Silvered Eyes

Each morning when I left for my day shift at the drug store, a white cat waited outside the apartment complex. I lived in a suburb with clusters of buildings, so I didn’t pay the cat much attention early on: its fur wasn’t dirty or matted, it didn’t meow to try and get my attention, and it looked fairly well-fed if its puff of a belly was any indication. The only thing that made me note it from the other strays I had seen was that it sat in one place and stared long after I had passed with my bike. Sometimes its eyes even shifted from yellow to silver when I looked back.

But by day’s end, when I returned irritable and tired from an eight-hour long shift, the cat was always gone. Back home, I figured, probably napping in a window.

It was easy to imagine that a cat’s life would be so much better than the daily slog I went through just to pay rent while my mom looked for freelance work in the weeks after her hip surgery. I felt bad for failing as a daughter who couldn’t even make ends meet well enough for just a month or two. Things had been bad ever since Dad died in the car wreck a few years ago. Hit-and-run accident with no suspect ever found and charged. You would think that Mistress Fortune would go easy on my family after a turn of the cards like that. But no.

When I finally dragged myself back up the stairs to our third-floor apartment, I let myself in quietly. Sure enough, Mom was napping on the couch, probably tired out from doing her own physical therapy by practicing going up and down the stairs. Her government insurance had only paid for a week of physical therapy, and even then we had had to rely on borrowing our neighbor Tina’s car to get there for the appointments. I remembered how my manager had screamed at me for needing to take that week off work—as if I had wanted to do it, when I had no choice. A week of pay towards rent and bills or accompanying my mom to the physical therapy she needed to regain how to be self-sufficient in a world that required work, work, work that broke your back and didn’t care if you could get back on your feet or not? I was just lucky I had held my tongue and not gone on a rant to my manager about common decency.

“Ava?” I looked up from undoing my shoes by the door. Mom had her head perked up over the back of the couch, peering at me. “Did you just get home, honey?”

I managed to pull a wide smile out of my bag of tricks—always for my mom. “Yeah, just walked through the door. How was your day?”

My mother’s forehead wrinkled. “Exhausting. I tried to go do some laundry this morning—”

“Mom!” I couldn’t keep the frustration out of my voice. “I told you I’d do the laundry when I got home. You can’t be carrying that kind of weight down the stairs yet. The PT said you had to take it slow.”

I tried not to notice how my mom rolled her eyes. “Ava, I can’t stay holed up in this apartment forever. I have to start getting back to a normal life. And how helpless am I if I can’t even do a load of my own laundry?”

“You will be able to,” I said, my voice softer as I strained not to let my anger show. “But you can’t push yourself either.” We can’t afford more hospital bills.

I could tell she wanted to say something else, but she held back and didn’t push the issue. Holding back a sigh, I turned my head to the kitchen. “What do you want for dinner? I took out some chicken breasts from the freezer last night. Maybe some rice and green beans to go with it? Does that sound good?”

“I was one step ahead of you,” Mom said, looking a tad brighter. “The chicken's been marinating for a few hours.”

“You rock, Mom,” I said, giving her a thumbs up. Before I could turn to the refrigerator, though, a knock came at the door. I frowned. Tina was the only neighbor we really got along with, and I knew she worked a late shift as security in a corporate building.

When I opened the door, my eyes first fell on the familiar white cat I saw every day; it was held up underneath its front legs by a woman with gray wiry hair. I recognized her face from passing by in the hallways sometimes. Her name was something like...Edna? Edith?

“Can I help you?” I asked, uncertain as I stared into the luminous eyes of the cat. It looked very much put-out that it was being so mishandled by the woman. Usually I would have taken her for the cat lady type, but from the scowl on her face...I supposed looks could be deceiving.

“Your cat keeps bothering my dog,” the woman said, her voice clipped. Her tone reminded me of the trouble-making customers I had who would insist in angry tones that I was not doing my job correctly when all I did was try to keep them pleasant and satisfied as I waited for my manager to sort their issues out. The customer was always right, the saying went.

I could be bullied at my job, but here, in my own home? I wasn’t going to take any crap.

“That’s not my cat,” I said, leaning against the doorjamb and folding my arms. “If you have a problem with a stray, call animal control.”

The woman barked out a laugh. “Funny, I see the other lady who lives here feeding this cat every morning. If it’s not your cat, it must be hers.”

I was about to call the woman out on her made-up story when my mom hobbled forward to stand next to me. I stood aside, wordless, just staring at her.

Before I could say something—anything to right this absurdity—my mother held out her hands for the cat. The other woman let go, and the cat ended up snuggling gratefully into my mother’s arms. I couldn’t tear my eyes away. “I’m so sorry,” my mom said to the woman. “He won’t be a problem for you again.”

“I hope not,” the woman said, offering a sneer of her mouth before heading down the stairs off our landing.

Then I looked back at my mom and said, “Please tell me you’re joking.”

My mom wouldn’t even look at me as she ran her fingers along the white cat’s chin. He leaned into the touch, obviously familiar and comfortable with her, and I knew enough about cats to know that it usually took time to build a bond with one.

While I had been going to work every single Monday through Friday (and sometimes Saturday), my mom had practically been romancing a cat in secret. Behind my back.

Then suddenly something dawned on me. “Is this why you had a sudden hankering for tuna over the past month?”

My mom’s silence was an obvious yes.

I closed the door behind us before I raised my voice. “Mom, we can’t afford to keep a cat! We can barely keep ourselves fed!” And clothed. And sheltered. And a whole list of other necessities.

But as soon as I saw my mom’s face crumple, I knew I had stepped on a landmine. Tears started trickling down her cheeks. “When I walked outside every morning after you left for work, he would follow me around and meow. I couldn’t leave him, Ava. He had no one but me.”

And in the space of that moment I realized a few things. One, the cat had obviously been waiting for my mom all those days he had been sitting outside when I went to work. Two, my mom had been lonely enough during the day to befriend the cat. Three, she had probably kept the cat in the apartment while I was gone.

And four...seeing how she looked at him, I could tell there was no way I’d be calling animal control today to come and get the cat.

“But—food, litter, vet visits…” My words were feeble as I eventually trailed off, imagining dollar signs flowing through the air and disappearing. Then I just had to close my eyes, pinch the bridge of my nose, and sigh. “Mom, I don’t know how we can do this.”

My mom was quiet again for a long moment. “I know it’s a lot, Ava, but I feel like I found this cat as a reminder that there are still good things to come. Like he found me for a reason, somehow. That maybe we can help each other.”

I wasn’t going to tell my mom that she had been reading too many self-help books in her time off. But one look at that cat in her arms and how comfortable he looked there…

I held out my hand for the cat to sniff before he let me scratch his forehead. “I guess this means I have the losing vote, huh? Guess you win, cat.”

My mom bit her lip as if she were trying to suppress a smile before she said, “His name’s Danny.”

I looked at my mom, startled, and she looked like she could start crying again from the way her eyes gleamed. “You named him after dad?”

“What else could it be? Maybe your dad sent him to me.”

I just shook my head, but I found my own eyes beginning to burn with the waterworks too.

Meanwhile, Danny the white cat just stared off, the sunlight from the window hitting his eyes just right so they appeared silver and looked just as clear as mirrors to show us who we really were.