There is a cat at his door. It wants in from the cold He doesn\u2019t own a cat, so if it wants to get in to his kitchen it must trust to something good in people and to the warmth of their houses.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s fifty years old now. He hasn\u2019t worked in four years. He hasn\u2019t looked for work in two. He tries hard to do the math, but it doesn\u2019t come out to anything he can feed himself from. You could set your watch by him when he was working. You could set your watch by him now too, but it\u2019s not a thing that is valued anymore.<\/p>\n
He walks to Walmart to pick up a few things. The houses he walks by are mostly rentals now, their trees thickets, and the lawns patchy and sere. The fences all need painting and planks. At Walmart the express line moves like the clock in class when he was fifteen, like it is waiting for permission to move. The people in front of him are old. They talk to the clerk, talk of small things like the weather and whether or not it is busy or slow. They can\u2019t see that she doesn\u2019t want to be there, with them. An old man, very old, takes four minutes just to open his wallet with his spotted hands. He has to hold his wallet at arm\u2019s length to get it open because he can\u2019t see anything within arm\u2019s length.<\/p>\n
Walking back home he runs into his neighbor in front of her house. Her name is Vera. It\u2019s a name from another era. She is older than he is. She has children somewhere, but not here. She had a husband once, but they divorced thirty years previously. He\u2019s years and miles away.<\/p>\n
Vera doesn\u2019t ask him how he is. A year ago a pipe broke in her house and flooded some rooms, some closets. The adjuster from the insurance company came and settled up with her. There was an argument over some things. She wanted money for her wedding album. She repeats her story now:<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll give you one-hundred dollars,\u201d the adjuster told me<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s not right,\u201d I said. \u201cThat\u2019s not enough. It cost me two thousand dollars to get those pictures taken, to get that album. It would be more than three thousand in this day and age.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLook,\u201d the adjuster said, \u201cI\u2019m divorced, you\u2019re divorced. I\u2019ll give you my wedding album and we\u2019ll call it even.\u201d<\/p>\n
I got only one hundred dollars. I felt I had to take it but I am not happy about it.<\/p>\n
This was the first time she\u2019d spoken to him in six months, and Vera complains to him about the album just like she had when it happened. She couldn\u2019t remember where he had worked, or that he was not working now. Vera could offer no pity, no consolation, without first being prompted, and he didn\u2019t want to beg. She thought only of the wedding album and of what she hadn\u2019t gotten for it, so she told him her story again.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell,\u201d he said, by way of trying to sympathize with her, \u201cmaybe you can find the photographer and see if they have negatives and recreate the album. Maybe the insurer would pay for that?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want the damn negatives, or the damn album, or the damn photographer. I want the money,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s hard to put a number on some things I guess,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
She talked right through him, still mad about the wedding album. \u201cIf you don\u2019t ask, you don\u2019t get,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
He asked her if she had a cat, and told her about the cat coming and waiting at his door.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d she said, “I do not have a cat and never have.\u201d<\/p>\n
He will have the same conversation with her again, until he loses his house and goes, or she dies and is gone. She wore pants of some sort and he noticed that they were too big for her. She\u2019d drawn the west up practically to her sternum. There was enough room between her neck and the collar of her shirt to fit a rolled-up towel in and her head bobbed when she talked. Vera has become lean now, he thought, and sallow too. She\u2019s done the math. She knows that less is coming in place of more. She knows no one has any money even though things get cheaper all the time. She wanted two thousand for that album. Two thousand, two thousand, two thousand. I am owed. People would rather feel right than be right. They believe what they say when they say it.<\/p>\n
He walked back to his house where the cat waited for him on the front step. The hands on the clock move so fast now, he thinks, they used to walk and now they run. Those old people in line, the clerk indentured to serve them, Vera too. They fall now, like people running downhill and losing their balance, and here he is in line waiting with them and then falling with them, in the same order in which they stand. Some say that God is above, in the firmament. Some say that God is below, in the foundation. Whatever they say he is not here on this street, in this life, except in the cat, with its animal patience and no internal, ticking clock. It trusts that the door will open. It knows only that it is warm inside and that it\u2019s good to be warm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We used to be worth something. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15201,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1889,1890,243],"class_list":["post-15108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-economicanxiety","tag-recession","tag-depression","writer-steve-passey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15108"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15184,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15108\/revisions\/15184"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}