assemblyman Alfred Lama, and signed into law in 1955 as the Limited-Profit Housing Companies Act. There was a large working-class population in New York who needed places to live. Manhattan was pretty crowded back thenĒóPerryís brief smile contained a hint of ironyóďand there was a shortage of affordable housing for people who were teachers, for example, or transit workers, or store clerks. City and government officials all the way up the line wanted to find some way to make affordable housing available to these people. The thinking was that it wasnít in the Cityís best intereststo have a population of only the very rich and the very poor. They wanted a stable middle class who were invested in their neighborhoods in order to generate additional tax revenues, bring crime rates down, et cetera.Ē

ďSounds logical,Ē said Laura.

ďItwas logical,Ē Perry replied. ďThe problem was that developers would say,Iím not going to build a building and then have the rent frozen afterward with rent control. Why should I invest money in a losing proposition? So Mitchell-Lama was created as a solution. The basis was that the city would put up ninety-five percent of the money to erect the buildings. Somebody from the private sector would come up with the additional five percent of the project cost at a ridiculously low interest rate on a thirty-five to fifty-year mortgage, and that would include the cost of the property, building a tenable building on it, and so forth. In exchange for this great deal the City was giving them, the developers would calculate rent by figuring out how much the building would need for maintenance, how much for debt service, and then they would build in a limited annual return for the investors. I forget the exact number, but something like seven percent. There would besome profit for the developers, but that profit would be limited so rents for the tenants could remain affordable. The developers knew this going inóit was why they got such favorable terms in the first place. It was a win for everybody at the time.Ē

ďAt the time,Ē Laura interjected when Perry paused to sip from his coffee mug. ďBut not anymore?Ē

ďAs you know, things change.Ē (Was the look he gave her then meaningful? Or was he merely looking at her? For the life of her, Laura couldnít decide.) ďThere havenít been many new Mitchell-Lama properties built in the past fifteen years or so. A lot of the buildings that already existed, especially the ones that went up in the earlier days of the program, have long since paid off their mortgages. Property values and market-rate rents have skyrocketed. So now thereís a wave of owners and development corporations that want to opt out of the program and flip the buildings, or at least raise the rents substantially. Itís not quite as simple as all that, of course. You have to get permission from the DHCR before you can privatize.Ē At Lauraís quizzical look, he clarified, ďThe Division of Housing and Community Renewal. Typically, though, thatís just a formality. Thereís a mandatory process by which the buildingís tenants have to be notified of a potential privatization and given a chance to protest the opt-out, and to submit any problems with building maintenance and repair that would need to be addressed before the building could be sold. Then there are several different agencies that regulate Mitchell-Lama housing. Not all buildings are regulated by the same agencies, and some buildings are regulated by multiple agencies that have conflicting regulations. Wading through all the bureaucracy can represent hundreds of billable hours and tens of thousands of dollars to a developerís law firm. There are a number of court cases and proposed amendments to the original statutes working their way through the system right now, any one of which could change the game significantly. Weíve been keeping an eye on them for some of our clients.Ē

ďUsually, though, the owners are able to sell the buildings.Ē Laura phrased this as a statement, not a question.

ďAlmost always, in the end,Ē Perry replied, nodding. ďThere was one situation back in 2007 with a Mitchell-Lama building up in the Bronx, where the tenants organized and were able to bring enough political pressure to bear that the DHCR ended up denying the request to opt out. That was the only time Iíve seen it happen, though, in the twenty-five years or so since the buildings started privatizing.Ē

ďThanks, Perry.Ē Laura prepared to rise and leave his office.

