What the Cat Knew

The pool in their backyard had been green for three months. Elena stared at it through the kitchen window, her coffee cold, watching the algae thicken across the surface like an unspoken word.

"You going to drain it?" Marcus asked, not looking up from his phone. The bull market was having another "correction," which meant he was having another shitty week. He'd been using the word correction a lot lately, as if the economy had simply made a typo.

"Maybe tomorrow."

She'd stopped saying maybe weeks ago. The word had become a placeholder for everything she wasn't going to do: drain the pool, file the papers, admit that their marriage had been circling the drain since before the water turned green.

Their cat, Luna, jumped onto the counter and meowed. Luna, who had stopped sleeping in their bed six months ago, who had taken to staring at Marcus with what looked unnervingly like judgment. The cat knew. Animals always knew when something had died, even when the people involved were still pretending to feed it.

"My mother called," Marcus said. "She wants us for Sunday dinner. She's making that thing with the beef."

"Bull roast."

"Right. That."

His mother had been making bull roast for Sunday dinner for twenty years. Elena had eaten it every Sunday for seven of them. She would eat it this Sunday too, because she was thirty-four and tired and because somewhere along the way, inertia had become a life choice.

She thought about her sister's wedding last month, how drunk Marcus had gotten, how he'd grabbed her arm in the parking lot and hissed that she was embarrassing him. She'd said nothing, just watched the condensation from her beer drip onto her dress like tears.

"The pool, Marcus."

"What about it?"

"It's been green for three months."

"I know, El. I'll call someone. Just—not this week, okay? Work's been..." He gestured vaguely at the ceiling. "Hell of a week."

It was always hell of a week. It had been hell of a week for years.

Luna rubbed against Elena's arm, purring. The cat was the only thing in the house that still touched her with any consistency.

"You know what your mother said to me?" Elena asked, her voice strangely calm. "When you were in the bathroom at the wedding? She said, 'He's going to destroy you, honey. Just like his father destroyed me.'"

Marcus went still. "She didn't say that."

"She did. And I looked at her—really looked at her—and I saw what thirty years of this does to a person. And I thought: that's going to be me. That green pool out there? That's going to be me."

"You're being dramatic."

"Am I?" She set her coffee cup down. "I'm done waiting for you to call someone about the pool. I'm done waiting for you to notice that I'm unhappy. I'm done waiting for the market to correct itself."

"Elena—"

"I'm staying with Sarah tonight. I think you should figure out what you actually want, because I can't do this anymore. I won't."

She walked out of the kitchen without waiting for a response. Luna followed her to the bedroom, winding through her legs, purring louder now, like she'd been waiting for this moment as long as Elena had.

Outside, the wind picked up, rippling across the green water in small, uneven waves. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked. And for the first time in three months, the pool didn't look like a problem to be solved.

It just looked like a pool.

And tomorrow, someone would finally drain it.