Always
Benjamin Selesenick
We’d been living in what had been my dad’s house for two weeks, when I met the black cat. Julia was in the basement then, filing the assorted letters dad had received in his seventy years into an accordion folder, another of which would soon be needed. I told her it’d be fine if she threw them all in a box and labeled it Eugene’s Letters, but she thought it’d be better if they were organized by sender and date. “You’ll want to read these one day,” she’d said. “You’ll regret leaving them a mess.” I said that if I wanted to read them, they’d be right there in Eugene’s Letters, but she went out and bought the accordion folders anyway.
I heard the cat before I saw it. Its meows were muffled by the house’s back door, but from where I sat in the living room, I could still hear them. I got up and followed the strange noise, and discovered its source sitting regally on the worn welcome mat beside the backdoor, the word Welcome in white, chalky letters peeking out between its front paws. The cat made no gesture to come inside the house when I opened the door, but its meowing did stop.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” I said. “I don’t have anything for you.”
I bent a knee so I could get a better look at it. I saw that its left ear was gnarled a bit: a V-shaped chunk was nipped out of the ear’s paper-thin end. Its fur was smooth, well-groomed, like a cat’s fur is supposed to be, and it had extra digits on its paws. It didn’t have a collar.
“You’re going to have to go looking elsewhere. I don’t have what you want.”
I reached over to pet the cat goodbye, but before I could touch it, it slunk out of arm’s reach, moving fluidly, like a fish. It went a few paces into the yard, nearing the small, cordoned-off vegetable patch that was overgrown with weeds long before Julia and I had moved in, and it stopped to look back at me—indifferently, unseeing, as if it didn’t recognize me as my own entity. Then, it sauntered on through the yard, until it slipped through an open gap in the fence where a board had collapsed.
I felt rebuffed by the cat’s elusiveness, but I tried not to make anything of it. I stepped back inside and let the door slam behind me.
“What was it?” Julia yelled up from the basement. “I thought I heard something.”
“It was a cat.”
“A cat?” Julia peaked her head into the stairwell that led from the basement to the kitchen, where the backdoor was. In one of her hands was the accordion folder—colored an ugly, holographic green—and in the other was a yellow sheet of paper, a form of sorts, with my dad’s chicken-scratch scrawled across it.
“A black cat,” I said.
“What color was its eyes?”
“I don’t know. It ran away pretty quick.”
She nodded thoughtfully. Her hair was kept up in a bun, like it usually was when she was doing chores.
“Leave some food out for it,” she said. “It’s probably hungry.”
“It looked well-fed to me.”
“Still,” she said.
“Alright.”
I left the entrance to the stairway and returned to the living room, knowing well that I wouldn’t put out a bowl of food—cat food? from where?—unless she asked me again later.
~ ~ ~
Dad got this house about twenty years ago, right after my Bar Mitzvah. "I want to stay close to you and your mother,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.” He also said that he wanted the house to feel like as much of a home as mom’s house did. Yet, seeing the brick ranch house with its brown trim around the street-facing windows, the mailbox mounted by the sidewalk with a large red tail the Postman would flip up after he made his delivery—so unlike the thin, unobtrusive gold container nailed to the door of mom’s house—I knew that this would never be home. The furniture was second-hand, picked up from yard sales and online listings, smelling of other families; the dishes weren’t passed down from grandparents; the attached garage had no bikes and no sleds that, long unused, still felt impossible to throw away.
When dad died, I was in favor of cleaning the house out and putting it on the market. But Julia had other ideas.
“It has everything we need,” she’d said. “Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, two-car garage, central air. An updated bath. We’ll still be working remote for awhile. And we’ll be saving on rent.”
We were standing at the end of the house’s driveway on an early spring day, readying to start a long Sunday afternoon of documenting the state of the house and making plans on how to handle the mess that was inevitably inside. Earlier in the week, mom had flown up from Florida, where she now lived, to do a little tidying of her own, but I couldn’t imagine that she’d made much of a dent.
“It was dad’s house,” I replied.
“We don’t have to live here forever. Just for now. Just for a little. Until we find something that really catches our eyes. Then we can sell this place and move on.”
“But it was dad’s house. Where will we sleep? The master?”
Although he was single when he passed away, dad’d had a few girlfriends while he lived in this house. I didn’t want to stay in his room and wonder what he and his girlfriends had gotten up to in there.
“We’ll sleep wherever you used to sleep. We can turn his old bedroom into an office space.” She linked an arm through one of mine. We’d been facing each other, but now she turned to the house and studied it as if it were a painting. “I know this is hard. Being here. But it’ll get easier, and before you know it, this will start feeling like our house. We’ll be comfortable then.”
I wanted to say that I wasn’t sure if I had the endurance to get to then, but I couldn’t get it out.
Six weeks later, when our lease was up, we called some movers.
~ ~ ~
The next time I saw the cat, it appeared in the kitchen window. There was a host of glassware and china that’d accumulated a lot of dust in the last years of dad’s life when getting from room to room became more of a task for him, and I was at the kitchen sink gently washing it all piece by piece. The counter was stacked with bowls and vases that I recognized from my infrequent visits, but whose origins I didn’t know. Why would dad have gotten a see-through lavender ashtray? Why had he placed it on the mantel in the living room?
The cat was giving itself a bath on the heat pump that sat outside the kitchen window, above the sink. Its face, with light yellow eyes and long whiskers that, at their tips, appeared to gray, was glued to its tail.
“Julia!” I yelled. “Our friend is back!”
Julia was in our bedroom on the opposite end of the house. It’d had an old twin bed with a rumpled mattress and a tiny wooden desk that, even as a teenager, was too small for me; we were in the process of getting rid of both items. We had buyers from Craigslist for the desk and the mattress we’d lost hope on—we were putting it out next bulky waste day. To replace them, we’d bought a king-sized bed, which spanned more than half of the room in both directions, and a pair of dressers that took up most of the other available space.
Julia came running into the kitchen and put her face near the window, trying her best to make eye contact with the cat.
“Mittens!” she squealed. “Look at its paws! It has mittens!”
“On all four paws.”
“How do you open this window?” She looked down at the bottom of the window and tried to pry it open.
“Why? It’ll get in.”
“Your dad probably used to care for him,” she said, turning to me. "People do that with neighborhood cats. It probably misses its old home.”
“My dad never mentioned caring for a cat.”
“Maybe he did and you didn’t know it.”
“Julia, I don’t want to care for a cat.”
She gave me a look that I knew well: frustrated, impatient; a narrowing of her eyes and flaring of her nostrils.