ďIím assuming this client youíre preparing the opinion letter for is interested in privatizing the property?Ē Laura nodded, feeling the color rise in her cheeks for a second time. Perry gestured her back down in her chair. ďYou should know that sometimes,if the tenantsí organization is very well organized, and if they can generate enough negative publicity for the buildingís owner, and if they have an attorney whoís an aceósomeone who can ferret out every problem in the building, every contradiction in the statutes, and who can bury the owners and developers in paperwork and make the whole process even more painful and expensiveóassuming a scenario where the tenantsí association has the intellectual and financial resources to mount a large-scale resistance like that, then it might be in the ownerís best interests to find a way to compromise with them. People donít always like to see their neighborhoods change too quickly, and theyíll fight hard to keep it from happening. As the Talmud says,Customs are more powerful than laws.Ē

Laura thanked Perry again and rose. She had been hoping for somethingóa word, a gestureóthat would let her know things between Perry and her were what theyíd always been. Sheíd gotten nothing from this conversation to confirm that wish, but then nothing to contradict it, either. Her hand was on the doorknob when Perry said musingly, ďYes†Ö†thereíd bea lot of potential billable hours for an attorney on either side in something like this.Ē The look he leveled at Laura was inscrutable. For a fleeting moment, it reminded her of Prudence.

Perry had a way of knowing things that nobody had ever told him. Laura wondered if this last statement was meant to urge her on to wring more hours out of this possibly lucrative client sheíd hinted at, or if some instinct had whispered that her motivations for asking werenít what sheíd led him to believe. Perhaps he was warning her against letting her priorities drift in unprofitable directions.

Not that Laura needed to be reminded where her priorities lay.At least the tenants have a process, she thought.At least they have a chance.

A chance was more than she and Sarah had ever had.

Laura had spent the past sixteen years of her life worrying about money. The day she and Sarah had been thrown out of their apartmentóalong with Mr. Mandelbaum and her best friend Maria Elena and everybody else whoíd lived thereósheíd heard people say how something like this would never have been done to people with money, how it wouldnít have happened if theyíd all lived on Park Avenue instead of Stanton Street.

In high school, sheíd gone one day with a friend to visit the friendís father, who was a partner in a large law firm much like the one Laura worked for now. Laura would never forget the first time sheíd been inside one of those huge, prosperous Midtown skyscrapers. There had been an atrium in the lobby with trees over twenty feet tall, and Laura had been astounded. That there could be trees that biggrowing indoors! A building so enormous, so obviously wealthy, so confident in its own permanence that it could afford the time and money to plant trees within its walls and wait for them to growósurely the people who worked in such a building could go to and from their offices every day in complete confidence that they would still have homes when they returned to them in the evening. And from that day, Laura had wanted nothing more than to be one of the chosen, happy few who could take such permanence for granted. She imagined opening her eyes one fine morning without even a flicker of memory of what it had felt like to worry about the things that might happen to her if she didnít have enough money.

Lauraís philosophy of life was simple. It was that money, money safely in the bank, money enough to pay all your bills, was the most important thing in the world. It was better and more important than youth or fame or having fun or being pretty or anything other than (Laura would grudgingly concede) oneís health. Maybe it wasnít more important than love, but even love would crumble in the face of true poverty.When poverty comes in the door, love flies out the window, Laura had heard Perry say once, quoting his grandmother. And Laura, remembering the catastrophic days after she and Sarah had lost their home, had known he was right.

Then again, there were the Mandelbaums, whoíd always struggled over money, especially after failing eyesight had forced Mr. Mandelbaum to retire from driving his cab.Weíll get by, Mrs. Mandelbaum would say.Remember, weíre supposed to thank God for our misfortunes as much as our good fortune. And Mr. Mandelbaum would reply,Ida, if I stopped to thank God every time I had problems, I wouldnít have time to scratch my own head. But there would be affectionate good humor mingled with the exasperation in his voice.

People who worried about accumulating a lot of expensiveďstuff,Ē or who felt a need to be ďfulfilledĒ by what they did for a living, were people who had gotten used to luxuries that Laura had never been able to afford. Stuff was nice and feeling fulfilled was probably even nicer, but money was more important than either. Without money you ended up the way Mr. Mandelbaum had. Without money you would rot in the streets or in one of those wretched SROs and nobody would care. Laura had no desire to live extravagantly. By living on less than half her take-home, sheíd managed to finish paying off her student loans the month before she and Joshwere married. Now all she asked was not to have to worry about having enough money to live decently and pay her bills on time.

But these days all she did was worry about money. Sheíd pace around her office with the door closed, during all of that ďextraĒ time that had once been given over to accumulating billable hours, calculating what she was likely to earn this year with her smaller bonuses, trying to think up a budget that would allow her and Josh to meet their current expenses and leave something to carry over into next year in case Josh still couldnít find a job.

