Excerpt
The Road to Tender Hearts
1Things were falling apart at the nursing home in Pondville, a small town in the armpit of Massachusetts. There was a leak in the roof in the left wing, and water came down the walls when it rained. The food was terrible, but that wasn’t new. The staff kept quitting. The pay was shit. People were dying, all the time, but that was to be expected in this line of work. And just that morning, Dr. Gust found the resident nursing-home cat in his office, curled up on the keyboard like a fat loaf of bread. “Shoo,” Dr. Gust said, but the cat would not budge. “I’m fifty-seven,” he told Pancakes. Pancakes was the hospital’s therapy cat. He was supposed to be in one of the rooms of the nursing-home residents, comforting them. That was his job. To comfort people at their end.
But Pancakes was not comforting the elderly residents, some of whom were quite sick, not long to go. No, the cat was in Dr. Gust’s office, and he would not budge from the keyboard. Dr. Gust had to answer emails and think about the budget. Pancakes was purring along with the whirr of the computer monitor. Perhaps he likes the heat from the computer, Dr. Gust reasoned. That must be it. “I’m fifty-seven,” he said again. Dr. Gust was a short man, with very bushy eyebrows and no hair left on his head. He wore a Saint Michael pendant around his neck, which was supposed to protect him.
Pancakes kept purring. A bit of drool fell onto the keyboard; Pancakes drooled when he was content. That was enough for Dr. Gust, who picked up Pancakes by the middle and carried him down the hall, arms straight, trying to keep the cat as far away from his body as possible. He marched the cat to the common room, where an arts-and-crafts class was under way. The residents were making butter-flies out of markers, clothespins, and coffee filters. “Here,” Dr. Gust said, dropping Pancakes in the middle of the room. “Have your pick.” He gestured at the room full of residents, all of them over eighty. Instead, Pancakes scaled the bookshelf, and once on top, turned and hissed.
“I’m glad you’re mad,” said Dr. Gust, hands on his hips. “Because I hate you too.”
Actually, Dr. Gust loved the cat. He was the one who’d bought Pancakes from a box of kittens outside the supermarket; he was the one who had made him a valued member of the nursing-home staff. He made Pancakes employee of the month more than a few times. But Dr. Gust still didn’t want Pancakes hanging around his office, didn’t want him lingering in his lap, because the cat had a remarkable talent.
It was Maribeth on the housekeeping staff who had noticed the pattern. Maribeth was in charge of stripping the beds, cleaning and dusting and sanitizing, and after a resident died, she noticed there was always orange cat hair everywhere, much more than in any other room. She pointed it out to Dr. Gust. She said she had heard there was another cat like that, a therapy cat over at a Rhode Island hospital. It wasn’t a completely unknown phenomenon.
“Curious,” Dr. Gust had said, and he agreed to look into it. In the morning, the cat was found on the chest of another patient, who had died overnight. Soon Dr. Gust was obsessed with the cat’s movements. First, Pancakes spent all his time in Mrs. Monty’s room. Dead in three days. Then on to Mr. Broomfield’s room down the hall. Dead in a week. Upstairs to Mrs. Anderson’s corner room. Mrs. Anderson lived another two weeks. One time, Pancakes snuggled with a patient for three months, but the woman was still the next one in the home to die. And so on, and so on, Pancakes made his choices. And the cat was never wrong. Dr. Gust was so excited, he called the reporter for The South Coast Daily Sun. The headline read: NURSING HOME CAT PREDICTS DEATH, PROVIDES COMFORT AT END. Dr. Gust planned to frame it for his office.
But after the article ran, there was no more comfort in the Pondville nursing home. Before, no one except Dr. Gust and a few members of the staff had known about Pancakes’s knack for prediction. After the article, the residents were in hysterics. Here was a four-legged and -pawed Grim Reaper, walking in their midst! Stalking the halls and picking them off, one by one. One of the patients died jumping out the window, just because the cat had sauntered in.
“Get rid of the cat,” the nursing-home patients demanded.
“Get rid of the cat,” the nurses said at the next meeting.
