A Cat Named Jo

The MO-X shuttle stops in Concordia every time on its way from the Kansas City International airport to my home in Columbia, Missouri. One time, I left with a cat. 

My routine is the same after every visit to Aunt Josephine's house in Texas: I clamber from the airport, feeling hazy and disoriented, and search the curbside for a large white passenger van with “MO-X” in purple writing. The shuttle leaves within 45 minutes, my plastic yellow suitcases hidden below my feet. The shuttle stops once at a rest stop before dropping me off in front of my home.

In my lap was often a bag of gifts from Aunt Jo, small knick-knacks she'd collected and thought I needed to decorate my apartment, but on this November evening, my lap held only my hands. I pulled at a fraying stitch on the bus seat next to my knee, working the loose yarn between my fingers.

Aunt Jo used to knit but stopped after arthritis dulled the delicate bones in each finger and sent sharp pains through her hands at random, converting her blankets and sweaters into lumpy granny-square coasters and uneven, too-short scarves. The last time I was in her bedroom, I noticed her knitting needles and yarn collection was stowed in a dairy crate deep in her closet. I’d return to her Colonial home, tucked in a Houston suburb with similar homes lining the block, at least three times a year: in the summer for her birthday and mine, at Thanksgiving, and at Christmas into the New Year. I liked that it was always a little warmer than Missouri, that November hid its 75-degree breeze and lush lawns near the Texas border. 

The Concordia rest stop is halfway between Kansas City and Columbia, and has always felt to me like an old schoolhouse. An American flag waved from the top of the restroom building, and a pretty white gazebo sat nearby. In the daytime, this rest stop felt quaint and wholesome, with people mingling about on day trips, and I felt like a tourist bus when all of the other college students poured from the shuttle to wander toward the bathroom.

But on this particular fall day, there were only three others on the shuttle with me, one of whom was asleep. The sun had already started setting when we left the airport, about an hour’s drive from the Concordia rest stop. When I left the heated shuttle, the chill stole at my bare arms, which had grown comfortable in T-shirts after a week in Houston, and left my flesh goose-pimpled. I looked between my pale forearm and the stars above me and wondered which one was more likely to hide Orion’s Belt in the static.

It was only 7 p.m., but the dark bathroom made it feel later. I crept past the sinks and, with my hand almost on the handle to the first stall, I heard a sound and almost jumped out of my skin. It was quiet, like a tiny faraway wail. Not so soft that I could pass it off as my imagination, though not for lack of trying. I was convincing myself it was the pipes when I heard it again, a little clearer this time. That was a cat.

Aunt Jo and I helped her cat deliver kittens last summer, the tiny mewling sock puppets bumping slowly around a plastic crate lined with spare fabric as each learned to walk and open its eyes. Her big-eyed tabby cat was pregnant, and for nine boiling weeks, Meredith’s belly swelled to house five baby kittens. Aunt Jo talked about her cat like a teenage mom: Meredith had got “knocked up” by a “stray Tom,” she was so irresponsible, and Aunt Jo had no interest in helping her raise those kittens. Still, she set up a pile of towels in her mud room for her beloved Mer, who lay there and yowled for hours. Aunt Jo taught me how to identify the sex of kittens when Meredith was pregnant. She’d come home with a stack of books on cats and kittens from the library, reminding me of a teenager coming home from high school in September, arms piled high, throwing the stack onto the couch to prove its heft. When Meredith was finally ready to have her kittens, I lugged the litter box to the mud room, next to the water dish Aunt Jo had filled with water and ice cubes. She cooed and cradled Meredith’s furry face in her hands for hours.