At a certain point, Laura had acknowledged that worrying about these things as much as she did could only be counterproductive and distract her from her work. But even that made her worry more rather than less, until she began to wonder if worrying about worrying was some kind of diagnosable mental disorder.

She thought about her mother, whoíd also tended toward obsessive thoughts, although Sarahís obsessions had been of a pleasanter kind. Sarah had sometimes spent whole days listening to a single songólike ďBaba JindeĒ by Babatunde Olatunji, or Double Exposureís ďTen PercentĒ on a twelve-inch albumóif she was in theright kind of mood. When she was small, Laura had marveled at the intensity and focus something like this required. Now, as an adult, she understood.

The apartment was silent when Laura let herself in after her sweaty slog home from the subway, empty except for Prudence, who was curled up asleep in a box that had once held a ream of paper and was now waiting by the front door for someone (Me, Laura thought, a touch resentfully) to carry it to the trash room. Josh was out somewhere, perhaps at some meeting of the tenantsí association in the Avenue A building, or at one of the networking events he attended with less frequency as the months went by and they failed to yield any job leads. Possibly heíd even told her about it that morning and sheíd forgotten. It wouldnít surprise her at all, considering how snarled her mind was these days.

She went upstairs to her bedroom to remove her watch and earrings and place them in the wooden jewelry box Josh had surprised her with in the early days of their courtship. Sheíd admired it in an antiques store theyíd ducked into during one of their walks. It had reminded her of Mrs. Mandelbaumís jewelry box, which had rested on her bedroom dresser amid framed photos of Mr. and Mrs. Mandelbaumís wedding, their honeymoon in Miami Beach, the two of them with their son, Joseph, as a towheaded toddler in a Thanksgiving Pilgrimís costume and later as a laughing young man dressed for his high school prom, and pictures of Mr. Mandelbaum in his World War II fighter pilotís uniform. The box itself had been filled with pieces in the art nouveau style that Mr. Mandelbaum had bought for Mrs. Mandelbaum over the years, none of it terribly expensive yet all of it beautiful to Lauraís young eyes.

One afternoon, when Laura was ten, Mrs. Mandelbaum had pressed a heavy brooch of silver and onyx into her hand. Laura had tried to give it back, thinking it would be bad manners to accept such a gift, but Mrs. Mandelbaum had said,Max and I love you as if you were our own granddaughter. This is so youíll always have something to remember us by. Then sheíd fixed the brooch onto Lauraís dress and combed her hair before the murky glass of the old mirror in their bedroom.See how pretty it looks on you? The two of them had walked hand in hand back into the living room where Mr. Mandelbaum waited with cake and tea things, Honey lying behind him on the back of the couch with one small paw resting on his shoulder.Hoo-ha! heíd said.I had no idea two elegant ladies were joining me for tea. Laura had blushed with shy pleasure at his praise. The brooch was long gone but Laura hadnít needed it to remember the Mandelbaums, not even all these years later. Not even though she had failed them, in the end.

Of all the childhood places she had loved, the Mandelbaumsí apartment had been second only to her own bedroom downstairs from them. Sheíd loved its sheer lace curtains that Mrs. Mandelbaum had sewn when Laura was still too young to remember such things, and the lovely watercolor wallpaper in deep blues and creams and purples that Sarah had picked outópretty but not cloying. Perfect for a young girlís room. Laura had been far less tidy in those days than she was now. Sheíd let dolls and books and clothing accumulate in large heaps until, finally, Sarah would be provoked into one of her rare displays of impatience.If you donít clean this room soon, Iíll†Ö But Laura had liked to let the mess build until even she couldnít stand it anymore, because then she would have the intense joy of cleaning it up. Once she had everything perfectly arranged, the amber of late-afternoon sunlight slanting in through the delicate white curtains (it was important to time the cleaning so that it never started so early or so late as to miss this time of day), sheíd walk around touching things and think,How lucky I am! Iím the girl who gets to live here.