“You won’t be caring for a cat. We’ll just be spending some time with it.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Okay,” I relented. “But I’m not letting it in through this window. I don’t want it thinking that that’s a way for it to get into the house. I’ll get it from the backdoor.”
I walked to the backdoor, and from the corner of my eye, when I left the window, I saw the cat jump down from the heat pump. I stepped into the backyard, with Julia right behind me, and rounded the corner to the ledge where the cat’d been. I saw the heat pump, but the cat wasn’t there, nor was it heading towards the backdoor, where I figured it’d been headed. Behind the heat pump was the edge of the property, only a few yards a way, which was lined with narrow ferns. I looked to the ferns’ feet, expecting to see the cat scampering around them, but no cat.
“Looks like we spooked it,” I said.
Julia looked at the fence forlornly. She had a cat two years ago, but he—Nathaniel—had been hit by a car, and she hadn’t had a cat since. She’d talked about getting another cat a few months after Nathaniel’s death, but those conversations had fallen off as life got busier.
I reached out and took her hand.
“I’ll buy some cat food when I go to the store later,” I said. “I’ll leave out a bowl for it.”
She squeezed my hand and leaned into my chest.
“Do you think it’ll like us?”
“I’m sure it will,” I said.
She nodded, and scanned the yard. Then, she looked back at the house. Its gutters were dripping and an old set of wind chimes made from seashells were lightly clanging from the breeze.
“I bet the cat liked your dad,” she said.
“I doubt it.”
“David.”
“I doubt that it even knew him.”
~ ~ ~
I held my breath through my teen-hood, through the Wednesday’s and weekends I had to spend at dad’s house. Coming here was a consistent rupture to my schedule, and on each ride over, I battled with the thought of asking my mom to let me stay home. Her house—and her—were comfortable. It was what I knew, where I wanted to be. Here, with dad, at his house, was never a place that felt safe.
I was nice to my dad through those years out of necessity, but when I went away to college, I stopped putting in the effort. I wouldn’t visit him and his house when I came home for break, always meeting him somewhere in the middle, and I called him way less than mom when I was at school. By my sophomore year, I stopped calling him altogether. He didn’t push me when I told him on break that I had plans and couldn’t spend the night, or that I forgot to call. Instead, one day in the spring semester of my sophomore year, he wrote me a letter. It wasn’t confrontational, as I first expected upon receiving. It was gentle, unassuming. In the letter, he didn’t mention that it’d been over a month since we spoke; he just wrote about what was new in his life and asked me what was new in mine.
The letter struck me as stupid. Who wrote letters? Couldn’t he just ask me this stuff over the phone, or the next time I see him? I’d never written anyone a letter, not really, so I put his letter away for a few days, unsure of what to do with it. But eventually, the guilt of not responding got to me. I sat down to write and, to my surprise, it all came out so smoothly. Telling my dad about my life was much easier to do if I didn’t have to look at him or hear his voice. It was like writing in my diary and giving him a peek.
Letter-writing became our new, special method of communication. The letters at first were as one would expect them: descriptions of what’s happening, of what everything looks like, of what’s currently catching our interests. But as one semester passed to the next, and as we slowly returned to talking on the phone—monthly, then biweekly—the letters morphed into something else. In these letters, we would share passing thoughts and insights and experiences. Snapshots, like a brief description of margin notes I found in my calculus textbook that made me laugh, or, for him, a description of what his neighbor had looked like when he showed dad his new car, accompanied by a drawing of the car. Signed (always): Always.
Julia found a dozen of these letters in the bottom of an old, short dresser dad had moved to the basement nearly a decade ago. There were personal letters there, like ones my grandpa wrote him when he was away at summer camp, but the ones I’d sent were the only ones that were organized: stacked in descending order of size, largest at the bottom and smallest on top, and wrapped with string, like a present.
“When did you write these?”
Julia presented the letters to me carefully, as if they’d tear if held improperly. The string was already undone, and all the letters were face-up. I rifled through them.
“A while ago,” I said. “In college and a little bit after, too.”
“I’m not sure I get them.” She pointed to a postcard at the top, which, from what I remembered of it, noted the silly expressions and manners of speech my old stats professor had. “There’s no context.”
“That was kind of the point. They were just like these tokens that we passed back and forth. Little bits of ourselves. I always liked writing them.”
“Why’d you stop?”
I flipped from one letter to the next, briefly recalling the many moments I’d sat at my dorm room desk writing them. Hastily, yet with an open spirit.
“It stopped meaning so much after awhile,” I said. “I got busier and—you know.”
Julia nodded. She’d heard me talk about my dad before—or, more accurately, she recognized how little I talked about him.
“Can I have them back?” she said. “I want to sort them in the folder before I forget about them.”
I gave the letters one last close look. I didn’t want to go through them—I didn’t want to know what my old self had to say about his life—but, now that I was holding them, I didn’t want to let them go, either.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Okay, but remember to give them to me when you’re done with them.”
“I will.”
I brought the letters to our bedroom and bent over to put them in the drawer of my bedside table. I shoved them beside a packet of Kleenex and my glasses case, just like they were any old object. When I righted myself, I felt almost light-headed, dazed, like my body wasn’t where it was supposed to be. I looked out the long window that opened onto the whole of the backyard: the oak tree whose long branches hung over the house was buffeted on both sides by evergreen shrubs, and at the base of one of the shrubs, I saw the black cat napping in a sunlit patch.
In that moment, I suddenly felt like I needed that creature’s comfort. I went over to the window, tapped gently on the glass. I soon got the cat’s attention, but its attention didn’t stay on me long: it looked at me, yawned, and then went back to sleep. I hurried through the house, out to the backyard, and walked up to the cat. It woke from the sound and feel of my footsteps, but it didn’t move and it didn’t appear to scare. I got down to my knees and starting scratching its head, scratching its back, and it went to sleep once more. I stayed out with it, keeping quiet so I wouldn’t wake it, until I felt a little better.
~ ~ ~
We ended up naming her Mittens, because of the extra digits. We didn’t know if Mittens was a girl, but when we both thought of cats, we thought of femininity, so we also called her Madame Mittens.
I’d put out a bowl of dried cat food ever since that first time we saw Mittens in the kitchen window, but she hadn’t eaten any, not that we’d seen. All that we’d seen were squirrels and chipmunks nipping or sniffing at the bowl. If I was the one who saw this, I’d march outside and scare these small creatures away.
“Do you think it’s the brand that she doesn’t like?” Julia suggested.
“Maybe.”
“We should try another.”
