Amy Gustine - You Should Pity Us Instead

Dobry bicycled up the walk and around to the back gate about an hour before sunset, the evening cool setting in and Caroline closing the windows and making sure all evidence of feeding the cat had been cleaned up. The animal sat on the concrete walk behind the house where the sun came down hard at sunset, its face turned up to the warmth, the tip of its tail flicking like the tapping fingers of an impatient monarch.

Dobry raked the few newly fallen leaves into the burn pile while Caroline stood watching from the window. The cat watched too, unintimidated by the crackle of the piles or the twing of the metal rake as it sprung against twigs and tangled grass. Dobry was a good-looking, tall man with wide shoulders and curly dark hair. He was better looking than Frederick, and sometimes, in the secret part of her heart, she was surprised he had married Eva, a girl as plain as Caroline. Once or twice Dobry had said something that gave Caroline the impression he’d intuited her surprise and resented it.

Of course, he might also resent Caroline because she made no attempt to hide her opinion that Dobry was a disappointment for Eva. What she never explained is that it was his love — not his family’s more recent immigration, or that they’d been farmers in the old country — that disappointed her. Dobry’s feelings for Eva, nearly worshipful in their purity and degree, required no change or improvement, and so Eva would remain like Caroline forever because she’d found someone who would allow her to.

Caroline made coffee and went back to the door. The cat was gone and Dobry was burning the piled leaves on the far side of the yard, the hose at the ready in case any flames leapt free. A few minutes later, he knocked on the door. “You’re all set.” She noticed that none of her sons-in-law ever called her anything. She wondered if they would simply call her Busia when the children started to arrive.

“Why don’t you come in and have some coffee?” Caroline said. “I want to ask you something.”

Dobry wiped his feet and sat down at the kitchen table.

Caroline put his cup down with the bowl of sugar and a spoon. “I was thinking I might get the house painted next summer. Would you be willing to do that? Or know someone I could hire?”

“I’ll do it. That’s no problem. Save you some money.”

“Oh no, I’ll pay you.”

“No.” Dobry shook his head. “You hold on to your money. You never know when you might need it. Rainy day.”

When Dobry stood to go, Caroline asked, “Do many children go to the houses in your block for Halloween?”

“I think there’s more than there used to be. People feel bad for them. It’s the only time of year they get a treat.”

“Does Eva make paczki?”

“We didn’t get too many children in the apartment. She gave them some coffee cake.”

Dobry walked down the back stairs. It had grown nearly dark while he was inside. There were kids shouting a few yards over, on the other side of a chain-link fence. Boys, Caroline could tell, from their posture: jittery, absentminded, backs to the dark. As Dobry mounted his bike, Caroline caught sight of a box and the black body writhing in the boys’ hands. She ran across the yard to the fence. The struggling creature cried out while the boys shut the box.

“Get out of there!” she yelled. “I see you! Go away! Leave it!”

“What’s the matter?” Dobry jogged up.

“Chase those boys away,” she said, pointing. Then hollered, “My son-in-law’s coming down there and that cat had better be untouched! You hear me! I’ll find you boys!”

The boys ran and Dobry loped over and retrieved the box, which had been taped shut. The firecrackers had fallen out, and lay around the box like a child’s drawing of sunrays. Dobry opened the lid and the cat leapt for the bushes. Caroline told Dobry to wait there and went in the house, where she retrieved a can of tuna fish.

They lured the animal out and took him home, where he sprawled beneath the kitchen table, his bright eyes disappearing into the blackness of his vaselike face.

“I didn’t think you much cared for cats,” Dobry said.

“Well, I don’t want to see anything murdered.” Caroline wiped the counters with a sponge and ran it under steaming water.

As Dobry opened the back door to go, the cat scuttled into the darkness of the adjacent dining room. “You want me to chase him out?”

“Why not finish up this coffee with me?” Caroline said. “It’ll go to waste otherwise. And I’ve got some cake.”

Back at the table, she asked, “Do you know why I came to America?”

Dobry shook his head.

Caroline smiled. “Of course I never told anyone. I never even told Frederick. Can you believe that? Thirty years of marriage.” She looked down at her cup, then into the dining room. The cat couldn’t be seen in the darkness, but she knew he was there.

When she looked back up, Dobry’s face waited like a blank piece of paper — neutral, open, empty.

Silk had disappeared. Her mother asked if she’d seen the cat.

“No, I haven’t.” Caroline looked under her bed, where the cat sometimes slept. Her mother waited a moment, then left.

Caroline could hear her walking through the house, whispering the cat’s name in her slurred speech—“Sik, Sik.”

When her mother was still whispering half an hour later, Caroline went to help. Silk hid when Atlas was home because he’d bitten her once, but when he was at the shop with her father, the cat normally sat with Caroline’s mother. Sometimes, though, in hot weather she would sleep on the brick floor of the porch off the kitchen or under the parlor sofa. Her mother caught Caroline checking the latter on her hands and knees. “I’ve looked,” she said.

“Perhaps she’s in town,” Caroline said, “getting mice.” Silk liked to go to the docks and catch mice, which she’d leave in her food dish. She never ate them. She was too full from the chicken and fish Caroline’s mother gave her.

Caroline suggested other possibilities too. None of them moved her mother to even respond. They sat until dark, skipping the dinner the maid had left in the icebox. Every few minutes her mother would get up and look out the back door. Normally Silk sat on the stoop when she was ready to come back inside.

Caroline’s father arrived home later than usual, assembled his dinner and settled in without a word at the dining room table. Caroline could see him through the glass doors, his sharp frame wavy and dissected through the seeded panels and their wooden mullions, his arm almost whole in the shadows cast by the flickering oil lamps.

After dinner her father headed toward his study. He’d just passed the parlor, where Caroline still sat with her mother, when he stopped and she felt, rather than heard, him and Atlas come back toward them. “My dear,” he said, his face close to a lamp to be sure her mother could read his lips. “I almost forgot. I think there’s something wrong with your cat.”

Caroline’s mother almost didn’t move. It was very close, but she did. Her eyes widened, just a moment, then back to normal. Her father went to his study. Her mother went out to the back porch and there Silk was, wet, limp, a potato sack next to her with a coarse rope fallen loose from her neck.

“Oh no,” Caroline moaned.

Her mother whirled as if she’d heard her, but it must have been a motion caught from the corner of her eye. “Sh!” She picked up the dead cat and took her inside as if she were merely damp from the rain.

The next day and the next and the next was like any other in their house. Caroline’s father and Atlas left for the shop at eight o’clock sharp. It opened at nine and he liked to be sure the money was in the register, the counters freshly dusted, the front window washed. At home Caroline’s mother did needlework while she read in her room.