On her way back downstairs, Laura passed the room she and Josh had intended for a nursery, now filled with Sarahís boxes. Prudence, for reasons Laura couldnít quite figure out aside from a generalWell thatís cats for you, had recently developed the habit of throwing things from the boxes onto the floor. Last night, Prudence had unearthed part of the collection of funny little musical instrumentsóa harmonica, a Jewís harp, a miniature drum on a stick with tiny wooden knobs attached to it by strings that would hit the drum if you spun the stick aroundóthat Sarah had kept behind the counter of her record store for Lauraís amusement.

The harmonica had been Lauraís favorite, although sheíd never really learned to play it. Sarah, discerning as her ear was, had smiled and never once winced whenever Laura had banged around the store blowing chaotic, discordant ďmusicĒ through it. Laura had blown a few notes experimentally through the harmonica yesterday while Prudence observed her with grave attention. The noise had startled Prudence away at first, although moments later sheíd returned to raise one paw up to it, as if to feel the air Laura blew through its holes or to push the noise back into the instrument.

Today Prudence had somehow uncovered Sarahís old address book, the one Laura had told herself sheíd never find among all Sarahís odds and ends after Sarah had died and the question of how to contact Anise, currently touring in Asia, came up. Sheíd settled for sending a letter through Aniseís management agency. In truth, Laura hadno desire to talk to Anise. It was Anise whoíd first lured Sarah into her Lower East Side existence. And it was Anise whoíd abandoned Sarah (and Laura) when that life fell apart.

Lately, though, looking through Sarahís old things with Prudence, Laura had found herself recalling earlier days, when Sarahís owning a record store and living with her in an old tenement had seemed like its own kind of charmed life. Even knowing that Prudence didnít really understand her, speaking aloud about Sarah while Prudence regarded her solemnly had given those memories a substance they hadnít had in years.

Prudence had followed Laura up the stairs and now sat in the spare bedroom next to Sarahís address book, waiting for Laura to put it back in a box so the game of throwing things out could begin again. But Lauraís newfound discovery of happy memories was a fragile thing, and thinking about Anise threatened to ruin it. ďNot now,Ē Laura said, on her way past the room and back downstairs. Prudence continued to wait with an air of martyred patience that made Laura smile despite herself. ďCome on,Ē she said in a softer tone. ďDonít you want your dinner?Ē

Prudence seemed to consider this for a few seconds. Then she stood and, after arching her back in a luxurious stretch (so as not to appeartoo eager, Laura supposed), she trotted into the hallway in front of Laura. The merry tinkling of the tag on her red collar grew fainter as she rounded the corner toward the staircase.

Josh had sounded apologetic a few weeks ago, when heíd moved some of his own things from his office to join Sarahís boxes in their spare room. ďI canít even think anymore with all that clutter,Ē heíd said. ďAnd we can always move this stuff into storage if†ÖĒ

He hadnít finished the sentence, and Laura hadnít finished it for him. The last time heíd brought up trying to get pregnant again, Josh had told Laura that the history of the world was people having babies under less-than-perfect circumstances. As if Laura didnít know thisóas if that wasnít how Sarah had gotten pregnant with her in the first place. But what was she saying? Laura wondered. That she and Sarah would both have been better off if sheíd never been born?

When Laura was a little girl, sheíd thought that the saddest thing in the world was a child without a mother. There was a girl in her class whose mother had died of AIDS, and Laura would lie in her bed at night and cry for this girl who she wasnít even really friends with, this poor girl who would now have to live the rest of her life without a mother. Sarahís shadow would appear in the trapezoid of light from the hallway that fell onto the floor of Lauraís bedroom, and then Sarah herself would be sitting on Lauraís bed, holding her and saying,Shhh†Ö†itís all right, baby, itís all right†Ö†youíll never lose me†Ö†Iím not going anywhere. Laura would bury her face in her motherís neck and breathe in the flowery smell of her hair, hair so much prettier than that of any of the other mothers she knew, clinging to her kind, beautiful, loving mother who would never never ever let anything bad happen to either one of them. Only after this ritual of assurance could she fall asleep.

