There was much coming and going through the long hours that the store was open, said the cat, but I tended to keep to myself in the back, and it was rare for anyone to notice me. And though I noticed everyone myself I hardly bothered to look up past their knees. For the truth is, we are less curious than the saying goes, at least in regards to human strangers, who after all do not differ greatly one from another. In the early days after I arrived I thought about my mother a lot (as it happened, I was the last to be adopted, and so for a few blessed days I’d had her all to myself), I missed her, and oh did I cry for her. But I’m a cat, said the cat, and I quickly adjusted to my new situation.

When I came here, to this house, though, after everything I’d been through—including a second stay at the shelter, where there was no longer any trace of my mother, not even her smell—I might as well have been a newborn again, I felt so helpless, said the cat, so puny and scared. And when this lady took charge of me, with her bowls of warm milk and wet-washcloth baths and piles of soft clean bedding, and the way she hovered as I went about investigating each new room, I remembered what it was like to have a mother, and I knew I had found a second one.

It happened in the middle of the night, but luckily the store was still open, the cat (who had stopped purring) went on. The son was working the counter alone and I was asleep in my box when smoke started pouring up from the basement. We were both out of there in a flash—not that he gave me a thought, but I was at his heels when he raced through the door. I ran across the highway and crouched there, not sure what to do. When the fire trucks came it was too much for me—the sirens made my ears hum after for days—so I ran and ran until I was too tired to run anymore. It was freezing that night, said the cat, and I wasn’t used to being outdoors. I lost the feeling in my ears and paws—I was afraid they would always stay that way! I crawled under a porch, where I felt at least safer, if not any warmer. When light came, I made my way back home and saw that it was home no more, just a reeking soggy blackened wreck. The front door had been secured with a lock and chain. There was no sign of my peeps.