I agreed. The next day, I bought a second bag of cat food and put out a second bowl, not replacing the original, in case Mittens had secretly liked the original but just hadn’t gotten around to eating any of it. This one didn’t see any changes, either. It sat out by the backdoor for three days until we saw rain in the forecast and decided to bring both of the bowls in.
We had a glimpse of her briefly on a Friday evening, when we were returning from a walk. She was in the far corner of the backyard taking bites out of a few tall blades of grass, and we were ourselves heading into the backyard—I’d forgotten my keys and had to grab the spare under the mat by the backdoor. We hardly were able to yell out Mittens! before she was off and running.
Now, it’d been almost a week since we’d last seen her. Julia and I were in bed, lamenting her absence. Neither us believed that anything had happened to her, but we were still disappointed that she hadn’t yet gravitated to us the way we’d wanted her to.
“She probably has a home somewhere else. Some other owners,” Julia said.
“Our neighbors, probably.”
“Maybe she has a little den that she lives in with other cats and we walk past it every day and we just don’t see it.”
“It could be,” I said, and laid a hand definitively down on my bedside table to punctuate the possibility. My fingers dripped over the table’s end and grazed against the handle that opened onto the drawer where I kept the letters I’d written my dad. The handle was smooth, a light grey against the table’s black, which itself clashed with the room’s tan wood paneling.
Julia saw that I was staring at the table, at the handle.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just—those letters I’d written dad. I put them in the drawer here.”
“Have you gotten around to reading them?”
“No. I’ve been thinking about them, though.”
“You should read them,” she said.
“I’ll get to it tomorrow morning.”
Which I did: when Julia went out for her morning jog, I went back into the room and pulled out the letters. There were twelve of them, dated from my junior year of college through the year after I graduated. I’d met Julia in that time. One the letters—the fourth in the stack—described her before our second date, although I didn’t tell dad in the letter that she was someone who I was about to go on a date with. I just wrote about a woman, who I supposedly didn’t know, and who was waiting for someone outside the student center. She wore a long camel-colored coat that seemed too warm for the April weather. I said that she looked pretty, confident, and that I went over and talked to her.
I’d nearly gone through the whole pile when I reached one of the last letters, which I remembered sending better than I remembered writing. That day, I went to the post office around the corner from the apartment I’d moved into after graduation, the letter in hand, and when I reached the mailbox, I felt a wrenching anxiety grip my stomach. The letter, which I’d rattled off in a fit, asked something I’d been meaning to ask for years: why did he and mom get divorced? Although I’d thought about it plenty, we’d never talked about it. I’d talked to mom about the divorce when it happened. She said that they got it because they weren’t happy together anymore, that they were just done. We decided it was time to move on, David. No matter how much she repeated that sentiment, I always thought the we sounded like a lie. That we was meant to be a he. I knew it. I could tell just from the sound of her voice.
Why’d you divorce mom?
There was more to the letter, but it was all throat-clearing. I didn’t have dad’s response with me—I threw it out as soon as I got it—but I knew it well enough.
I wasn’t happy anymore.
He had the intuition to not add anything else to the letter, like a passing thought or image. But he gave me the wrong answer, the one that confirmed what I’d always thought: He was the one who made me come to this ranch house, not mom; He was the one who splintered my life. He was the reason I’d felt the way I felt.
I wrote back without addressing what he’d said, because I was raised to be a nice boy who knew better than to stir up trouble. But all I wanted to write was You should’ve stayed. You should’ve worked it out.
I put the letters down on the bedside table, suddenly exhausted. I laid down on the bed and put an arm across my face, covering my eyes. I stayed there, unmoving, until Julia returned home. I got up and walked over to the kitchen to meet her.
“I read the letters,” I said.
Julia was sweaty, her hair was frizzed from the humidity. She was taking her headphones out of her ears.
“That was quick,” she remarked.
“Yeah.”
Julia looked me up and down. Steadily, her face shifted from one of investigation to compassion. She came close to me and ran a hand gently along one of my arms, which were both crossed over my chest.
“It was tough wasn’t it, reading through them?”
I nodded.
“But it was cathartic,” she said. “It was good. You’re glad you read them.”
I shrugged weakly. I didn’t like her telling me how I felt.
“That was really important. I know how strange it’s been living here and having all of your dad’s stuff around and having to touch it and move it and deal with it. I know you haven’t really enjoyed a lot of it. But doing this, reading those letters—it’s made things better. You’ll see it. Being here will be easier now.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I already knew what was in the letters. It’s not like I discovered anything new reading them.”
“Still, you needed to do that.”
I felt myself grow warm, my cheeks grow red.
“I didn’t need to.”
“Okay,” she said, irritated. She walked around me, coiling her headphones into a neat ball. “You didn’t need to. And still."
“The letters are on the bed now. You can organize them however you want.”
“Okay,” she said, and left the room.
I was alone now, and I really didn’t want to be alone. I looked out the kitchen window, hoping that Mittens might be on the heat pump, but she wasn’t there.
~ ~ ~
It’d now been two and a half weeks since we last saw Mittens. We still didn’t think anything bad had happened to her, but we were preparing ourselves for the fact that we might not see her again for a while.
It was Memorial Day, so both Julia and I had the day off. We’d agreed to stay at home and finish the last of the unpacking. I’d mostly cleaned the main floor and Julia, to my pleasure, had done a great job organizing and cleaning out the basement: three carpets that’d been haphazardly unrolled on top of other items were now rolled and placed upright against a wall in a corner of the basement; the paintings dad had accrued from yard sales and artist friends were also stacked evenly against a wall; books and VHS’s and DVD’s were in boxes, marked with genres. She even separated hardcovers from softcovers. I walked through it all, marveling.
“What’s left?” I asked.
“There’s the dresser,” she said, nodding to the one we’d found my letters in. She’d put the last of dad’s received letters in the third accordion folder, which now sat on top of a table here in the basement along with assorted tchotchkes. “And there’s the armchair.”
The armchair was in the corner of the basement. It had a mobile base that let you recline and twist in multiple directions, and it was colored a deep, swampy green. Since it wasn’t up in the living room, where dad had spent most of his time in the years before he died, I assumed that there was something broken about it.
“We can throw that out,” I said.
“Okay.”
We decided to handle the dresser first, which wasn’t as difficult to handle as I’d thought: Together, we carried it up the stairs and brought it the hallway that connected the front foyer and the kitchen. Then, we went back downstairs to get the armchair. This was a more daunting task: it was unwieldy, heavy, and didn’t look like it’d fit so easily into the narrow staircase that led upstairs. I circled the chair like a hawk, judging how best to approach it.
“I get the back and you get the front?” I asked.