Sheíd never considered what it would feel like to be a mother without a child. Sheíd never thought about how many different ways there were to lose a person. She had resented Sarah for so long for not giving up the music and the life sheíd loved so she could have given Laura a more secure childhood. And then sheíd resented herself for having wanted Sarah to give up what sheíd loved, for being angry she hadnít given it up earlier, even after Laura had seen the happy light in Sarahís eyes fade, year by year, as she trudged to and from that dreary desk where sheíd typed endless documents for other people who had more important things to do.

And now that Laura was old enough to have children of her own, she was afraid of all the things she couldnít even begin to foresee that might take her and her child away from each other. She was afraid of not having enough money to keep her own child safe, and afraid of the price that would be exacted (because everything had to be paid for in the end) in exchange for the money and the safety that money provided.

She looked at Sarahís picture sometimes, the framed photo theyíd taken from her apartment, and wondered how Sarah had felt when sheíd first learned she was pregnant. Had she been happy? Had she foreseen a long future of laughter and sunny days together with her husband and the child they were going to have? Would she have done things differently if sheíd known everything that would happen?

But Sarahís perpetually smiling face gave no answers. Sheíd clearly been happy at the moment the photo was taken, her eyebrows arched and her eyes holding a hint of laughter for whoever had held the camera. That was all Laura could tell.

Prudence greeted Laura at the foot of the stairs. Her tail twitched three times and then stood straight up, and Laura thought that sheíd never seen a cat with a tail as expressive as Prudenceís. It could swish from side to side in annoyance, and puff up when she was scared of something, or puff just at the base and vibrate like a rattlesnake when she felt full of love (as Laura had seen it do in Sarahís presence), or curl at the very tip when Prudence was feeling happy and complacent. This straight-up posture, combined with the series of urgentmeows, meant,Give me my dinner now! Laura obliged her, carefully cleaning the bits of food that had spilled from the can off the otherwise spotless kitchen counter. Josh must have eaten his lunch out today.

Spending so much more time among Sarahís things latelyóamong the music and picture frames and knickknacksóhad made it almost painfully clear to Laura how empty her own home seemed by comparison with her motherís. She had been reluctant to become too attached to the apartment and the things in itónot tothis apartment andthese things specifically, but to the idea of apartments and things in general. Looking at the sheer volume of everything Sarah had accumulated over the years, sheíd marveled at the courage (for it had been a miracle of courage in its own way, hadnít it?) it must have taken for Sarah to unearth and display old treasures, and even add new ones.

Perhaps it would make her feel more rooted if she and Josh were to finally unpack all their wedding gifts and do something with this apartment theyíd spent weeks hunting for together (ďSomeplace with room to grow,Ē Josh had said, eyes sparkling). Maybe, if they filled bookcases with well-worn paperbacks and the glossy hardcovers about music that Josh dearly loved, and decorated bare walls with paintings and prints, maybe after all that they could rest to admire their work and think,How lucky we are to get to live here!

Except that now there was no telling how much longer theyíd get to live here. Laura knew that if they did end up having to move, it wouldnít be like that other time. This time they would be able to pack everything neatly into labeled boxes that would follow them to wherever their new home would be. Still, she had hoped never again to be forced to leave a home, and she raged inwardly against the cruelty of a world that could never allow you to consider anything in ďforeverĒ terms, no matter how much of yourself you were willing to sacrifice for the sake of permanence.

The apartment was stuffy, as it tended to get during the summer when nobody was home to turn on the central air. On sweltering summer nights like the one now overtaking the failing daylight, she and Sarah had sometimes slept outside on the fire escape, listening to the car alarms and music and laughter and angry shouts that drifted up from the street. It had been a glorious day when theyíd finally been able to afford a small, secondhand air-conditioning unit, even though theyíd had to wedge it into place with old magazines to make it fit the roughly cut hole in the wall.

Laura moved into the living room to unlock the clasp that would allow her to push open the top half of one of the tall windows and let fresh air in. She could see people in other apartment buildings watching television, many of them unknowingly watching the same show in different apartments on different floors. All the way down on the street was a cluster of teenagers dribbling a basketball up the block, and Laura remembered the boys whoíd made basketball hoops out of milk crates in the neighborhood sheíd grown up in, sloppily duct-taping them to lampposts and telephone poles. Across the way the amber-and-white pigeons rested peacefully, settling in for the evening. Their numbers had grown of late, and Laura wondered when the mating season was for pigeons, if perhaps their little group had swelled to (she carefully counted) upwards of thirty because theyíd had chicks she hadnít seen, even though she looked at them every day.

