The bus was filigreed with Serendipity Village’s signature ivy. The front license plate was a yellow smiley face, and the driver wore a baseball cap reading “Let’s Party.” His party people numbered thirty. Their names were printed on neon index cards above their seats, for easy sorting. We were not their first enrichment activity.

     Sheri, the cat shelter’s tour guide, watched them disembark from the door. “Serendipity sent a mighty horde.”

     The vet tech, Dana, looked up from expressing Peppercorn’s bladder, a task she had hoped to finish before Serendipity descended. The paraplegic tabby did not mind this necessity, nor the diapering that followed. But thirty party people from the nursing home did not know that. They would only see a woman in scrubs squeezing a cat like a lemon.

     Dana finished quickly and released Peppercorn into the lobby. He splayed flamboyant in the first available sunbeam, baring his ocelot belly and Incredible Hulk undergarment. He would join Cat Haven’s other ninety-nine cats in providing Serendipity Village with a stimulating afternoon.

     “I’m not sure I would use the word ‘mighty.’” Dana peered out the front door.

     I was just passing through the lobby, bimbling back to the office where I wrote the shelter’s newsletters and press releases. One glimpse of our guests confirmed Dana’s evaluation. Shuffling two-by-two behind the driver, the Serendipity seniors brandished walkers with all-terrain tennis balls on the bottoms, canes covered in Mickey Mice, and mouths half-open.

     “They’re ‘advanced needs’ cats,” I observed.

     “That’s exactly what they are.” Sheri glided towards the door, which she opened a dozen times every Monday. I did not know how she fit tour guiding between shifts with the local EMS and Hospice. I did not envision her ever ending up on a bus with an index card bearing her name, though she was old enough to qualify. “Welcome to Cat Haven!”

     The dutiful din of “ohhhs” and “my goodnesses” faded behind me as I scurried to my office. In fifteen years as Cat Haven’s Development Director, I had learned the sound of touchdown. A sanctuary for the derelict and decrepit is always foreign soil. Cat Haven took cats too frail or incorrigible for shelters that thought they took all cats.

     Cat Haven hired me with no experience because I dropped out of divinity school and needed to hide among beasts without guile. Fifteen years later, I was still writing about how the last would be first. The vet techs scolded me when I described the cats as prophets and poets, but the donors agreed the cats were more than “advanced needs” with eyes.

     Serendipity’s sixty eyes began their circuit through the building, a loop Sheri could narrate in her sleep. Magenta canes clattered through the Weight Management Suite. Mouths remained open for enriching descriptions of paraparesis, feline immunodeficiency virus, and the importance of “multiple access routes to resources.”

     When I crept into the atrium to refill my water bottle, the driver was asking if it was true that cats need vertical space. Sheri simply pointed overhead, where Thundermuffin was traversing the intricate system of Plexiglas ceiling tunnels. A woman no larger than a second grader raised her arms like a sun salutation, weeping when she fell several inches short of contact.

     “That’s OK, Bev.” The driver wrapped his arm over her pink shoulders as she buried her face in her hands. “That’s OK. We’ll pet other cats.”

     I had hoped to pass by undetected. I was the only staff member whose duties did not involve “direct care.” My colleagues gave insulin and tours. I had words to write and parables to prove. I had just one cat in my office, a deaf bodhisattva who let me break to brush him when I struggled to tell the story.

     A party person in suspenders grabbed my shoulder like a knob. He had a half dozen hairs on his head, but they were long enough to braid. His eyes reminded me of the terrifying Jesus of Revelation. Before I could “fall down as though dead,” he smiled.

     “They’re diabetic like me,” he informed me.

     “Some of them are diabetic, that’s true, Elmer.” The driver tried to be helpful, but Elmer was looking in my eyes.

     “The diabetic cats have courage.” The words fell out before I could consider them.

     Elmer released my shoulder so he could clap both hands on his head. “Amen!”

     Bev was crying again, because the first third of the thirty had outrun Sheri to the kitten suite. A calico sprite without eyes was angling for attention at the window, on her hind legs.

     “She’s standing up like a person,” Elmer observed.

     “They all think they’re people,” Sheri agreed.

     “They are people!” The tallest party person winked over Bev’s head at me. I struggled to maintain eye contact in the presence of her curls. Each one was a silver nautilus. It must have taken her an hour to tame them all. She deserved some kind of ringlet achievement award.

     I kept moving and made it back to home base, only to find that Serendipity had followed me. The thirty stood in front of my window like a diorama. They stared, and I stared. My office mate, Oscar, gave a benediction, the strident meow of a cat who still thinks he can hear himself with enough effort. I was not sure which of us was the Natural History Museum exhibit. A man in a sweatshirt printed “Funcle, noun: Fun Uncle” pressed his nose to the glass.