Julia was next to me, dressed in khaki shorts and a black tank top. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking out the window and, suddenly, pointed a finger at it.
“David!” She yelled.
I picked my head up and followed her finger. The basement had two sets of slat-like windows whose bottoms met the ground, and through one of them, we saw Mittens prowling along: her tail was trailing low behind her, almost touching the ground, and her ears were pointed backwards.
“Mittens!”
I turned to look at Julia—but she was no longer standing where she’d been standing. She’d darted to the staircase and was now bounding up the stairs. I saw the back door fly open and then, turning back to Mittens, I saw Julia come into view of the window. She approached her, bent forward, with a hand extended in greeting.
“Mittens,” she cooed. “Mittens.”
Mittens stopped in her tracks, but didn’t run away. Julia crept closer and closer, making that kissing sound that cats supposedly like. Mittens sniffed Julia’s fingers curiously when Julia was close enough, and then she tentatively started licking her fingers. Slowly, Julia stroked Mitten’s fur, doing her best not to frighten her. And then, Mittens flopped on the ground and rolled side to side.
“Mittens, you’ll ruin your coat,” Julia chastised. In one quick motion, she picked Mittens up and heaved her over her shoulder. “C’mon, let me take you somewhere nice.”
Julia rounded the corner of the house and stepped out of view. She reappeared a moment later in the back door, the sun shining around her and Mittens like they were holy. Julia kicked the door shut and lowered Mittens to the ground.
“What do you think, Mittens? How do you like our home?” she asked.
I went over to the bottom of the staircase to better watch the two of them. Julia was crouched low, smiling. But Mittens, now inside, looked much less comfortable. She remained exactly where Julia had placed her, like her paws were frozen to the floor.
“Maybe you should take her back out,” I suggested. “She doesn’t know our house. She’s probably scared.”
“She is not scared.” Julia started petting Mittens, to coax the scared-ness out of her. “She just needs a minute to get adjusted.”
I waited anxiously, hoping that Mittens would either relax or start pawing at the backdoor to be let out. She did neither. She accepted Julia’s petting for a moment, never really leaning into it the way you want a cat to, before she slipped out of Julia’s arm-reach and began trotting down the basement stairs. Not alarmed and fast, but not slow and comfortable, either. Down one step and another.
When she reached the bottom, I crouched down and extended a hand for Mittens to sniff, like Julia had. “Hi Mittens,” I said. “It’s so good to see you inside.” Mittens got close to my hand, gently rubbing her head against it, but didn’t waste much time with me. She walked past me onto the basement’s concrete floor and started zig-zigging around the organized mess.
“Where’re you off to, Mittens?” I asked.
Steadily, Mittens made her way to the corner of the basement, where the armchair was placed. She approached it, sniffed its feet, and clawed at it. Then, she slipped behind it.
Julia came clomping down the stairs.
“Where’d she go?” she asked.
“Behind the armchair.”
Julia weave her way across the basement, taking practically the same path Mittens had. When she got to the armchair, she tried to look around it, but there was only enough space for a cat to get through. She put a knee on the seat and looked over the back of it.
“David,” she said, her voice light, “come see this.”
I hurried over, thinking that she might’ve found a stash of dead mice or something. Instead, when I got to the armchair and looked behind it, I found Mittens in a zebra-print cat bed, pushed right up against the corner of the room. She was lying on her chest, but her head was up, attentive, studying the two humans hovering over her. Beside Mittens were two mouse toys, each well-used, and there was a third whose tail was in between Mittens’s teeth.
Julia tried to reach over the back of the armchair to pet Mittens, but couldn’t reach, so we both got off the armchair and pulled it back a few feet. Mittens was scared by the sound and the movement, her pupils as large as I’d ever seen them. Julia and I sat down on the floor next to her, crosslegged, and pet her and scratched under her chin and on top of her head until her pupils shrunk, until she started purring.
“Look at all this,” Julia said. “I told you your dad looked after her.”
I nodded, but was unconvinced. I looked out over the basement, with all of my dad’s stuff, his useless treasure. I looked back to Mittens, with her own personal bed and three personal toys. It didn’t make any sense.
“I didn’t think dad would’ve cared enough about a cat to actually go out and buy it stuff,” I said.
“You thought that?”
“Yeah, he just—I just never thought he was that nice. That kind of nice.”
Julia shook her head softly. Almost pityingly. With one hand still scratching Mittens’s chin, she said, “You don’t give your dad enough credit.”
“I give him plenty."
“He was nicer than you say. He was always nice to me.”
“That’s you, though. You’re my girlfriend. He had to be nice to you.”
“One: he didn’t. And two: he was nice to you, too. At least, he tried to be.”
“When?”
“I don’t know—I can’t think of anything right now.” Julia took her hand off Mittens, who looked up at her, confused. “But you know. You don’t need me to tell you.”
“I don’t get why you keep trying to push my dad on me like this. You don’t know what he was really like.”
“I push because it’s important,” she said. “We live in this house, now. You’re not going to be able to ignore your dad. And I’m not going to dance around like he didn’t matter, either.”
“I never said he didn’t matter.”
“He tried, David. Give him that."
I wanted to say otherwise, but held myself. I looked at the table across the room, at the ugly accordion folder that held all his letters. All my letters. The index card-sized letters. I remembered, as if remembering for the first time, that he was the first one to have written a letter. That he wrote it because I wouldn’t call him. I remembered, too, that he sent a few more to me that I never responded to; that I read and might’ve acknowledged in a phone call, but never kept. And I remembered—or, it occurred to me—that he tried to make me feel at home here, in this house, nearly two decades ago. I remembered how, when he first came here, he presented the guest room to me with a nervous flair; how later that same day he cooked us a tray of Mac and Cheese the he knew I’d love and that he knew I’d want seconds of the following morning; and how he got up before me and ran to Starbucks to get me coffee, which he didn’t drink but which I was just starting to drink.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He tried sometimes.”
“I know he did. So don’t act like he didn’t.”
Mittens’s purring had quieted, but she wasn’t asleep. Her eyes were lightly opened. She let out a big yawn. Julia grabbed the tail of the mouse that was in Mittens’s mouth and put it beside her, so her paws could hold it. I then tugged at the tail bouncily, the way a mouse might bounce, until Mittens started pawing at it.
“Would you go upstairs and get Mittens her cat food?” Julia asked. She took the tail from me and started bouncing the mouse on her own. “Maybe she’ll want some now.”
“Sure.”
I slowly got to my feet and ambled across the basement. When I passed the table with the accordion folders, I thought that, maybe later that day, I might take the time to start reading through them all.
