Amy Gustine - You Should Pity Us Instead

Lavinia searches for over half an hour, going east from the station, trudging along the tracks, panning for the slightest movement in the bushes on the far side. Then she returns to the station and heads west. A dirt parking lot with several cars sits in the V formed where the tracks cross. Lavinia is getting back on her knees to look under these cars when she hears a faint meow. For a fleeting moment she thinks it’s him, then realizes the meows are too high, too strained.

The kittens are in an ancient Bonneville. Lavinia presses her face against the hot glass, hands cupped on either side of her eyes. It must be over a hundred in the car. A mother cat lies in the back seat. Lavinia tries both door handles, but the car is locked.

She could go home and look through Carl’s tools. He might have something she could smash the window with, but the kittens would likely get injured and she might be arrested. Lavinia croons to the three tiny, blind balls of fur, “It’s okay, I’ll get you out of there. Just hold on. Hold on.” The kittens crawl back and forth over their mother, pulling at her dry teats, kneading her belly.

Lavinia begins to cry again as she runs toward Pultwock’s. Shortly after they moved in, Carl locked his keys in the Cutlass and old man Pultwock used a slim jim to get them out.

Before Lavinia gets a fist up to knock, he opens the door.

“I need to borrow your slim jim.” She’s stopped crying, but her eyes tingle and she can feel the stretch of her swollen face.

“Why?”

“I need to open a locked car.”

“You don’t have a car.”

“I know, Walter. Can I borrow it?”

“You don’t have the touch,” he says and disappears into the house.

“Walter!” Lavinia is about to go inside when through the haze of the screen door she spots a picture on Pultwock’s end table of a woman who looks very much like her mother holding a dog.

Pultwock emerges from the kitchen, slim jim in hand, and slams the front door. Silently they go down to the station. Lavinia convinces herself the picture is of someone else.

At the car Pultwock grumbles. “Figured it had something to do with the damn cats.” He opens the door and Lavinia scoops up the kittens.

“Check the mother,” Lavinia says. “Is she alive?”

Pultwock prods her roughly with a single finger. “Nope.”

Lavinia doesn’t believe him. She climbs into the car, laying the kittens on the driver’s seat, then reaches into the back, burning her bare arm against the vinyl seats. But as soon as she touches the mother, she knows he’s right. Lavinia retrieves the newborns, eyes only half-open, all three small enough to fit in her cupped palms, and starts back home.

Behind her she hears Pultwock lock and slam the car. He grunts with satisfaction. “Somebody’ll be wondering how the hell them cats got out.”

He catches up to Lavinia without seeming to try. “Thought I was lying, huh?”

“You ran Jason off, why wouldn’t you lie about that?”

“Who’s Jason?” Pultwock says.

“My cat,” Lavinia says.

“Oh shit, he ran himself off.”

At home Lavinia checks the kittens’ rectal temperatures first, glad to see they are within the acceptable range. Then she pinches their flesh and rubs her finger along their gums. Each is a bit sticky, so she sets up the humidifier in her bedroom, shooing out all the other cats, and installs the kittens in a box lined with sheepskin car-seat covers from the towed Olds.

In the kitchen Lavinia warms milk, corn oil, salt, and egg yolks on the stove, then feeds each kitten with a doll’s bottle. Afterward, she massages their genitals with a warm, moist cotton ball and they relieve themselves in her palm. She prefers to do it that way at first, so she can be sure who did what and how much.

Fritz wails in the hall and Lavinia goes out to him, careful to shut the bedroom door where the helpless newborns sleep.

After she washes up, Lavinia goes through the newspapers stacked in the spare room. She’s looking for blank sheets, the ones they sometimes wrap the ad sections in. On each one she writes with a black marker, “Cat Lost. Very Precious. Black with white mask. Reward.”

She posts her signs, stapling them to every light post within a ten-block radius, then returns home and feeds the kittens again before lying down to take a nap. Sliding her alarm to on, she reads a piece of paper taped to the top of the clock: I know men by the consequences caused in life by their presence.

She tries to fall asleep, but Fritz wails relentlessly at the door. Lavinia fights the urge to let him in. What if he attacked the kittens?

A car pulls up. Lavinia thinks nothing of it. Her bedroom is on the front corner of the house. People come and go all day and half the night from The Rusty Tavern.

A few moments later there is a knock. Lavinia sits up and parts the curtains above her bed. No one has knocked on her door in months. Solicitors don’t come to this neighborhood. Rarely do Jehovah’s Witnesses. The last knock was the postman. He needed to verify that a package addressed to her house, but with a different name, was not hers.

A fat woman in a purple pantsuit and a tall man wearing a blue windbreaker stand on her porch. The man faces sideways and on his back, in fancy, yellow letters, it says “The Toledo Humane Society.” The woman sees the curtains move and waves her hand, catching Lavinia’s eye. “Mrs. Simms, we’re from the Humane Society and we’d like to talk to you a moment.”

Too late to hide. Lavinia gets out of bed and stands for a moment to think. The doorbell rings — bleat, bleat, bleat.

Coming out of the bedroom, she stomps her feet like a schoolgirl — left, right, left — and waves her hands, scattering the cats to the back bedroom, the basement, and bathroom, closing each door, then counting the bold stragglers: Maryann and Ginger, Rodeo Roy, Lucy, Genie, Buck, and Fritz. Seven. That’s not crazy, is it? They won’t freak out over seven.

Lavinia opens the door as far as the chain will allow. “Yes?”

“Hello, Mrs. Simms,” the woman says. “We’ve had a report about your home. Some animals that live here.”

“Really? From who?” Lavinia tries to keep her voice pleasant and surprised.

“We’d just like to come in and assure ourselves the animals are well cared for.”

Lavinia tells them to wait a second, closes the door, and turns up the TV, hoping to drown out the inevitable whining and scratching from the bedrooms and basement. A soap opera is on. Lavinia turns the dial two clicks. The woman outside hollers “Mrs. Simms?” so Lavinia settles on a game show, with its bells and frequent clapping. Then she unchains the door and invites the two Humane workers in.

The lady has a face that ought to be pleasant — soft cheeks, bright blue eyes, yellow eyebrows — but strikes Lavinia as arrogant and unknowing. The man shakes Lavinia’s hand and introduces himself as Tom Mitchell. “This is Dawn Kester,” he says. Tom is very tall and thin, his narrow, too-small face split by a thick, straight mustache which obscures his upper lip. Dawn looks around appraisingly. Tom raises his eyebrows and nods at nothing in particular.

“Well, you can see I have a few cats.” Lavinia waves her hand around the room. Lucifer jumps onto the recliner and stretches his paws against Tom’s leg.

Eight is okay, Lavinia thinks.

“Hey, buddy.” Tom reaches out to pet him, but Lucifer swats his hand away and a thin line of blood appears on Tom’s finger. He glances at it with lifted brows, pursing his lips.

“Sorry,” Lavinia grabs the cat. “He’s like that.” She puts Lucifer in the kitchen, and turns to find Dawn on her heels. Behind Dawn the small living room looks suddenly foreign. A bookshelf blocking half the front window and piled haphazardly with yellowed, dog-eared paperbacks. A threadbare autumn-gold loveseat with avocado stripes obscured by cat hair. A brown, sculpted shag carpet spotted with stains — cat puke, the occasional potty accident and, of course, the blueberry mollusk. A blue La-Z-Boy with a seat cushion pilled to gray by zealous paws. Above the La-Z-Boy the back of a culled calendar page is taped at its torn frill. In black marker, printed neatly in block letters, the page reads, What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.