As she watched, the black door that led to the roof where the pigeons slept opened. The head of a broom appeared, followed by a dark-haired man in a white T-shirt. The man began yelling something and waving his broom at the pigeons. The startled birds took flight in circles that grew in breadth and number as more pigeons from the roof joined their widening arcs of panic.

Laura didnít know what came over her. There was a part of her mind that watched with a kind of bewildered detachment, even as she pushed her head through the open window and screamed,ďLeave them alone!Ē The man must have heard her, even if he couldnít tell what she was saying, because he looked directly at her (the crazy lady in the apartment across the way) as he kept shouting and flailing his broom. Laura waved her fists in the air and continued to scream,ďLeave them alone! Leave them alone!Ē Over and over she shrieked,ďLeave them alone!Ē until her throat was raw and the man grew tired of his work and disappeared again through the black door. The circles the pigeons made in the air began to tighten and shrink until, finally, a few brave souls were the first to alight. Soon all the pigeons had settled back onto the rooftop, as if nothing had happened to disturb their rest.

Laura pulled her head back through the window and closed it. She discovered small, red half-moons where her fingernails had dug into the flesh of her palms. Her hands were shaking, and she ran them through her hair and took a few deep breaths to steady herself. Prudence was sitting on her haunches in front of Laura, eyeing her steadfastly.

ďWhat areyou looking at?Ē she demanded hoarsely of Prudence, thinking that now she really must be losing her mind. ďMy mother never yelled in front of you?Ē

To Lauraís surprise, Prudence purred and bumped her head affectionately against Lauraís ankles. Then she turned and curled the tip of her tail around the bottom of Lauraís leg.

11

Prudence

ITíS BEEN RAINING ALL DAY. ALL THE WAY DOWNSTAIRS ON THE SIDEWALK, humans struggle against the wind with inside-out umbrellas that pull them backward or into the street. Some of them finally give up and throw the umbrellas into trash cans with disgust. In Lower East Side, our apartment was close enough to the street that I could look out the window and see if Sarah was about to walk in. From this high up, though, I can never tell if any of the humans on the sidewalk is Laura or Josh. I donít know if Laura had any trouble with the little black umbrella she took with her this morning, but sheís sopping when she gets home. ďGive me a minute, Prudence,Ē she says when she sees me waiting for her by the front door. ďLet me get out of these wet clothes first.Ē She leaves little drip-drops of water behind her as she walks toward the stairs.

Somebody left the window open in my upstairs room this morning, and some of the rainwater has spotted the white curtains and dripped inside. Iím pleased to note, though, that while a little water got into one of the boxes Josh moved in here from Home Office, none has gotten into any of the Sarah-boxes, which live farther into the room. Itís more crowded in here than it used to be, but notso crowded that I canít still throw little things out of the Sarah-boxes for Laura to find and talk to me about.

The air from outside smells like the rolls of new quarters Sarah used to bring home to feed to the laundry machines in Basement, which means thereíll be lightning soon. It also means that the room doesnít have as much of the fading Sarah-and-me-together smell, but thatís okay. Listening to Laura talk about Sarah is almost as good as breathing in her smellómy own memories of Sarah seem much more real when Laura tells me about hers.

There are times when she doesnít say much. Once we found a little plastic bag with some old pinsóthe round, colorful kind that humans occasionally attach to their clothing. Laura picked one out of the bunch and said, ďIbegged my mother to buy me this Menudo pin after I saw my best friend Maria Elena wearing one.Ē Then she laughed. ďI think I wore it on my backpack for about two weeks before I got tired of it and left it at the store.Ē That was all she had to say about any of the pins before putting them away again. But other times sheíll tell longer stories, or say things that are more about Sarahthan other people Laura remembers, and those are the best times of all.