Benjamin Selesenick
We’d been living in what had been my dad’s house for two weeks, when I met the black cat. Julia was in the basement then, filing the assorted letters dad had received in his seventy years into an accordion folder, another of which would soon be needed. I told her it’d be fine if she threw them all in a box and labeled it Eugene’s Letters, but she thought it’d be better if they were organized by sender and date. “You’ll want to read these one day,” she’d said. “You’ll regret leaving them a mess.” I said that if I wanted to read them, they’d be right there in Eugene’s Letters, but she went out and bought the accordion folders anyway.
I heard the cat before I saw it. Its meows were muffled by the house’s back door, but from where I sat in the living room, I could still hear them. I got up and followed the strange noise, and discovered its source sitting regally on the worn welcome mat beside the backdoor, the word Welcome in white, chalky letters peeking out between its front paws. The cat made no gesture to come inside the house when I opened the door, but its meowing did stop.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” I said. “I don’t have anything for you.”
I bent a knee so I could get a better look at it. I saw that its left ear was gnarled a bit: a V-shaped chunk was nipped out of the ear’s paper-thin end. Its fur was smooth, well-groomed, like a cat’s fur is supposed to be, and it had extra digits on its paws. It didn’t have a collar.
“You’re going to have to go looking elsewhere. I don’t have what you want.”
I reached over to pet the cat goodbye, but before I could touch it, it slunk out of arm’s reach, moving fluidly, like a fish. It went a few paces into the yard, nearing the small, cordoned-off vegetable patch that was overgrown with weeds long before Julia and I had moved in, and it stopped to look back at me—indifferently, unseeing, as if it didn’t recognize me as my own entity. Then, it sauntered on through the yard, until it slipped through an open gap in the fence where a board had collapsed.
I felt rebuffed by the cat’s elusiveness, but I tried not to make anything of it. I stepped back inside and let the door slam behind me.
“What was it?” Julia yelled up from the basement. “I thought I heard something.”
“It was a cat.”
“A cat?” Julia peaked her head into the stairwell that led from the basement to the kitchen, where the backdoor was. In one of her hands was the accordion folder—colored an ugly, holographic green—and in the other was a yellow sheet of paper, a form of sorts, with my dad’s chicken-scratch scrawled across it.
“A black cat,” I said.
“What color was its eyes?”
“I don’t know. It ran away pretty quick.”
She nodded thoughtfully. Her hair was kept up in a bun, like it usually was when she was doing chores.
“Leave some food out for it,” she said. “It’s probably hungry.”
“It looked well-fed to me.”
“Still,” she said.
“Alright.”
I left the entrance to the stairway and returned to the living room, knowing well that I wouldn’t put out a bowl of food—cat food? from where?—unless she asked me again later.
~ ~ ~
Dad got this house about twenty years ago, right after my Bar Mitzvah. "I want to stay close to you and your mother,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.” He also said that he wanted the house to feel like as much of a home as mom’s house did. Yet, seeing the brick ranch house with its brown trim around the street-facing windows, the mailbox mounted by the sidewalk with a large red tail the Postman would flip up after he made his delivery—so unlike the thin, unobtrusive gold container nailed to the door of mom’s house—I knew that this would never be home. The furniture was second-hand, picked up from yard sales and online listings, smelling of other families; the dishes weren’t passed down from grandparents; the attached garage had no bikes and no sleds that, long unused, still felt impossible to throw away.
When dad died, I was in favor of cleaning the house out and putting it on the market. But Julia had other ideas.
“It has everything we need,” she’d said. “Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, two-car garage, central air. An updated bath. We’ll still be working remote for awhile. And we’ll be saving on rent.”
We were standing at the end of the house’s driveway on an early spring day, readying to start a long Sunday afternoon of documenting the state of the house and making plans on how to handle the mess that was inevitably inside. Earlier in the week, mom had flown up from Florida, where she now lived, to do a little tidying of her own, but I couldn’t imagine that she’d made much of a dent.
“It was dad’s house,” I replied.
“We don’t have to live here forever. Just for now. Just for a little. Until we find something that really catches our eyes. Then we can sell this place and move on.”
“But it was dad’s house. Where will we sleep? The master?”
Although he was single when he passed away, dad’d had a few girlfriends while he lived in this house. I didn’t want to stay in his room and wonder what he and his girlfriends had gotten up to in there.
“We’ll sleep wherever you used to sleep. We can turn his old bedroom into an office space.” She linked an arm through one of mine. We’d been facing each other, but now she turned to the house and studied it as if it were a painting. “I know this is hard. Being here. But it’ll get easier, and before you know it, this will start feeling like our house. We’ll be comfortable then.”
I wanted to say that I wasn’t sure if I had the endurance to get to then, but I couldn’t get it out.
Six weeks later, when our lease was up, we called some movers.
~ ~ ~
The next time I saw the cat, it appeared in the kitchen window. There was a host of glassware and china that’d accumulated a lot of dust in the last years of dad’s life when getting from room to room became more of a task for him, and I was at the kitchen sink gently washing it all piece by piece. The counter was stacked with bowls and vases that I recognized from my infrequent visits, but whose origins I didn’t know. Why would dad have gotten a see-through lavender ashtray? Why had he placed it on the mantel in the living room?
The cat was giving itself a bath on the heat pump that sat outside the kitchen window, above the sink. Its face, with light yellow eyes and long whiskers that, at their tips, appeared to gray, was glued to its tail.
“Julia!” I yelled. “Our friend is back!”
Julia was in our bedroom on the opposite end of the house. It’d had an old twin bed with a rumpled mattress and a tiny wooden desk that, even as a teenager, was too small for me; we were in the process of getting rid of both items. We had buyers from Craigslist for the desk and the mattress we’d lost hope on—we were putting it out next bulky waste day. To replace them, we’d bought a king-sized bed, which spanned more than half of the room in both directions, and a pair of dressers that took up most of the other available space.
Julia came running into the kitchen and put her face near the window, trying her best to make eye contact with the cat.
“Mittens!” she squealed. “Look at its paws! It has mittens!”
“On all four paws.”
“How do you open this window?” She looked down at the bottom of the window and tried to pry it open.
“Why? It’ll get in.”
“Your dad probably used to care for him,” she said, turning to me. "People do that with neighborhood cats. It probably misses its old home.”
“My dad never mentioned caring for a cat.”
“Maybe he did and you didn’t know it.”
“Julia, I don’t want to care for a cat.”
She gave me a look that I knew well: frustrated, impatient; a narrowing of her eyes and flaring of her nostrils.
