Since Evelyn Lambert couldn’t turn Gracie away—she could never turn away any cat in need—Scott adopted her. He covered the floor and walls of the mudroom with newspaper and brought in a litter box, a food dish, a few toys, and a chair. He sat with Gracie in the mudroom for hours; he even did his homework in there. Whenever Gracie had an accident, Scott threw out the soiled newspaper and brought in a few more sheets. He didn’t think of it as a chore. It wasn’t something anyone asked him to do. He just loved the little cat.
But Gracie was sick, and without medicine (or even a correct diagnosis), she didn’t live long. She died on a freezing February night, and despite the weather, Scott was determined to bury her. He spent the next morning in the wind and ice, crying and banging at the dirt with his shovel, but the ground was frozen solid. He cursed and cried and banged until his hands and face were numb. Finally, out of frustration, he lifted the shovel over his head and slammed it down into the little crevice he had made in the icy dirt . . . and sliced right through the television antennae line.
At that moment, the phone rang. It was Adopt-a-Pet. Someone had thrown a kitten into the Dumpster behind the local pizzeria. She was in surgery because the tops of her ears and half her tail had frozen during the night. Despite the amputations, she was expected to survive. The operation was paid for, but there was no money or space for the hospital to keep the kitten after she woke up from the anesthesia. Barbara’s mom didn’t hesitate. “We’ll take her,” she said. “We’ll be right over.”
That cat was never adopted either. Her name was Amber, and she lived with Barbara’s mother for nineteen years. She was stocky and shaped like a sausage, with little cups for ears and hardly any tail, but everybody who knew Amber adored her. Despite the terrible cruelty that led her to the pizzeria Dumpster, she always loved people. She would cuddle on any lap and purr, purr, purr. She was sweet and affectionate, but she was also tough. She was the house’s school marm; she didn’t let anyone get away with anything. The only female cat who stayed longer than a few weeks, Amber was queen, and everyone knew it. As Barbara recalls, in a house with twelve cats, Amber ate first, drank first, did anything she wanted first. She was the boss, and she had too much respect for Barbara’s mother to let any of the other cats misbehave. The house had a large unfinished basement the cats were herded into periodically while the living areas were given a thorough cleaning. Amber made sure all the cats followed orders. She made sure they tried to amuse themselves in the crowded basement. Then, one by one, she sent the boys up the stairs to meow at the door. When Amber came to the door, cleaning time was over. When the queen spoke, even Evelyn Lambert listened.
So there was Harry for Evelyn; Gracie for Scott; Amber for everyone; and for Barbara, of course, there was Smoky. While Evelyn was working, or collecting cans, or just plain exhausted, Smoky was there. No matter what Barbara needed, no matter why, he was always there.
In the end, they were a family, the Lamberts and their cats: a determined mother, a couple of hardworking kids, three permanent cats—Smoky, Harry, and Amber—and a revolving cast of visitors that gave the family an extra reason to pull together. Maybe it wasn’t a traditional family, but it was full of love, something that can’t be said often enough. There were hard times, of course, especially as the children grew up. In her last year of high school, Barbara grew weary of her mother’s complaints about work and her incessant need to be right. (Her mother later admitted she was scared to admit she was wrong about anything because she didn’t want Barbara to know she was weak. She thought everything might fall apart.) She was tired of the poverty and the struggle. She didn’t understand why her mother didn’t just get a better job, why they had to be so different from everyone else, why she had to spend her childhood as the bucktoothed girl with the hand-me-down jeans and the crazy cat-lady mom.
When she graduated from high school and moved to Flint for community college, she didn’t speak to her mother for a month. But it didn’t take Barbara long to figure out how cruel the world can be and how difficult it is to improve yourself, especially when you were exhausted from the daily struggle to survive. Often, she longed for the comfort of home and her old life: Smoky’s head on her arm, Harry’s constant purring, Amber’s sweet meows. “Normal” life, outside the bounds of cats and poverty, was a little too . . . normal. She craved the company of her cats. But even more, she worried about her mother. She felt obligated to her. Barbara had never known a day in her life when she felt her father loved her. Her mother was the parent who stayed. She was the one who loved her, every minute of every day.
She watched as her mother lost Harry, then Amber. She watched as foster parenting of kittens became so admired, and popular, that Adopt-A-Cat didn’t need Evelyn anymore. She went home to her old room and noticed that Smoky, as sweet as ever, had gone completely gray around the muzzle. He still loved her as fervently as before, but he, too, had become old and tired—as tired as Evelyn Lambert had always been. Barbara felt the tears as she held him, remembering their life together. She had by then stopped thinking of her childhood as a curse and had learned to embrace her eccentric mother, her hand-me-down jeans, her buckteeth (which were mostly in her mind anyway), and her outsider status as valuable lessons in perseverance and love. She had never, even in her darkest moments, stopped cherishing the cats. She cherished every moment with Smoky until the day he died and was buried, like all the other kittens who never found love outside the Lambert home, beneath the old apple trees at the back of the yard.
But if the house of cats ultimately took on a patina of charm for Barbara Lajiness, life never got any easier for her mother. On the day Barbara graduated from high school, her mother lost another job. Eleven years later, when Barbara married and settled in Ann Arbor, her mother was still working as a cook in a Flint, Michigan, retirement home. Her car died and she couldn’t afford to fix it, so she walked to and from work every day. Every weekend, Barbara drove to Flint to take her grocery shopping. It was a struggle, always a struggle. Every day since her divorce was a fight to survive.
When Evelyn retired at age sixty-five, Barbara moved her mother to a small apartment a few blocks from her house in Ann Arbor. Harry, Amber, and Smoky had passed away, and the only cat left from the great Lambert foster home of Fenton, Michigan, was Bonkers, an older cat that had been abandoned by a neighbor a few years before. Bonkers was a fluffy black cat with a white chest and a calm disposition. She preferred lying about, mostly in the sun or on someone’s lap. She wouldn’t hurt anything, with the possible exception of walls, which she was always running straight into with her head. That’s why they called her Bonkers. Sweet, harmless Bonkers.
Unfortunately, the apartment complex didn’t allow pets. So Barbara and her husband, James, took in Bonkers, leaving Evelyn Lambert truly alone for the first time in her life. Almost every day, she came over to their house, but it wasn’t really to see her, Barbara knew. Evelyn Lambert wanted to spend time with Bonkers. She would sit on the porch or in the big living room chair, petting Bonkers and staring down at his back as if staring into the past. She told her daughter, “I’m sick, sweetie. You know I’m sick,” but Barbara figured it was depression. Evelyn missed the house she had struggled to keep through all the tough times. She missed her garden and her cat cemetery and her lifetime of memories. What could she see, when she looked back on her life, but a path carved out by heartbreak and disappointment? What could she possibly find in the future? Evelyn Lambert had moved from a house full of love, as well as struggle, to a lonely apartment in a new city where they wouldn’t even let her keep her beloved cat.