But Dr. Gust didn’t believe in getting rid of animals. He knew shelter animals were treated like they were disposable. He wished they could euthanize some of the patients in the Pondville nursing home instead. He didn’t want to get rid of the cat. But now Pancakes was in his office and Dr. Gust didn’t want to die either. He was fifty-seven, and he was newly divorced, and he was having some luck on the dating apps. He had just gone on a date with a woman he’d really clicked with; she was newly divorced too. They’d had a great dinner at Applebee’s, and a nice time at Dr. Gust’s place after. Her name was Linda. She was into bondage.
That afternoon, the first day that Pancakes had showed up in his office, Dr. Gust went to his own doctor, but the doc couldn’t find anything. Blood pressure was normal. No hard lumps in his abdomen. His prostate felt better than ever.
Dr. Gust tried to bravely carry on at work for the rest of the week, but every morning that goddamn cat was in his office. Dr. Gust couldn’t handle it. He was young. Or youngish. He had so much juice in him yet. So, he did what he felt he had to do: during his lunch break on Friday, he took Pancakes in the cat carrier to the animal shelter. The sad one on Breaker Road off Main Street in Pondville, with the concrete cells.
“He’s only two years old and his name is Pancakes,” Dr. Gust said to the woman at the counter. “I hope he finds a good home. He’s a wonderful cat,” he continued. “But he was a . . . well, he’s . . . a killer.”
“Did you put a little bell on him?” the woman volunteering at the animal shelter asked. Her name was Alana, and she had six cats at home. “If he wears a jingle bell on his collar, it will be much harder for him to kill birds. Or you could always make him an indoor cat. That’s a great option.”
Dr. Gust didn’t want to get into it with this nice lady at the volunteer animal shelter. He did not want to get the cat a jingle bell. It would do nothing to fix the problem. He shook his head sadly. He would not change his mind. “He’s an agent of death,” he said to Alana.
“That’s a shame,” Alana said, shaking her head also. “We’ll try to find him a good home. Maybe he’ll get lucky.” Those were heavy words: maybe and lucky.
Dr. Gust teared up, but he turned away. I am a good person, he reminded himself. I work with the elderly. I am a good person, he repeated, before driving away from the animal shelter and back to work.
That afternoon, Alana smoked a bowl at her desk. She fed everyone their kibble, refilled their waters, and then locked up for the night. Pancakes enjoyed his dinner before he started working on the lock. Thanks to his claws, Pancakes was able to pick the lock with surprising ease. Once he was freed, he jumped from his cage to Alana’s desk to the top of the filing cabinet. Alana had left a window cracked open to air out the pot-smoke smell overnight, and it was through that window that Pancakes slipped out into the night.
Out on the road, Pancakes took a left onto Main Street. He walked through the town center, past the stone library and the white-steepled Congregationalist church on the right. On the left was the town hall, built in 1856, still coated in a thick layer of lead paint. He went past the athletic club, past the liquor store, past the gun shop, past the crumbling brick fire station. He walked by White Rock Elementary School, a square building with lots of windows, built on land that backs up onto Assawompset Pond. Pondville was named for the network of five ponds in the town, and Assawompset Pond is one of the five. Assawompset is a word from the Wampanoag tribe, and it means “the place of the white stone.”
Pancakes kept walking. He followed the main road out to the edge of town, past the cranberry bogs and the cranberry juice factory, past a stone bench memorial for a teenager who had drowned in the bogs nearly fifteen years before. There was an old man who sat on the bench sometimes while he worked through a six-pack, but no one was sitting there now. Pancakes sniffed the legs of the bench. He lingered for a minute. Up ahead was the town border.
LEAVING PONDVILLE, the sign said, at town’s edge. BE CAREFUL OUT THERE! it said underneath that. Pancakes had learned to read from one of the patients in the nursing home. Alberta Russet would read aloud from the Russian masters while Pancakes snuggled on her lap. Alberta Russet hadn’t made it to the end of Anna Karenina before her death, had missed the entire part about the train.
Pancakes walked to the other side of the roadside sign. WELCOME TO PONDVILLE! it read. And then in smaller letters, written in yellow on a white sign, looking like piss in snow, the town motto read: YOU’RE SAFE HERE.