“You won’t be caring for a cat. We’ll just be spending some time with it.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Okay,” I relented. “But I’m not letting it in through this window. I don’t want it thinking that that’s a way for it to get into the house. I’ll get it from the backdoor.”
I walked to the backdoor, and from the corner of my eye, when I left the window, I saw the cat jump down from the heat pump. I stepped into the backyard, with Julia right behind me, and rounded the corner to the ledge where the cat’d been. I saw the heat pump, but the cat wasn’t there, nor was it heading towards the backdoor, where I figured it’d been headed. Behind the heat pump was the edge of the property, only a few yards a way, which was lined with narrow ferns. I looked to the ferns’ feet, expecting to see the cat scampering around them, but no cat.
“Looks like we spooked it,” I said.
Julia looked at the fence forlornly. She had a cat two years ago, but he—Nathaniel—had been hit by a car, and she hadn’t had a cat since. She’d talked about getting another cat a few months after Nathaniel’s death, but those conversations had fallen off as life got busier.
I reached out and took her hand.
“I’ll buy some cat food when I go to the store later,” I said. “I’ll leave out a bowl for it.”
She squeezed my hand and leaned into my chest.
“Do you think it’ll like us?”
“I’m sure it will,” I said.
She nodded, and scanned the yard. Then, she looked back at the house. Its gutters were dripping and an old set of wind chimes made from seashells were lightly clanging from the breeze.
“I bet the cat liked your dad,” she said.
“I doubt it.”
“David.”
“I doubt that it even knew him.”
~ ~ ~
I held my breath through my teen-hood, through the Wednesday’s and weekends I had to spend at dad’s house. Coming here was a consistent rupture to my schedule, and on each ride over, I battled with the thought of asking my mom to let me stay home. Her house—and her—were comfortable. It was what I knew, where I wanted to be. Here, with dad, at his house, was never a place that felt safe.
I was nice to my dad through those years out of necessity, but when I went away to college, I stopped putting in the effort. I wouldn’t visit him and his house when I came home for break, always meeting him somewhere in the middle, and I called him way less than mom when I was at school. By my sophomore year, I stopped calling him altogether. He didn’t push me when I told him on break that I had plans and couldn’t spend the night, or that I forgot to call. Instead, one day in the spring semester of my sophomore year, he wrote me a letter. It wasn’t confrontational, as I first expected upon receiving. It was gentle, unassuming. In the letter, he didn’t mention that it’d been over a month since we spoke; he just wrote about what was new in his life and asked me what was new in mine.
The letter struck me as stupid. Who wrote letters? Couldn’t he just ask me this stuff over the phone, or the next time I see him? I’d never written anyone a letter, not really, so I put his letter away for a few days, unsure of what to do with it. But eventually, the guilt of not responding got to me. I sat down to write and, to my surprise, it all came out so smoothly. Telling my dad about my life was much easier to do if I didn’t have to look at him or hear his voice. It was like writing in my diary and giving him a peek.
Letter-writing became our new, special method of communication. The letters at first were as one would expect them: descriptions of what’s happening, of what everything looks like, of what’s currently catching our interests. But as one semester passed to the next, and as we slowly returned to talking on the phone—monthly, then biweekly—the letters morphed into something else. In these letters, we would share passing thoughts and insights and experiences. Snapshots, like a brief description of margin notes I found in my calculus textbook that made me laugh, or, for him, a description of what his neighbor had looked like when he showed dad his new car, accompanied by a drawing of the car. Signed (always): Always.
Julia found a dozen of these letters in the bottom of an old, short dresser dad had moved to the basement nearly a decade ago. There were personal letters there, like ones my grandpa wrote him when he was away at summer camp, but the ones I’d sent were the only ones that were organized: stacked in descending order of size, largest at the bottom and smallest on top, and wrapped with string, like a present.
“When did you write these?”
Julia presented the letters to me carefully, as if they’d tear if held improperly. The string was already undone, and all the letters were face-up. I rifled through them.
“A while ago,” I said. “In college and a little bit after, too.”
“I’m not sure I get them.” She pointed to a postcard at the top, which, from what I remembered of it, noted the silly expressions and manners of speech my old stats professor had. “There’s no context.”
“That was kind of the point. They were just like these tokens that we passed back and forth. Little bits of ourselves. I always liked writing them.”
“Why’d you stop?”
I flipped from one letter to the next, briefly recalling the many moments I’d sat at my dorm room desk writing them. Hastily, yet with an open spirit.
“It stopped meaning so much after awhile,” I said. “I got busier and—you know.”
Julia nodded. She’d heard me talk about my dad before—or, more accurately, she recognized how little I talked about him.
“Can I have them back?” she said. “I want to sort them in the folder before I forget about them.”
I gave the letters one last close look. I didn’t want to go through them—I didn’t want to know what my old self had to say about his life—but, now that I was holding them, I didn’t want to let them go, either.
“Not yet,” I said.
“Okay, but remember to give them to me when you’re done with them.”
“I will.”
I brought the letters to our bedroom and bent over to put them in the drawer of my bedside table. I shoved them beside a packet of Kleenex and my glasses case, just like they were any old object. When I righted myself, I felt almost light-headed, dazed, like my body wasn’t where it was supposed to be. I looked out the long window that opened onto the whole of the backyard: the oak tree whose long branches hung over the house was buffeted on both sides by evergreen shrubs, and at the base of one of the shrubs, I saw the black cat napping in a sunlit patch.
In that moment, I suddenly felt like I needed that creature’s comfort. I went over to the window, tapped gently on the glass. I soon got the cat’s attention, but its attention didn’t stay on me long: it looked at me, yawned, and then went back to sleep. I hurried through the house, out to the backyard, and walked up to the cat. It woke from the sound and feel of my footsteps, but it didn’t move and it didn’t appear to scare. I got down to my knees and starting scratching its head, scratching its back, and it went to sleep once more. I stayed out with it, keeping quiet so I wouldn’t wake it, until I felt a little better.
~ ~ ~
We ended up naming her Mittens, because of the extra digits. We didn’t know if Mittens was a girl, but when we both thought of cats, we thought of femininity, so we also called her Madame Mittens.
I’d put out a bowl of dried cat food ever since that first time we saw Mittens in the kitchen window, but she hadn’t eaten any, not that we’d seen. All that we’d seen were squirrels and chipmunks nipping or sniffing at the bowl. If I was the one who saw this, I’d march outside and scare these small creatures away.
“Do you think it’s the brand that she doesn’t like?” Julia suggested.
“Maybe.”
“We should try another.”
