Cat Coming Home

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FOG AS SOFT as a purr drifted among the twisted oaks and tucked down around the weathered roofs of the old hillside neighborhood, blurring their steep angles. On the twisted arm of a sprawling oak, the gray tomcat crouched above the rooftops licking at his fog-dampened fur, his claws kneading idly as he watched the neighborhood below. The old stucco or shingled homes, denizens from an age past, crowded close to one another among their overgrown gardens, descending the hill with dignity, some perhaps still sheltering their original occupants. This early morning, the tomcat was concerned with only one house, with the small, two-story Tudor that, until this week, had stood empty, its tenants long departed.

It was a simple house, and straightforward, its pale plaster walls set within heavy, crisscrossed timbers. A wide bay window at the front revealed a glimpse of the kitchen, and above the kitchen, behind a narrow ledge of dark shingles, opened the wide windows of two upstairs bedrooms topped by a steeply peaked roof. Only the garage roof was flat, out of keeping with the original design as if it had been added on in later years. Replacing, perhaps, the kind of small detached garage common in the age of the first cars, of the little Model A Fords—the kind of shed that would never have held Maudie Toola’s big black Town Car.

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