We had already heard that question twenty times, and it was only early afternoon. I told the staff, “Tell them Dewey’s not feeling well. No need to alarm anyone.” He’d show up. I knew it.
That night, I drove around for half an hour instead of heading straight home. I wasn’t expecting to see a fluffy orange cat prowling the neighborhood, but you never know. The thought going through my mind was, “What if he’s hurt? What if he needs me, and I can’t find him? I’m letting him down.” I knew he wasn’t dead. He was so healthy. And I knew he hadn’t run away. But the thought kept creeping up. . . .
He wasn’t waiting for me at the front door the next day. I stepped inside and the place felt dead. A cold dread walked up my spine, even though it was ninety degrees outside. I knew something was wrong.
I told the staff, “Look everywhere.”
We checked every corner. We opened every cabinet and drawer. We pulled books off the shelves, hoping to find him in his crawl space. We shone a flashlight behind the wall shelves. Some of them had pulled an inch or two away from the wall; Dewey could have been making his rounds, fallen in, and gotten stuck. Clumsiness wasn’t like him, but in an emergency you check every possibility.
The night janitor! The thought hit me like a rock, and I picked up the phone. “Hi, Virgil, it’s Vicki at the library. Did you see Dewey last night?”
“Who?”
“Dewey. The cat.”
“Nope. Didn’t see him.”
“Is there anything he could have gotten into that made him sick? Cleaning solution maybe?”
He hesitated. “Don’t think so.”
I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “Do you ever leave any doors open?”
He really hesitated this time. “I prop open the back door when I take the garbage to the Dumpster.”
“How long?”
“Maybe five minutes.”
“Did you prop it open two nights ago?”
“I prop it every night.”
My heart sank. That was it. Dewey would never just run out an open door, but if he had a few weeks to think about it, peek around the corner, sniff the air . . .
“Do you think he ran out?” Virgil asked.
“Yes, Virgil, I do.”
I told the staff the news. Any information was good for our spirits. We set up shifts so that two people could cover the library while the rest looked for Dewey. The regular patrons could tell something was wrong. “Where’s Dewey?” went from an innocent inquiry to an expression of concern. We continued to tell most patrons nothing was wrong, but we took the regulars aside and told them Dewey was missing. Soon a dozen people were walking the sidewalks. “Look at all these people. Look at all this love. We’ll find him now,” I told myself again and again.
I was wrong.
I spent my lunch hour walking the streets, looking for my baby boy. He was so sheltered in the library. He wasn’t a fighter. He was a finicky eater. How was he going to survive?
On the kindness of strangers, of course. Dewey trusted people. He wouldn’t hesitate to ask for help.
I dropped in on Mr. Fonley at Fonley Flowers, which had a back entrance off the alley behind the library. He hadn’t seen Dewey. Neither had Rick Krebsbach at the photo studio. I called all the veterinarians in town. We didn’t have an animal shelter, so a vet’s office was the place someone would take him. If they didn’t recognize him, that is. I told the vets, “If someone brings in a cat who looks like Dewey, it probably is Dewey. We think he’s escaped.”
I told myself, “Everyone knows Dewey. Everyone loves Dewey. If someone finds him, they’ll bring him back to the library.”
I didn’t want to spread the news that he was missing. Dewey had so many children who loved him, not to mention the special needs students. Oh, my goodness, what about Crystal? I didn’t want to scare them. I knew Dewey was coming back.
When Dewey wasn’t waiting for me at the front door on the third morning, my stomach plummeted. I realized that, in my heart, I had been expecting to see him sitting there. When he wasn’t, I was devastated. That’s when it hit me: Dewey was gone. He might be dead. He probably wasn’t coming back. I knew Dewey was important, but only at that moment did I realize how big a hole he would leave. To the town of Spencer, Dewey was the library. How could we go on without him?
When Jodi was three, I lost her at the Mankato Mall. I looked down and she was gone. I almost choked on my own heart, it jumped into my throat so fast. When I couldn’t find her, I became absolutely frantic. My baby. My baby. I couldn’t even think. All I could do was rip clothes off hangers, run the aisles faster and faster. I finally found her hiding in the middle of a circular rack of clothes, laughing. She had been there all along. But, oh, how I died when I thought she was gone.
I felt the same way now. That’s when I realized Dewey wasn’t just the library’s cat. My grief wasn’t for the town of Spencer, or for its library, or even for its children. The grief was for me. He might live at the library, but Dewey was my cat. I loved him. That’s not just words. I didn’t just love something about him. I loved him. But my baby boy, my baby Dewey, was gone.
The mood in the library was black. Yesterday we had hope. We believed it was only a matter of time. Now we believed he was gone. We continued to search, but we had looked everywhere. We were out of options. I sat down and thought about what I was going to tell the community. I would call the radio station, which was the information nexus of Spencer. They would immediately make an announcement. They could mention an orange cat without saying his name. The adults would understand, but maybe that would buy time with the children.
“Vicki!”
Then the newspaper. They would definitely run the story tomorrow. Maybe someone had taken him in.
“Vicki!”
Should we put up flyers? What about a reward?
“Vicki!”
Who was I kidding? He was gone. If he was here, we would have found . . .
“Vicki! Guess who’s home!”
I stuck my head out of the office and there he was, my big orange buddy, wrapped in the arms of Jean Hollis Clark. I rushed over and hugged him tight. He laid his head on my chest. Out of the circular clothes rack, right under my nose, my child had appeared!
“Oh, baby boy, baby boy. Don’t ever do that again.”
Dewey didn’t need me to reassure him. I could tell immediately this was no joke. Dewey was purring like he had on our first morning. He was so happy to see me, so thankful to be in my arms. He seemed happy. But I knew him so well. Underneath, in his bones, he was still shaking.
“I found him under a car on Grand Avenue,” Jean was saying. “I was going over to White Drug, and I happened to catch a glimpse of orange out of the corner of my eye.”
I wasn’t listening. I would hear the story many times over the next few days, but at that moment I wasn’t listening. I only had eyes and ears for Dewey.
“He was hunched against the wheel on the far side of the car. I called to him, but he didn’t come. He looked like he wanted to run, but he was too afraid. He must have been right there all along. Can you believe that? All those people looking for him, and he was right there all along.”
The rest of the staff was crowding around us now. I could tell they wanted to hold him, to cuddle him, but I didn’t want to let him go.
“He needs to eat,” I told them. Someone put out a fresh can of food, and we all watched while Dewey sucked it down. I doubt the cat had eaten in days.
Once he had done his business—food, water, litter box—I let the staff hold him. He was passed from hand to hand like a hero in a victory parade. When everyone had welcomed him home, we took him out to show the public. Most of them didn’t know anything had happened, but there were a few wet eyes. Dewey, our prodigal son, gone but now returned to us. You really do love something more when it’s been lost.
That afternoon I gave Dewey a bath, which he tolerated for the first time since that cold January morning so long ago. He was covered in motor oil, which took months to work out of his long fur. He had a tear in one ear and a scratch on his nose. I cleaned them gently and lovingly. Was it another cat? A loose wire? The undercarriage of a car? I rubbed his cut ear between my fingers, and Dewey didn’t even flinch. “What happened out there?” I wanted to ask him, but the two of us had already come to an understanding. We would never talk about this incident again.