I agreed. The next day, I bought a second bag of cat food and put out a second bowl, not replacing the original, in case Mittens had secretly liked the original but just hadn’t gotten around to eating any of it. This one didn’t see any changes, either. It sat out by the backdoor for three days until we saw rain in the forecast and decided to bring both of the bowls in.
We had a glimpse of her briefly on a Friday evening, when we were returning from a walk. She was in the far corner of the backyard taking bites out of a few tall blades of grass, and we were ourselves heading into the backyard—I’d forgotten my keys and had to grab the spare under the mat by the backdoor. We hardly were able to yell out Mittens! before she was off and running.
Now, it’d been almost a week since we’d last seen her. Julia and I were in bed, lamenting her absence. Neither us believed that anything had happened to her, but we were still disappointed that she hadn’t yet gravitated to us the way we’d wanted her to.
“She probably has a home somewhere else. Some other owners,” Julia said.
“Our neighbors, probably.”
“Maybe she has a little den that she lives in with other cats and we walk past it every day and we just don’t see it.”
“It could be,” I said, and laid a hand definitively down on my bedside table to punctuate the possibility. My fingers dripped over the table’s end and grazed against the handle that opened onto the drawer where I kept the letters I’d written my dad. The handle was smooth, a light grey against the table’s black, which itself clashed with the room’s tan wood paneling.
Julia saw that I was staring at the table, at the handle.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just—those letters I’d written dad. I put them in the drawer here.”
“Have you gotten around to reading them?”
“No. I’ve been thinking about them, though.”
“You should read them,” she said.
“I’ll get to it tomorrow morning.”
Which I did: when Julia went out for her morning jog, I went back into the room and pulled out the letters. There were twelve of them, dated from my junior year of college through the year after I graduated. I’d met Julia in that time. One the letters—the fourth in the stack—described her before our second date, although I didn’t tell dad in the letter that she was someone who I was about to go on a date with. I just wrote about a woman, who I supposedly didn’t know, and who was waiting for someone outside the student center. She wore a long camel-colored coat that seemed too warm for the April weather. I said that she looked pretty, confident, and that I went over and talked to her.
I’d nearly gone through the whole pile when I reached one of the last letters, which I remembered sending better than I remembered writing. That day, I went to the post office around the corner from the apartment I’d moved into after graduation, the letter in hand, and when I reached the mailbox, I felt a wrenching anxiety grip my stomach. The letter, which I’d rattled off in a fit, asked something I’d been meaning to ask for years: why did he and mom get divorced? Although I’d thought about it plenty, we’d never talked about it. I’d talked to mom about the divorce when it happened. She said that they got it because they weren’t happy together anymore, that they were just done. We decided it was time to move on, David. No matter how much she repeated that sentiment, I always thought the we sounded like a lie. That we was meant to be a he. I knew it. I could tell just from the sound of her voice.
Why’d you divorce mom?
There was more to the letter, but it was all throat-clearing. I didn’t have dad’s response with me—I threw it out as soon as I got it—but I knew it well enough.
I wasn’t happy anymore.
He had the intuition to not add anything else to the letter, like a passing thought or image. But he gave me the wrong answer, the one that confirmed what I’d always thought: He was the one who made me come to this ranch house, not mom; He was the one who splintered my life. He was the reason I’d felt the way I felt.
I wrote back without addressing what he’d said, because I was raised to be a nice boy who knew better than to stir up trouble. But all I wanted to write was You should’ve stayed. You should’ve worked it out.
I put the letters down on the bedside table, suddenly exhausted. I laid down on the bed and put an arm across my face, covering my eyes. I stayed there, unmoving, until Julia returned home. I got up and walked over to the kitchen to meet her.
“I read the letters,” I said.
Julia was sweaty, her hair was frizzed from the humidity. She was taking her headphones out of her ears.
“That was quick,” she remarked.
“Yeah.”
Julia looked me up and down. Steadily, her face shifted from one of investigation to compassion. She came close to me and ran a hand gently along one of my arms, which were both crossed over my chest.
“It was tough wasn’t it, reading through them?”
I nodded.
“But it was cathartic,” she said. “It was good. You’re glad you read them.”
I shrugged weakly. I didn’t like her telling me how I felt.
“That was really important. I know how strange it’s been living here and having all of your dad’s stuff around and having to touch it and move it and deal with it. I know you haven’t really enjoyed a lot of it. But doing this, reading those letters—it’s made things better. You’ll see it. Being here will be easier now.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I already knew what was in the letters. It’s not like I discovered anything new reading them.”
“Still, you needed to do that.”
I felt myself grow warm, my cheeks grow red.
“I didn’t need to.”
“Okay,” she said, irritated. She walked around me, coiling her headphones into a neat ball. “You didn’t need to. And still."
“The letters are on the bed now. You can organize them however you want.”
“Okay,” she said, and left the room.
I was alone now, and I really didn’t want to be alone. I looked out the kitchen window, hoping that Mittens might be on the heat pump, but she wasn’t there.
~ ~ ~
It’d now been two and a half weeks since we last saw Mittens. We still didn’t think anything bad had happened to her, but we were preparing ourselves for the fact that we might not see her again for a while.
It was Memorial Day, so both Julia and I had the day off. We’d agreed to stay at home and finish the last of the unpacking. I’d mostly cleaned the main floor and Julia, to my pleasure, had done a great job organizing and cleaning out the basement: three carpets that’d been haphazardly unrolled on top of other items were now rolled and placed upright against a wall in a corner of the basement; the paintings dad had accrued from yard sales and artist friends were also stacked evenly against a wall; books and VHS’s and DVD’s were in boxes, marked with genres. She even separated hardcovers from softcovers. I walked through it all, marveling.
“What’s left?” I asked.
“There’s the dresser,” she said, nodding to the one we’d found my letters in. She’d put the last of dad’s received letters in the third accordion folder, which now sat on top of a table here in the basement along with assorted tchotchkes. “And there’s the armchair.”
The armchair was in the corner of the basement. It had a mobile base that let you recline and twist in multiple directions, and it was colored a deep, swampy green. Since it wasn’t up in the living room, where dad had spent most of his time in the years before he died, I assumed that there was something broken about it.
“We can throw that out,” I said.
“Okay.”
We decided to handle the dresser first, which wasn’t as difficult to handle as I’d thought: Together, we carried it up the stairs and brought it the hallway that connected the front foyer and the kitchen. Then, we went back downstairs to get the armchair. This was a more daunting task: it was unwieldy, heavy, and didn’t look like it’d fit so easily into the narrow staircase that led upstairs. I circled the chair like a hawk, judging how best to approach it.
“I get the back and you get the front?” I asked.
