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Back What Are You Going Through
Chapters (24)
  1. Cover
  2. ALSO BY SIGRID NUNEZ
  3. PART ONE
  4. Chapter I
  5. II
  6. III
  7. IV
  8. V
  9. VI
  10. VII
  11. VIII
  12. PART TWO
  13. Chapter I
  14. II
  15. III
  16. IV
  17. V
  18. PART THREE
  19. Chapter I
  20. II
  21. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  22. CREDITS
  23. About the Author
  24. What’s next onyour reading list?

And so, said the cat, who was purring again, I found myself back at the shelter. And one day, after I’d been nursed back to health, I and about a dozen other cats and dogs were loaded onto a bus and driven to a shopping mall.

Call it beginner’s luck: my very first Rescue Me Day and I get adopted. The best thing would’ve been to be reunited with my mother, which was what I was hoping for. But if that was not to be, the next best thing was this lady. She is my second mother, said the beautiful bourbon-eyed silver-furred cat.

He told many other stories that night—he was a real Scheherazade, that cat—but this was the only one I remembered in the morning.

VII

I went to visit my neighbor, an eighty-six-year-old woman who has been living on her own in one of the ground-floor apartments of our building ever since her husband died twenty years ago. This woman once worked as an administrative assistant in some division of our city government. After she retired she got a job as a cashier in a local drugstore, but she hated having to be on her feet for hours at a time so she quit after just a few months. Aside from some babysitting when she was a girl, these two jobs, administrative assistant and drugstore cashier, are the only jobs this woman has had her entire life. The first time I visited her I shocked her by listing all the jobs I’d had since leaving school, some of which I had to struggle to recall. The only thing that appeared to shock her more was my saying that I’d never been married and didn’t have any children. That this could have been a choice rather than some kind of curse she would not accept.

She has a son who lives in Albany and who comes to see her once or twice a month, usually on a Sunday, and always by himself. He and his wife are divorced. He has several children and grandchildren, but none of them come to visit the old woman and since she refuses to travel she never sees any of them. There is just the son, driving down one or two Sundays each month from Albany, where he works as an accountant for a legal firm.