Chapter 16

The temperature dropped tremendously and was below zero by the time that Josh got his clothes loaded up in the back of his truck. He stopped at Fran’s Sub Shop and got a ham & provolone sub (with lettuce, onion, extra tomato, banana pepper, oil & vinegar & more oil) a bag of salt and vinegar chips, and a liter of Pepsi. Nobody else knows how to make a sub like Fran and her husband Yano. He loaded his precious meal in the truck and drove home ... Home! the thought made him smile. He realized the last time he had a place he could call home was just before he stepped into his apartment in base housing to find his pregnant wife blowing a stranger in his living room. She wasn’t pregnant when he deployed over nine months previously.

Casting aside that memory, Josh pulled into the driveway of Veronica’s house and began unloading his clothes. He came back downstairs after tossing an armload on the bed and there on the kitchen table was a cat sniffing at his wrapped sub. It must have followed him in when he carried an armload of clothes into the house. “Come on fella, you don’t live here.” He scooped up the short hair orange tabby and carried it outside and set it on the ground and watched it run off to the garage, then he grabbed the last of his load and carried it in the house. He kicked off his sneakers and went upstairs and stepped into Veronica’s walk-in closet. Half of it was empty, so she did some re-arranging while she was home packing. There was a note that read, “Can you survive with the dresser in the closet?” On the empty side of the closet was a three-drawer dresser.

He hung up his clothes and found that he used less than half of the space she made for him. Most of his clothes were T-shirts, polo shirts, and flannel shirts. Not counting his dress blues, he only had two suits and has only worn one of them. He hung up the clothes that he had on hangers and then went back downstairs, ready to eat. When he entered the kitchen, he found the cat on the table, tugging at a corner of the sub wrapper. “Dude! Seriously?”

The cat looked at him and meowed as if to say, “Gimme.” It was a pretty cat, orange with intense orange tiger stripes and a tiny white bib under his chin. Like all tabby cats, he had an M between his eyes. Some say that the M stands for the Virgin Mary. Others insist it stands for Mohammed. Those are people that clearly do not understand cats. The M on any cat stands for “Me.” Cats are like that. “Me” embodies their entire philosophy of life.

“Ok, buddy,” and Josh set out a bowl of water for the young cat, who lapped it up. With a sigh of resignation, Josh opened a can of sardines and forked out half the content onto a small dish and set it on the floor next to the bowl of water. As the hungry cat ate, he put his sub on top of the fridge so the cat wouldn’t get it, then grabbed his coat, car keys, and left. After a quick trip to Bell’s IGA, he returned with a litter box, litter, and a small sack of cat food for “Tigger.” In his absence, Tigger had finished the sardines, then got up on top of the fridge and tugged his sub to the edge of the fridge. When Josh walked in, it was ready to fall. “You’re killing me cat. You’re probably one of those cats that have several homes,” said Josh and he took the sub, leaving Tigger on top of the fridge and sat down to his dinner.