Julia was next to me, dressed in khaki shorts and a black tank top. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking out the window and, suddenly, pointed a finger at it.
“David!” She yelled.
I picked my head up and followed her finger. The basement had two sets of slat-like windows whose bottoms met the ground, and through one of them, we saw Mittens prowling along: her tail was trailing low behind her, almost touching the ground, and her ears were pointed backwards.
“Mittens!”
I turned to look at Julia—but she was no longer standing where she’d been standing. She’d darted to the staircase and was now bounding up the stairs. I saw the back door fly open and then, turning back to Mittens, I saw Julia come into view of the window. She approached her, bent forward, with a hand extended in greeting.
“Mittens,” she cooed. “Mittens.”
Mittens stopped in her tracks, but didn’t run away. Julia crept closer and closer, making that kissing sound that cats supposedly like. Mittens sniffed Julia’s fingers curiously when Julia was close enough, and then she tentatively started licking her fingers. Slowly, Julia stroked Mitten’s fur, doing her best not to frighten her. And then, Mittens flopped on the ground and rolled side to side.
“Mittens, you’ll ruin your coat,” Julia chastised. In one quick motion, she picked Mittens up and heaved her over her shoulder. “C’mon, let me take you somewhere nice.”
Julia rounded the corner of the house and stepped out of view. She reappeared a moment later in the back door, the sun shining around her and Mittens like they were holy. Julia kicked the door shut and lowered Mittens to the ground.
“What do you think, Mittens? How do you like our home?” she asked.
I went over to the bottom of the staircase to better watch the two of them. Julia was crouched low, smiling. But Mittens, now inside, looked much less comfortable. She remained exactly where Julia had placed her, like her paws were frozen to the floor.
“Maybe you should take her back out,” I suggested. “She doesn’t know our house. She’s probably scared.”
“She is not scared.” Julia started petting Mittens, to coax the scared-ness out of her. “She just needs a minute to get adjusted.”
I waited anxiously, hoping that Mittens would either relax or start pawing at the backdoor to be let out. She did neither. She accepted Julia’s petting for a moment, never really leaning into it the way you want a cat to, before she slipped out of Julia’s arm-reach and began trotting down the basement stairs. Not alarmed and fast, but not slow and comfortable, either. Down one step and another.
When she reached the bottom, I crouched down and extended a hand for Mittens to sniff, like Julia had. “Hi Mittens,” I said. “It’s so good to see you inside.” Mittens got close to my hand, gently rubbing her head against it, but didn’t waste much time with me. She walked past me onto the basement’s concrete floor and started zig-zigging around the organized mess.
“Where’re you off to, Mittens?” I asked.
Steadily, Mittens made her way to the corner of the basement, where the armchair was placed. She approached it, sniffed its feet, and clawed at it. Then, she slipped behind it.
Julia came clomping down the stairs.
“Where’d she go?” she asked.
“Behind the armchair.”
Julia weave her way across the basement, taking practically the same path Mittens had. When she got to the armchair, she tried to look around it, but there was only enough space for a cat to get through. She put a knee on the seat and looked over the back of it.
“David,” she said, her voice light, “come see this.”
I hurried over, thinking that she might’ve found a stash of dead mice or something. Instead, when I got to the armchair and looked behind it, I found Mittens in a zebra-print cat bed, pushed right up against the corner of the room. She was lying on her chest, but her head was up, attentive, studying the two humans hovering over her. Beside Mittens were two mouse toys, each well-used, and there was a third whose tail was in between Mittens’s teeth.
Julia tried to reach over the back of the armchair to pet Mittens, but couldn’t reach, so we both got off the armchair and pulled it back a few feet. Mittens was scared by the sound and the movement, her pupils as large as I’d ever seen them. Julia and I sat down on the floor next to her, crosslegged, and pet her and scratched under her chin and on top of her head until her pupils shrunk, until she started purring.
“Look at all this,” Julia said. “I told you your dad looked after her.”
I nodded, but was unconvinced. I looked out over the basement, with all of my dad’s stuff, his useless treasure. I looked back to Mittens, with her own personal bed and three personal toys. It didn’t make any sense.
“I didn’t think dad would’ve cared enough about a cat to actually go out and buy it stuff,” I said.
“You thought that?”
“Yeah, he just—I just never thought he was that nice. That kind of nice.”
Julia shook her head softly. Almost pityingly. With one hand still scratching Mittens’s chin, she said, “You don’t give your dad enough credit.”
“I give him plenty."
“He was nicer than you say. He was always nice to me.”
“That’s you, though. You’re my girlfriend. He had to be nice to you.”
“One: he didn’t. And two: he was nice to you, too. At least, he tried to be.”
“When?”
“I don’t know—I can’t think of anything right now.” Julia took her hand off Mittens, who looked up at her, confused. “But you know. You don’t need me to tell you.”
“I don’t get why you keep trying to push my dad on me like this. You don’t know what he was really like.”
“I push because it’s important,” she said. “We live in this house, now. You’re not going to be able to ignore your dad. And I’m not going to dance around like he didn’t matter, either.”
“I never said he didn’t matter.”
“He tried, David. Give him that."
I wanted to say otherwise, but held myself. I looked at the table across the room, at the ugly accordion folder that held all his letters. All my letters. The index card-sized letters. I remembered, as if remembering for the first time, that he was the first one to have written a letter. That he wrote it because I wouldn’t call him. I remembered, too, that he sent a few more to me that I never responded to; that I read and might’ve acknowledged in a phone call, but never kept. And I remembered—or, it occurred to me—that he tried to make me feel at home here, in this house, nearly two decades ago. I remembered how, when he first came here, he presented the guest room to me with a nervous flair; how later that same day he cooked us a tray of Mac and Cheese the he knew I’d love and that he knew I’d want seconds of the following morning; and how he got up before me and ran to Starbucks to get me coffee, which he didn’t drink but which I was just starting to drink.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He tried sometimes.”
“I know he did. So don’t act like he didn’t.”
Mittens’s purring had quieted, but she wasn’t asleep. Her eyes were lightly opened. She let out a big yawn. Julia grabbed the tail of the mouse that was in Mittens’s mouth and put it beside her, so her paws could hold it. I then tugged at the tail bouncily, the way a mouse might bounce, until Mittens started pawing at it.
“Would you go upstairs and get Mittens her cat food?” Julia asked. She took the tail from me and started bouncing the mouse on her own. “Maybe she’ll want some now.”
“Sure.”
I slowly got to my feet and ambled across the basement. When I passed the table with the accordion folders, I thought that, maybe later that day, I might take the time to start reading through them all.