     Dana texted me from the lobby. “Do you need me to save you? I can page you.”

     But the party moved on, and I returned to my assignment. I was to write a brochure on what to consider when adopting a cat with “advanced needs.” I kept defaulting to shortcut theology. People need to know how to administer subcutaneous fluids. They are not looking to hear that every being is an astonishment who they underestimate at their peril. But if I wrote the former well enough, the latter would be implicit. Oscar hurled himself to the ground to assault a jingle ball. I wondered if he would follow my other office mates out the door, “unadoptables” who refused the terms of surrender. I was negotiating an opening sentence when Sheri appeared in my window.

     “Daisy, will you talk to Verna?”

     I felt my mouth drowse open. “Verna?”

     “Verna says she knows you.” Sheri glanced over her shoulder towards the lobby, where every tour began and ended. I heard the party people burbling at cats, in the primeval coos that every tongue knows without being taught. The same sounds spill from toddlers, the fire inspector, and people with names written on index cards. You can’t tell the difference by ear.

     Sheri read the sticky note in her hand. “Verna says you go to church with her son-in-law.”

     “I don’t go to church.” I regretted it the instant I said it. I had gotten out of my assigned seat while the vehicle was still moving.

     “You don’t? But I thought you—”

     “—I used to go to church.” I stooped to stroke Oscar. “I love God. My butt doesn’t fit in a pew anymore. I came here instead. Why am I telling you this?”

     “Because we all babble here.” Sheri shrugged, not incorrect. “But Verna says you go to church. Will you talk to Verna?”

     “Of course I’ll talk to Verna.”

     Oscar mewed something shrill but uplifting as I ventured out. Verna was in the atrium, separated from the twenty-nine. Verna was the one with the ringlets. Under the skylight, every rhinestone on her sweater cast a half-dozen rainbow prisms to the floor.

     “Verna?”

     “Daisy!” Verna took a step towards me, then stopped as though her forehead hit a forcefield. I took both of her hands in both of my hands before I knew what was happening.

     “Sheri tells me I know you.”

     “You don’t know me.” Verna squeezed my hands, and I squeezed back. “You know Ron.”

     “Ron.”

     “Ron Gronholz?”

     “Oh, my stars.” I squeezed harder. “Yes. Of course. Ron and Donna. Cherrybrook.”

     Cherrybrook was the last church and the best. Their deacons farmed soybeans. On your birthday, everyone sang your favourite hymn, even if you chose one of the weird ones with six verses. The pastor used the word “irrevocable” until it turned threadbare. When I moved away to get married, they made me oatmeal cookies and a crown reading Daughter Of The King. When I got divorced and someone saw my name change on Facebook, deacons and women sent me sweater socks and gift cards to the gas station.

     Verna’s eyes brimmed. The levee could not hold. “Donna is my daughter.”

     I wanted to cup her curls in my hands. My hands were not big enough. “I loved Donna.”

     Everyone loved Donna. Donna kept track of the favourite hymns in a spreadsheet and made baby hats for the NICU*. Donna died without telling anyone she was sick.

     Verna was several inches taller than me. “You still send Ron cards on his birthday and Christmas.”

     There was no time to explain that cards are a place for a feral animal to hide while still loving. I hoped she could hear all the words in my eyes. “I always will.”

     “Ron said to ask for you.” Verna squeezed, and I squeezed. “When I said we were doing an enrichment activity at the cat place, he said, ‘ask for Daisy, she writes for them.’ So, I wanted to thank you.”

     “I’m glad you did.”

     Verna hesitated. “I think everyone had a good time today.”

     “I hope so. I’m sorry Bev got sad.”

     “Bev feels it all,” Verna nodded. “She is a woman of valour.”

     It wasn’t the word I would have chosen, but it should have been. “Serendipity seems like a good community.”

     “We’re the gamut,” Verna grinned. “Enrichment activities are open to everyone, from independent living all the way up to advanced care. The first thirty to sign up get to go.”

     “Always thirty.”

     “Always thirty.”

     The cooing was trailing off, and I heard Verna’s name in the distance. “I think the driver is calling you.”

     She hurled me into her arms, the way unsupervised Girl Scouts pick up sleeping cats. “This place is a church, you know.”

     “I keep hoping that’s the case.”

     “Keep sending Ron cards,” she ordered. She gave my hands one final squeeze before taking her curls and prisms back to the bus. I ran to my desk before I could forget all I had to write down.

 

 

NICU: Neonatal Intensive Care Unit