Only after Grandpa Walter spent two weeks stuck in bed did I understand why he talked to his cat like it was a person.
He lives alone in Erie, Pennsylvania, in a walk-up on East 26th Street, third floor, the kind of building where the landlord keeps promising to fix the buzzer and never does. The cat's name is Rusty — orange, heavyset, with a torn ear from some fight years back. Grandpa talks to him constantly.
"Rusty, come eat, the chili's getting cold."
"Rusty, sit down, the news is starting."
"Rusty, it's twenty degrees out there, can you feel that in your paws?"
The family used to joke about it. Mom said Grandpa was getting old and starting to talk to furniture. Uncle Dale would shake his head and say somebody should buy him a louder TV, maybe then he'd stop chatting with the cat.
Then Grandpa got sick. Pneumonia. The doctor at the clinic on Peach Street told him to stay in bed, take the antibiotics, drink fluids — there wasn't much else to do, since he refused the hospital outright. Stubborn as ever.
So the visiting started. Mom would swing by after work for half an hour, put soup on the stove, and head back home. Uncle Dale stopped in on weekends, brought the newspaper, sat for a bit with a cup of coffee, then left. I texted — "Grandpa, how are you feeling," "Grandpa, don't forget your pills" — from Pittsburgh, where I was in the middle of midterms and couldn't make the drive more than once a week.
Life kept moving. Groceries, work, traffic on I-79.
Rusty never left the bed. Not once.
Aunt Carol, who lives one floor down and came by every day with a thermometer, said the cat barely ate — she had to carry his bowl right up to the bedside because he wouldn't go to the kitchen on his own. He stayed pressed against Grandpa's side, sometimes resting his head on his hand. When Grandpa coughed at night, Rusty would get up, circle around him, and lie back down closer than before.
Two weeks. Outside, the first hard frost had just broken, and the stairwell smelled like fresh paint — the guy on the ground floor was redoing his door. The television stayed locked on some home renovation show, over and over, because the remote sat too far across the nightstand for Grandpa to reach.
When he finally got up, sitting at the kitchen table for the first time in a week, I asked him how he was doing.
He answered short, not looking at me, like it was something so obvious it barely needed asking:
"The only one who didn't leave me alone was Rusty."
Nobody said anything. Uncle Dale set his coffee mug down on the table a little too hard. Mom started refolding a napkin that was already folded.
A month later, Mom bought Rusty a new bowl — one raised on a little stand, so he wouldn't have to bend down, since he's not young anymore. She put it by Grandpa's bed, and it stayed there for good, even after Grandpa was back on his feet and cooking for himself again. Nobody said why it had to be right there. Nobody needed to.
