What the Cat Remembered

Eleanor's arthritic fingers trembled as she held the sleek black rectangle in her palm. Her granddaughter Sophie had insisted she needed this thing—an iphone, though Eleanor still thought of it simply as "the screen that shows me faces I miss." At eighty-three, she had outlived her husband, both brothers, and most of her friends, but here she was, learning to tap glass.

Barnaby, her orange tabby cat of sixteen years, jumped onto the sofa beside her. He was deaf now, mostly blind, but he still found his way to her side somehow. Eleanor ran her hand along his spine, the same way she'd petted the barn cats back in 1947 on her father's farm in Iowa.

"You remember," she whispered to Barnaby, though he couldn't hear her. "You remember when old man Miller's bull broke through the fence that summer? Your grandfather had to climb onto the tractor, waving his hat like a madman, while your father and I chased that stubborn animal through three cornfields before we finally herded him back."

She smiled at the memory. They'd been stubborn as bulls themselves back then—stubborn in love, stubborn in hope, stubborn enough to weather droughts, crop failures, and five babies in six years.

Sophie's face appeared on the screen, calling from Seattle. "Grandma? Did you figure out the photo album I set up?"

"I'm looking at it right now, sweet pea." Eleanor pressed a finger to the glass, zooming in on a photograph of her and Arthur on their wedding day. She held the device tighter in her palm, feeling the weight of sixty-one years compressed into this little machine that showed her everything she'd loved and lost.

Barnaby purred against her hip, the vibration the only sound he could still make that carried through his whole body and into hers.

"Grandma?" Sophie's voice crackled through. "You still there?"

"I'm here," Eleanor said. "I'm right here. Looking at pictures of your grandfather, thinking about how I was too stubborn to let him go, even when he got sick. Bull-headed, he called me."

Barnaby lifted his head, as if he knew.

"That's why I'm still here too," Eleanor added. "Some things you just don't give up on."