Вики Майрон - Dewey - The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched The World

“Dewey, do you want me to get the squirt bottle?”

He just stared at me.

I brought the squirt bottle out from behind my back. With the other arm, I held open the door to the library. Dewey slunk back inside.

Ten minutes later I heard: “Vicki, Dewey’s in the lobby again.”

That was it. Three times in one day. It was time to put my foot down. I stormed out of my office, screwed up my best Mom voice, threw open the lobby door, and demanded, “You get in here right now, young man.”

A man in his early twenties almost jumped out of his skin. Before the last word was out of my mouth, he had rushed into the library, grabbed a magazine, and buried his head in it all the way up to the fine print. Talk about embarrassing. I was holding the door open in stunned silence, unable to believe I hadn’t seen this kid right in front of my face, when Dewey came trotting past like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. I could almost see him smiling.

A week later, Dewey didn’t come for his morning meal, and I couldn’t find him anywhere. Nothing unusual there; Dewey had plenty of places to hide. There was a cubbyhole behind the display case by the front door that I swear was the size of a box of crayons—the old sixty-four pack with the sharpener built in. There was the brown lounge chair in the children’s area, although his tail usually stuck out of that one. One afternoon Joy was shelving the bottom row of books in the Westerns section when, to her amazement, Dewey popped out. In a library, books fit on both sides of a shelf. Between the two rows is four inches of space. Between the books was Dewey’s ultimate hiding place: quick, handy, and secure. The only way to find him was to lift books at random and look behind them. That doesn’t sound so difficult until you consider that the Spencer Public Library contained more than four hundred shelves of books. Between those books was an enormous labyrinth, a long, narrow world all Dewey’s own.

Fortunately he almost always stuck to his favorite place in the bottom rows of Westerns. Not this time. He wasn’t under the brown lounger, either, or in his cubbyhole. I didn’t notice him peeking down from the lights. I opened the doors to the bathrooms to see if he had been locked inside. Not this morning.

“Has anyone seen Dewey?”

No. No. No. No.

“Who locked up last night?”

“I did,” Joy said, “and he was definitely here.” I knew Joy would never have forgotten to look for Dewey. She was the only staffer, besides me, who would stay late with him to play hide-and-seek.

“Good. He must be in the building. Looks like he’s found a new hiding place.”

But when I returned from lunch, Dewey was still missing. And he hadn’t touched his food. That’s when I began to worry.

“Where’s Dewey?” a patron asked.

We had already heard that question twenty times, and it was only early afternoon. I told the staff, “Tell them Dewey’s not feeling well. No need to alarm anyone.” He’d show up. I knew it.

That night, I drove around for half an hour instead of heading straight home. I wasn’t expecting to see a fluffy orange cat prowling the neighborhood, but you never know. The thought going through my mind was, “What if he’s hurt? What if he needs me, and I can’t find him? I’m letting him down.” I knew he wasn’t dead. He was so healthy. And I knew he hadn’t run away. But the thought kept creeping up. . . .

He wasn’t waiting for me at the front door the next day. I stepped inside and the place felt dead. A cold dread walked up my spine, even though it was ninety degrees outside. I knew something was wrong.

I told the staff, “Look everywhere.”

We checked every corner. We opened every cabinet and drawer. We pulled books off the shelves, hoping to find him in his crawl space. We shone a flashlight behind the wall shelves. Some of them had pulled an inch or two away from the wall; Dewey could have been making his rounds, fallen in, and gotten stuck. Clumsiness wasn’t like him, but in an emergency you check every possibility.

The night janitor! The thought hit me like a rock, and I picked up the phone. “Hi, Virgil, it’s Vicki at the library. Did you see Dewey last night?”

“Who?”

“Dewey. The cat.”

“Nope. Didn’t see him.”

“Is there anything he could have gotten into that made him sick? Cleaning solution maybe?”

He hesitated. “Don’t think so.”

I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “Do you ever leave any doors open?”

He really hesitated this time. “I prop open the back door when I take the garbage to the Dumpster.”

“How long?”

“Maybe five minutes.”

“Did you prop it open two nights ago?”

“I prop it every night.”

My heart sank. That was it. Dewey would never just run out an open door, but if he had a few weeks to think about it, peek around the corner, sniff the air . . .

“Do you think he ran out?” Virgil asked.

“Yes, Virgil, I do.”

I told the staff the news. Any information was good for our spirits. We set up shifts so that two people could cover the library while the rest looked for Dewey. The regular patrons could tell something was wrong. “Where’s Dewey?” went from an innocent inquiry to an expression of concern. We continued to tell most patrons nothing was wrong, but we took the regulars aside and told them Dewey was missing. Soon a dozen people were walking the sidewalks. “Look at all these people. Look at all this love. We’ll find him now,” I told myself again and again.

I was wrong.

I spent my lunch hour walking the streets, looking for my baby boy. He was so sheltered in the library. He wasn’t a fighter. He was a finicky eater. How was he going to survive?

On the kindness of strangers, of course. Dewey trusted people. He wouldn’t hesitate to ask for help.

I dropped in on Mr. Fonley at Fonley Flowers, which had a back entrance off the alley behind the library. He hadn’t seen Dewey. Neither had Rick Krebsbach at the photo studio. I called all the veterinarians in town. We didn’t have an animal shelter, so a vet’s office was the place someone would take him. If they didn’t recognize him, that is. I told the vets, “If someone brings in a cat who looks like Dewey, it probably is Dewey. We think he’s escaped.”

I told myself, “Everyone knows Dewey. Everyone loves Dewey. If someone finds him, they’ll bring him back to the library.”

I didn’t want to spread the news that he was missing. Dewey had so many children who loved him, not to mention the special needs students. Oh, my goodness, what about Crystal? I didn’t want to scare them. I knew Dewey was coming back.

When Dewey wasn’t waiting for me at the front door on the third morning, my stomach plummeted. I realized that, in my heart, I had been expecting to see him sitting there. When he wasn’t, I was devastated. That’s when it hit me: Dewey was gone. He might be dead. He probably wasn’t coming back. I knew Dewey was important, but only at that moment did I realize how big a hole he would leave. To the town of Spencer, Dewey was the library. How could we go on without him?

When Jodi was three, I lost her at the Mankato Mall. I looked down and she was gone. I almost choked on my own heart, it jumped into my throat so fast. When I couldn’t find her, I became absolutely frantic. My baby. My baby. I couldn’t even think. All I could do was rip clothes off hangers, run the aisles faster and faster. I finally found her hiding in the middle of a circular rack of clothes, laughing. She had been there all along. But, oh, how I died when I thought she was gone.

I felt the same way now. That’s when I realized Dewey wasn’t just the library’s cat. My grief wasn’t for the town of Spencer, or for its library, or even for its children. The grief was for me. He might live at the library, but Dewey was my cat. I loved him. That’s not just words. I didn’t just love something about him. I loved him. But my baby boy, my baby Dewey, was gone.