“Then what happened?” I asked.

His face turned bleak. “Guernica,” he said.

“Something’s wrong with the cat,” I tell Lindquist, when I come in to breakfast. “It doesn’t want to get out of bed.”

Lindquist shrugs over her newspaper. “She’s old. She’ll get up when she’s ready.”

“I don’t know. I think you should take a look.”

As I said, the cat’s grown attached to me, and it’s now taken to sleeping on my bed at night, observing my darkroom rituals with an air of disgust such as only a cat can affect. Over the past week or so, I’ve noticed that it moves a little more slowly and deliberately, hopping down by degrees; that it stays curled for hours in a snug ball in one corner. At first I figured, as Lindquist did, that this was just regular old age, and no wonder. But when I rose this morning, the cat didn’t stir. I checked that it was still breathing but I thought maybe it should go to the vet, just to be sure, because Irene thought the sun rose and set on that cat.

I explain all this to Lindquist as she crosses the lawn with me in giant, silent strides. I’m surprised by the tenderness with which she addresses the beast. She strokes its fur gently and bends down to ask it a question, and I don’t know what the little furball says to her in reply, but Lindquist lifts her head again with the same white, bleak expression I remember from Velázquez’s face, when he told me about Guernica.

“Do you think you can hold her in your lap on the way to the veterinarian?”

It turns out, there’s only one veterinarian on Kauai and his office is on the other side of the island, in Lihue, and because Kauai is essentially a volcano, we have to motor all the way around the perimeter instead of directly across. Lindquist drives the Buick like a racecar, which would scare me if she hasn’t always driven that way, guided by an intuition for her car and the road beneath. The cat sits in my lap, not complaining. The children are at school already.

“Thank goodness,” says Lindquist. “They’d be devastated.”

Now, I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure this is what the shrinks would call projection, although I don’t say so. Lindquist would rather die than admit sentimentality. I don’t say this to criticize; I’m the same way myself. To admit you are sentimental is to admit you are vulnerable, that you are susceptible to emotional excess, and we can’t have that in this modern age, can we? Lindquist pours out all her sentiment into the road, into the neat, quick curves and short stretches of pure speed, as we race toward the veterinarian in Lihue.