In the rest stop bathroom, I whipped my head back and forth, trying to find the location of the crying animal. I needed to get back to the shuttle. I couldn't remember if the driver bothered to count heads or just assumed adults taking a shuttle home from the airport were responsible for themselves. I got on my knees, feeling filthy on the rest stop floor, crawling closer to where the meowing was loudest. When I found her, she was curled inside a hole in the wall, nestled behind a toilet, just yowling. The cat was black. I’d have lost her if not for her voice, tinny and echoing. And those giant serpentine amber eyes. I repeated Aunt Jo’s nonsense words and tried to call her sweet baby, but it felt too awkward. Aunt Jo and Meredith had been like the Golden Girls, each embedded in the other after years together. 

I stepped out of the bathroom into the cooling wind. Another passenger, a tall, gruff-looking man wearing a Carhartt jacket and puffing on a cigarette, turned at the sound of crying. He looked at me, then at my arms, and his eyes grew to the size of grapefruits. “What is that?” I wrinkled my nose at his cigarette smoke and covered the kitten's face with my arms protectively. I used to love that smell. The man stamped his cigarette into the wall-mounted ashtray and turned back around. “I don't think you can have that on the bus.”

“Well, I know that. I just found her in that bathroom.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I hadn't gotten that far.”

“Are you going to take it with you? Were there others?”

“I don't know. You have a lot of questions,” I said, although I had looked around the bathroom for a mother or other kittens to no avail. “Why do you care?”

The stranger looked a little hurt. “Well… I was going to help.” The man didn't look as gruff now. He looked younger, I realized, and I imagined he'd have looked even younger without his beard, which was somewhere between scraggly and trimmed. He also needed a haircut, because his bangs were just getting in his eyes. He leaned a little closer to look at the cat. He smelled like soap.

Aunt Jo married the first man she'd ever dated a few years after she graduated high school. She told me she was young and dumb and in love, but she was married to my uncle for 50 years. She told me I needed to find a man I could chat with. “Not just talk,” she'd tell me, waving a cigarette perched between her middle and forefinger, “but really chat. Like a girlfriend, but better.” I’d breathe in the smell of her Marlboro Golds and rock back and forth on one of Aunt Jo’s vintage rocking chairs, eyes closed, while she smoked on the porch and told me everything I needed to know. At her funeral last week, my uncle said he missed asking her questions most of all. He loved to hear her answers.

“You can help. And sorry for snapping. I thought about crying to the bus driver, or just staying here and getting an Uber home or something, and I looked around, but I couldn't find the mom, and–” The strange man started to remove his coat, and I stepped reflexively backward, almost knocking my head into a wooden pole.

“Put this on,” he told me, holding out the Carhartt. And if he thought my reaction was weird, he didn't show it. “You can…hide it underneath?” He looked a little less sure, but I liked it. If we were planning a bank heist, I’d have congratulated the kid on his moxy. 

I shrugged into his oversized jacket and got a head rush from the relief as the warmth spread through my ice-encased bones. I held the kitten at my chest, wincing at her tiny claws digging through my T-shirt and into my skin.

“But what about the noise?”

“Um. Hold on.” The man held his hands up before disappearing around the corner. I leaned against the wall of the restroom and checked the time. We still had five minutes. I yawned. I still thought crying to the bus driver was a good back-up plan for whatever this was.

The man came back holding a bottle of water and a beef stick from the vending machine. He cupped his hand, poured some water, and invited the cat to drink. She sniffed at his palm. “Well, that was just in case it was thirsty. I got this too.” He unwrapped the beef stick and broke off a small piece, which the kitten devoured in selfish gulps. He slipped the remainder into his pocket. “Hopefully, it’ll be quiet now.”

“By the way, she's a girl,” I told the man when we sat down on the bus, each sheepishly grinning that we have, at least so far, pulled off our heist. 

“Are you going to keep her?” he asked me.

“I think so. I'm not sure yet.”

“Do you have a name for her?”

“Her name is Jo.” I turned to look at this strange man, the one with golden bangs that covered his brow and ruddy cheeks like a mill worker and whose coat I was wearing at that very moment. His face was backlit as we glided down the highway. “You have a lot of questions.”

He smiled at me. “I want to hear your answers.”