Suzy Says

Poor Audrey. In the short space of a week, she’s gone from having a fun, cool mom like Lorelai Gilmore to having a freaky, overprotective one like Mrs. Bates of the famous motel.

If I haven’t seen her for ten minutes, I’m calling her and looking for her anxiously. Unlike her sister, she never deigns to respond, even if she’s two feet away, and when I find her, she always looks at me as if to say, “What now?”

Unfortunately for her, winning the cat version of “Survivor: Hooterville” means that I’ve been locking her in at night. As soon as darkness falls, I lure her in with treats and then slam the prison doors until dawn. She doesn’t even get reading materials to while away the long hours.

The Alcatraz treatment was slightly hampered at first by the fact that the balcony cat door has fallen out and I keep forgetting to ask Rob to repair it, leaving an empty space where the glass should be. I solved this problem temporarily by putting a stereo speaker in front of it at night.

Yes, Audrey does claw the door a couple of times a night, but it’s better than freaking out about her if she’s out and about in the dark. It doesn’t completely eliminate the freak out, either. I couldn’t find her when I woke up at 4:30 on the first morning, and looked all over the place, calling her. Even though I knew all the doors were closed, I was convinced she’d found some secret way out.

Eventually, I found her sitting in front of the heater, staring as if waiting for a mouse to emerge. Then she started chasing something all over the house, just as I had chased her.

The same afternoon Rob put the flyers up at the store and the post office, I had a call from a woman who said she’d seen June.

My heart leaped.

“Where?” I asked excitedly.

“In the long grass by the field where the bull is.”

“Near the store?”

“Yes.”

Now, the store is more than five miles away, and June has never been known to venture as far as Mark’s house, but I raced to the car and jounced down the driveway like a bat out of hell. I made it to the field in record time. Shaking a bag of treats (and shaking), I called for June through all the long grass, to the bull’s curiosity and that of drivers-by, but to no avail.

I saw a cat run down a side road and chased it, only to discover it was the wrong cat.

I went to the two houses across the road from the field. No-one was home at one, and at the other, an elderly lady answered the door. She was sympathetic and asked what June looked like, since there was a black cat with white paws (the one I had chased) and a multi-colored one who were often seen around there.

My heart fell as I realized that the caller had seen that cat, not June.

I gave the lady my name and number just in case, and drove slowly home, checking the ditches.

A couple of days later, another woman called just to say she was sorry and was keeping an eye out for June. Like many locals, she had tales of cats who went missing for a month, five months, a year, and turned up one day as if nothing had happened.

As I hung up the phone, I thought how nice it is to live in a small town, where a total stranger will call you up just to try and make you feel better. I remembered when I lived in Oakland and had left the keys in my car door in the driveway. An African-American gentleman had noticed this on his way to church and came to the front door to tell me. When I answered the door, he had his hands up before I said a word.