 he old man is eighty-two or eighty-three, he says. He can never remember. He has lived in the same house, where we stand, since 1955, a house he bought for his young bride. They raised two sons there, lost both in Vietnam. His wife followed them not long after. The man has gone on alone in the house since then. “Alone,” he says, “but not lonely.” He is the self-described crazy cat daddy of the town, a soft touch to the neighborhood felines, well-known for his abilities to calm and communicate with even the most feral. He has photos taped to the refrigerator that stretch back into 1970s Polaroids. Hundreds of cats have crossed his path, squatted here, curled up on the cushions and kneaded biscuits on his chest while he watched TV. He has rehomed as many as were willing to go. He has never had, he says, more than six at a time. So, he’s not THAT crazy a cat daddy, he tells me. His plastic cat carriers have clearly seen some action. All the cats get a vetting. A spay. A neuter. These days, they all get a chip. You have to stop before there’s a risk that you have more cats than money and time to care for them, he says. When one exceeds the number, he does everything he can to get that cat a home. Still, a lot of cats have come through. Tomcats healing from their battles. Queens fat with coming babies. Kittens born beneath the porch or in the garden shed. He has never turned a single cat away. But he is worried now about one that’s gone missing. He has no favorites, he says, but this one is his favorite—a creaky, half-blind, battle-scarred, striped tomcat with a big head like an apple and, strangely, a deep croak coupled with the tiniest, most plaintive kitten cry. Follows me everywhere when I’m outside, he says. That cat talks and talks like he has breath to spare. Never goes farther than the backyard. Fought a hawk off a squirrel once, that cat did, I’m told. Took it on, let the squirrel get away. Needed stitches after. Never went farther than the backyard. Never went farther than the backyard. Never. Came in for meals like that boy could tell the time. But he never went farther than the backyard. Never. There is love in his voice, and heartbreak. He looks out the kitchen window to the backyard for a long moment, as though he could conjure the missing cat. We go over what he’d done since he realized the old cat was missing. Not on social media, he had reached out to neighbors, who’d shared a photo from their own accounts. Guy next door drove him to the shelters. One kid across the street had made a few signs that were very kind, most kind, really, but they melted in the rain. Every night the man steps out on the porch and rattles the pie tin with kibble for the old cat’s supper, and every night the cat has failed to come. It’s been ten nights now, and he misses his old friend. It’s like there’s another hole in the house, he says. Someone he loved there and gone. So, I do the things I can do, working to make the sighting net wider and, conversely, running a search dog through and getting down on my hands and knees to peek into all the small spaces where a cat might get trapped. The neighbors are sweet. They haven’t seen the cat, but they love the old man. They let me into their yards to peek into the small spaces there, too. I have some help from a kid in a Paw Patrol t-shirt. “Mr. ___ gives the big candy bars at Halloween!” says the third grader about his neighbor. He already has his Spiderman costume. He’s looking forward to the goodies. “I hope we find his cat.” What changed? I wonder about this space, this cat, this man, and their joint lives together. Something came into the space or something changed about the space or something unusual happened, displacing the cat and disrupting a clearly established routine. “What changed?” I ask the man. “Nothing,” he says. “Have you done anything differently at all?” The man opens his mouth to speak, then closes it again. The only thing, he says, the only thing he’s done different is to walk down the alley to the shed where he keeps his son’s bright red ’73 Mustang. A convertible in mint condition, every year the high school wants it for their homecoming parade. Every year he whips off the tarp, pulls it out of the shed, gives it a wash, and they use it. Every year, he puts it back the next day. There are still sequins from all the dresses of homecoming queens who sat on the back of the open seat to wave. I suggest maybe we go down to the shed. The man raises his eyebrows, but he is crazy cat daddy enough and crazy enough about this cat to not insist that the cat never goes out of the backyard, never, and he gets a key off a loop in the kitchen, and down the alley we go. The shed sits beside an old brick building that was once his father’s hardware shop. The man is shaking his head as he walks, like this is another disappointment coming, like he doesn’t dare hope. We crunch along the gravel path and a long, tidy row of trashcans, and I think this is a heckuva trek for the cat to have made, but maybe. Maybe. The shed, tilty and out of plumb, probably a century old, is silent. The man is trembling as he fumbles the keys at the lock, and it takes a bit for us both to swing the warped shed doors wide. We never get them fully open, because we are met at the door by a skinny, battle-scarred, deep-voiced and squeaky tomcat, whose supper—whose suppers, plural, ARE WAY OVERDUE. He marches out, shies from me but winds around the man’s ankles, talking and talking. This cat has many thoughts, and he will share them. “Porrrrrp?” he says indignantly. “Hort! Frrrup? Eeek? Eeek? Eeek? Hrrmph. PORRRP!” The man is weeping. All this time, the cat has been in the shed. He should have realized, he says. He should have thought. He feels terrible about the close call of this, because he’s pretty sure he would not have gone back to the shed for a good while, and his beloved cat would have starved there. Hungry and thirsty, with a wisp of cobweb trailing from one ear, the cat seems all forgiveness, though. Maybe in a life of scraps with dogs, cats, and hawks, this is just another in a string of misadventures.
We make our way back up the alley, and the cat, who will not be picked up, strides along beside the man, a furry bag of loose cat language telling the whole story from mishap to imprisonment to rescue, in detail. He is hungry. He is thirsty. He IS READY FOR A LITTLE HOMECOMING OF HIS OWN. The man tilts his head as he walks. He can’t keep his eyes off his friend. He nods as though he understands every word from the cat who never leaves the backyard, never, but who follows him wherever he goes. 
© Susannah Charleson, 2025 | 