It bothered me at first, throwing Sarahís and my old things out of the boxes theyíre supposed to be in, because Sarah always said how important it was to keep your past organized. Throwing things on the floor is theopposite of being organized. But if I didnít show these things to Laura to make her tell me about her memories, then Sarah wouldnít have a past at all.

Today I found two white boxes while I was looking for things to show Lauraóa smaller one and one thatís bigger, like the kind clothing comes in when one human is giving another human a present. When Laura comes to sit next to me on the floor, wearing sweat-clothes, itís the smaller box she opens first. ďLetís see what you found today,Ē she says. Her voice, which was hoarse for days after she yelled at that man across the street about the pigeons, sounds normal again. When Josh asked her about it, she told him she was in a loud meeting at work and must have strained her throat. Josh has been so busy with his own work lately that he didnít narrow his eyes the way he does when he can tell Laura is saying something not-true. Maybe he didnít even notice how her cheeks changed color. I donít know why Laura wouldnít want to tell him what she did, though, because even things as stupid as pigeons deserve to have a place to liveóand they spend so much time on that rooftop that it must becovered in their smell by now. Who was that strange man to try to make them leave? I was proud of Laura for defending them, even though it turns out they came right back without her help to where theyíre used to being.

The inside of the small white box is lined with cotton fluff. Wrapped into the fluff is something made of a smooth, dark-white material that Laura says is called ivory. The bottom part of it is made up of five long teeth, and the top part is shaped like a fan with all kinds of curls carved into it.ďItís a comb,Ē Laura says. ďMy mother had this way of twisting her hair up and holding it with a comb. She looked so elegant and glamorous, I couldnít believe she was reallymy mother.Ē Lauraís face used to get so tight whenever Sarah was mentioned, but now it wears a soft kind of smile. Her voice is soft, too. She holds the comb up to the light and says, ďI donít remember ever seeing this one, though.Ē

Of course I canít talk and tell Laura so, butI remember seeing this comb. Sarah showed it once to Anise. She told Anise that Mrs. Mandelbaum had given it to her years and years ago, to give to Laura on her wedding day.She wore it at her own wedding, Sarah said.She said it was only fitting that Lauraís ďsomething oldĒ should come from her. Sarah told Anise sheíd thought about giving it to Laura the day she got married, but ended up losing her nerve because Laura always got so upset whenever the Mandelbaums were mentioned. Anise looked sad for Sarah, and she told her,You canít spend the rest of your life waiting for a perfect moment to say the things you want to say. You have to do the best you can withthe moments you actually get. Itís funnyówhen I think about the Sarah I remember and compare her with the Sarah in Lauraís memories. I remember a Sarah who always knew exactly the right thing to say to me. Laura remembers a Sarah who talked and talked but never said the thing Laura really wanted to hear.

Now she puts the comb back into the little box, and puts that back into one of the big Sarah-boxes, although not the one I found it in. As the days go by Laura seems to be organizing the things we look at together. Some go into boxes with things she probably wants to keep, like this comb, and others go into boxes of things sheíll bring to Trash Room someday, like old ordering slips from Sarahís record store, or the funny little drum on a stick with strings attached.

The bigger white box I found is trapped shut with clear tape, and Laura has to slide her fingernail around the edges to get it open. Thereís lots of crinkly tissue paper (perfect to play in!), and inside of that are tiny clothes, far too small for even the littermates to wearólittle knitted sweaters and hats, tiny denim jackets covered in silver safety pins and neon-colored spray paints, and teeny skirts and dresses and ripped Tshirts decorated to match the jackets. The sweaters have the very,very faint aroma of another cat, along with a bit of Sarah-smell and another scent thatís probably what Laura smelled like when she was younger.

ďOhGod.Ē The look on Lauraís face is amazement. ďMrs. Mandelbaum knitted these sweaters for my Cabbage Patch Doll. And Anise made her these little rock-star outfits.Ē Itís when she says Aniseís name that I notice something like anger dart behind Lauraís eyes and fade again, just as quickly. ďI told my mother to get rid of these when I was eleven.Ē She laughs a little. ďIinsisted, actually. I wanted her to know I wasnít a baby anymore.Ē Lauraís smile is wobbly. ďI canít believe she kept them all these years.Ē