Another Insane Devotion Read Online Free Page A

didn’t return phone calls with the promptness one values in a cat-sitter. I’d had to leave four or five messages just to get him to call me back and tell me wearily—he might’ve been talking to his mom—that the cats were fine. So when his name came up on my caller ID a few days later, before I’d even begun to pester him again, I felt a twinge of unease, and the moment I heard his voice, my whole being constricted like a muscle in spasm. He’d let Biscuit out as usual, he told me, and she hadn’t come back. I said nothing. He’d thought she would, since it was raining. It had been raining almost nonstop. I felt ill. I should never have told him he could let her out. I should never have let her out at all, considering what had happened to Gattino a year before. I asked Bruno how long she’d been gone, and it was his turn to fall silent. “Was it Sunday?” I wanted to throttle him through
the phone. “Saturday, Saturday morning.” Two and a half days. Back when we’d lived in the village, she’d stayed away for as long as three, sustained by the generosity of our neighbors and an abundance of slow-moving mice and voles. I told him to go out and call her. “It’s best if you say her name three times.” I showed him how F. and I did it; I used a falsetto. It’s true that was the voice she most responded to, but I suspect I was also taking some mean pleasure in the thought of this big, preening kid being made to squawk, “Biscuit, Biscuit, Biscuit!” in a mortified falsetto on the back porch of our house, within earshot of a women’s college dorm. “Try it now,” I told him. “And call me if she comes. Call me if she doesn’t come.”

    We brought our new cat into the house the way they always tell you to, sequestering her behind closed doors for a few days so our other cats could get used to her scent and she to theirs, then bringing her out in a carrier, like a visiting dignitary in a covered litter, for a formal presentation. None of it was necessary. It helped that one of our cats was very old and arthritic, and another was old and senile, and Tina, the third, was almost as fearful as she’d been four years before. But most of the credit is Biscuit’s. She was so easygoing. When the other cats approached her carrier, she rubbed against the gate and purred. Nobody purred back, but nobody struck at her either, and within a week the new arrival was eating with the older residents and calmly touching noses with them when they met on the stairs.
    She had health problems, starting with the copious wet sneezing. A small raised bump on her neck became an open
sore that made you wince with pity and disgust. Biscuit herself seemed oblivious to it, except for the two times a day when we daubed the wound with antibiotic ointment. Another cat would have gone into hiding whenever it saw its owners heading toward it with nonchalant expressions and a tube of Neosporin. This one stood her ground. She struggled, of course, rearing up on her hind legs and striking out with her claws, snorting with anger and congestion. But at some point she let herself be overpowered and tended to, all the while making it clear how so not crazy she was about it. Maybe it was because she was still young and hadn’t perfected the tactics that would make her so hard to medicate later on. I thought of this as being somehow indicative of her character, of its forthrightness and stalwartness. We don’t consider these feline qualities—if anything, you’d call them canine qualities—but intelligent animals often display traits that seem alien to their species. Think of those aloof dogs that don’t even prick up an ear when a visitor makes an entrance. Think of horses that stay imperturbable in the midst of cannon fire. The more intelligent the animal, the more of its traits will seem uncharacteristic or anomalous, until it