“Is hyperthyroidism serious?”
“Yes, but it’s treatable.”
“Will this medicine help his fur?”
“Dullness isn’t a disease, it’s a function of age, like gray hair on a human.” They should understand. There wasn’t a head in the room without a few gray hairs.
“What about his weight?”
I explained his diet in detail, from the obsessiveness with which Donna and I changed his cat food to the Arby’s Beef ’n Cheddar sandwiches.
“But he doesn’t look good.”
They kept coming back to that. Dewey didn’t look good. Dewey was hurting the image of the library. I knew they meant well, that they were interested in finding the best solution for everyone, but I couldn’t understand their thinking. It was true, Dewey didn’t look as appealing. Everybody ages. Eighty-year-olds don’t look like twenty-year-olds, and they shouldn’t. We live in a throwaway culture that stashes older people away and tries not to look at them. They have wrinkles. They have age spots. They don’t walk well and their hands shake. Their eyes are watery, or they drool when they eat, or they “burp in their pants” too much (Jodi’s phrase from when she was two years old). We don’t want to see that. Even the accomplished elderly, even the people who gave their whole lives, we want them out of sight and out of mind. But maybe older people, and old cats, have something to teach us, if not about the world, then about ourselves.
“Why don’t you take Dewey home to live with you? I know he visits you on holidays.”
I had thought of that but dismissed it long ago. Dewey could never be happy living at my house. I was gone too much, between work and meetings. He hated to be alone. He was a public cat. He needed people around him, he needed the library around him, to be happy.
“We’ve had complaints, Vicki, don’t you understand? Our job is to speak for the citizens of this town.”
The board seemed ready to say the town didn’t want Dewey anymore. I knew that was ridiculous because I saw the community’s love for Dewey every day. I had no doubt the board had received a few complaints, but there had always been complaints. Now, with Dewey not looking his best, the voices were louder. But that didn’t mean the town had turned on Dewey. One thing I’d learned over the years was that the people who loved Dewey, who really wanted and needed him, weren’t the ones with the loudest voices. They were often the ones with no voices at all.
If this had been the board twenty years ago, I realized, we would never have been able to adopt Dewey. “Thank God,” I thought to myself. “Thank you, God, for past boards.”
And even if what the board thought was true, even if the majority of the town had turned its back on Dewey, didn’t we nonetheless have the duty to stand by him? Even if five people cared, wasn’t that enough? Even if nobody cared, the fact remained that Dewey loved the town of Spencer. He would always love Spencer. He needed us. We couldn’t just toss him out because looking at him, older and weaker, no longer made us proud.
There was another message from the board, too, and it came through loud and clear: Dewey is not your cat. He’s the town’s cat. We speak for the town, so it’s our decision. We know what’s best.
I won’t argue one fact. Dewey was Spencer’s cat. Nothing has ever been truer. But he was also my cat. And finally, in the end, Dewey was a cat. At that meeting, I realized that in many people’s minds, Dewey had gone from being a flesh-and-blood animal with thoughts and feelings, to being a symbol, a metaphor, an object that could be owned. Library board members loved Dewey as a cat—Kathy Greiner, the president, always carried treats in her pocket for Dewey—but they still couldn’t separate the animal from the legacy.
And I have to admit, there was another thought going through my mind. “I’m getting older, too. My health isn’t the best. Are these people going to throw me out on my ear, too?”
“I know I am close to Dewey,” I told the board. “I know I’ve been through a hard year with the death of my mother and with my health, and that you’re trying to protect me. But I don’t need protecting.” I stopped. That wasn’t what I was trying to say at all.
“Maybe you think I love Dewey too much,” I told them. “Maybe you think my love clouds my judgment. But trust me. I’ll know when it’s time. I’ve had animals all my life. I’ve put them down. It’s hard, but I can do it. The very last thing I want, the very last thing, is for Dewey to suffer.”
A board meeting can be a freight train, and this one pushed me off to the side like a cow on the tracks. Someone suggested a committee to make decisions about Dewey’s future. I knew the people on that committee would mean well. I knew they would take their duty seriously and do what they thought best. But I couldn’t let that happen. I just couldn’t.
The board was discussing how many people should be on this Dewey Death Watch Committee when one member, Sue Hitchcock, spoke up. “This is ridiculous,” she said. “I can’t believe we’re even discussing this. Vicki has been at the library for twenty-five years. She’s been with Dewey for nineteen years. She knows what she’s doing. We should all trust Vicki’s judgment.”
Thank God for Sue Hitchcock. As soon as she spoke, the train jumped the tracks and the board backed off. “Yes, yes,” they muttered, “you’re right . . . too soon, too much . . . if his condition worsens . . .”
I was devastated. It stung me to the heart that these people had even suggested taking Dewey away from me. And they could have done it. They had the power. But they didn’t. Somehow, we had won a victory: for Dewey, for the library, for the town. For me.
Chapter 26
Dewey’s Love
I’ll always remember Christmas 2005, the year before that horrible meeting, when Dewey was eighteen. Jodi and Scott stayed at my house. They had twins now, Nathan and Hannah, a year and a half old. Mom was still alive, and she put on her best lounging outfit to watch the twins open presents. Dewey sprawled on the sofa, pressed against Jodi’s hip. It was the end of one thing, the beginning of the next. But for that week, we were all together.
Dewey’s love for Jodi had never diminished. She was still his great romantic affair. Whenever he got a chance that Christmas, Dewey stuck by her side. But with so many people around, especially the children, and with so much going on, he was more content than ever to just watch. He got along well with Scott, not a hint of jealousy. And he loved the twins. I replaced my glass coffee table with a cushioned ottoman when my grandchildren were born, and Dewey spent most of Christmas week sitting on that ottoman. Hannah and Nathan would toddle up and pet him all over. Dewey was cautious around toddlers now. In the library, he slunk away when they tried to approach him. But he sat with the twins, even when they petted him the wrong way and messed up his fur. Hannah kissed him a hundred times a day; Nathan accidentally knocked him on the head. One afternoon, Hannah poked Dewey in the face while trying to pet him. Dewey didn’t even react. This was my grandchild, Jodi’s child. Dewey loved us, so he loved Hannah, too.
Dewey was so calm that year. That was the biggest difference in old man Dewey. He knew how to avoid trouble. He still attended meetings, but he knew how far to push and which lap to choose. In September 2006, just a few weeks before the board meeting, a program at the library brought in almost a hundred people. I figured Dewey would hide in the staff area, but there he was, mingling as always. He was like a shadow moving among the guests, often unnoticed but somehow there at the end of a patron’s hand each time someone reached to pet him. There was a rhythm to his interactions that seemed the most natural and beautiful thing in the world.