That morning the alarm clock didn't go off — it just gave up — and Bartholomew Reyes shot out of bed twenty minutes past the time he should've already been on the 7:15 bus heading downtown to his office near Riverside Avenue in Sacramento. His coffee went cold before he could touch it, and there he was in his socks, tearing through the apartment on J Street, hunting for one single shoe.
He checked under the bed, behind the armchair, in the bathroom, even the hall closet where the vacuum lived. Nothing. He was about to grab his other pair — the ones that pinched at the toes — when he spotted something under the entryway table, right by the key hooks.
The shoe was sitting exactly where it always sat. Except a plush mouse tail was poking out of it.
Bartholomew crouched down and looked inside. The shoe was stuffed to the brim — a polka-dot mouse toy, a frayed tennis ball, a scrap of string from a wand toy, and that ragged, many-times-stitched plush hedgehog that Filemon carried from room to room in his mouth ever since he'd gotten it as a birthday present.
Filemon, an orange tomcat with one ear slightly notched since kittenhood, sat about two feet away on the rug, watching. He didn't bolt, didn't duck under the couch. He just sat there and observed as Bartholomew pulled his entire fortune out of the shoe, piece by piece.
"You made yourself a stash spot in here, huh?" Bartholomew said, more to himself than to the cat.
The cat blinked with his one good eye — the other had teared up a little ever since some old scrape with the neighbor's cat and never fully recovered — and didn't budge. Out in the hallway it smelled like fresh mopping, the upstairs neighbor was heading down for her morning bagel, her keys jingling with each step. The kitchen radio mumbled a weather forecast nobody was listening to.
Bartholomew fished out the last toy and had to run — he had a nine o'clock call with a client in Denver, and being late wasn't an option. He jammed his foot into the shoe, dumped the rest of the toys back into the basket by the couch, and bolted out the door.
That evening he found one more item in the shoe — a hair tie he'd forgotten he even owned. He shook his head at it like it was some quirky habit, scratched the cat behind the ears, and went to make dinner.
But by Friday the shoe was full again, packed clear up to the laces this time, and Bartholomew — already running late for the second day that week — dumped everything onto the floor with an irritation that surprised even him.
"Filemon, come on, I don't have time for this," he snapped, shoving his foot into the shoe, a few stray hairs still clinging to the inside.
On the call he was distracted, the client had to repeat the delivery schedule question twice, and afterward his boss messaged him privately: "Bart, get it together — the client called me directly, he's not happy." Bartholomew read that message standing in the break room, holding a mug of coffee gone cold, and felt something tighten in his chest — anger at the cat, at himself, at the whole rotten morning.
He got home late, irritated, ready to finally shut Filemon in the bedroom at night so he'd stop turning the entryway into a warehouse. But when he walked in, he found the cat lying by the shoe, motionless, chin resting against the leather. Filemon didn't get up to greet him like always. Only after Bartholomew crouched down did the cat try to stand, and his back leg buckled under him.
The anger drained out of Bartholomew instantly. He scooped the cat up — lighter than he remembered, way too light — and noticed a matted patch of fur on his belly, like Filemon had stopped grooming there because it hurt. He called the 24-hour animal hospital over on Fair Oaks Boulevard, loaded the cat into a carrier he hadn't used in years, and drove over without even changing out of his work shirt.
The vet talked for a long time — about kidneys, about age, about how in older cats a drop in appetite paired with weakness in a hind leg were signs you couldn't afford to ignore, that he should have come in sooner. Bartholomew sat on a plastic chair in the waiting room, and only then did it click why the shoe mattered. Filemon hadn't been hoarding it out of some whim. He'd been carrying everything he treasured most to one single spot, because for a while now he'd been struggling to move, and that shoe was the one place in the apartment he could still manage to reach before his strength gave out for another trip.
The next morning Bartholomew called his boss and said he wasn't coming in — that he needed to stay home with a sick cat, and if that was a problem, so be it. He didn't sound like a man apologizing.
He sat on the entryway floor, right where the shoe always stood, Filemon wrapped in a blanket on his lap. The cat, groggy from the medication, purred in soft, broken bursts, like even that took effort. Bartholomew pulled the ragged plush hedgehog out of the basket and set it down beside him on the blanket.
Filemon sniffed the toy, pressed his face against it, then against Bartholomew's hand, and the two of them stayed there on the floor while out in the hallway it smelled like fresh mopping again, and somebody was heading down for a bagel, like nothing in the world had happened.
