Through the lifting veil of sleep, a baby cried.
No babies lived in my grandparents’ four plex or in any of the adjoining apartments on their street.
The warble persisted, a faint siren rolling past the clothesline. Another cry entwined the first. This one rang sharp — the staccato hiccup of a baby running toward its mother. Wait. Babies can’t run. Still dreaming, I guess.
Pre dawn filtered cobalt through the bedroom’s sheer curtains. I burrowed my seven-year-old self beneath the bedcovers. Grandma’s back door creaked open. The muffled flip-flop of her slippers padding down the two-step rise of her back porch drew a chorus of mews.
I tore off the covers and peered through the bedroom window. Three stray cats had gathered by her feet, mewing earnestly. Grandma clanged a ceramic bowl full of milk on the cement. The liquid sloshed onto her thumb.
“Oy!,” grandma sputtered. The cats bleated like hungry calfs.
“Shhhh!” Grandma whispered. “I don’t wanna those people to come and take you away!”
Much to the landlord’s chagrin, the cats had apparently gnawed through a mesh screen to access the building’s crawlspace. I’d met one of them the week before. She’d padded cautiously over to me and licked my wounds after I flipped over the handlebars of my bike. Perhaps grandma’s milk offering was a thank you to the orphaned felines she dare not take in but could never shoo away.
Cats homed in on grandma. They curled around her ankles when we took neighborhood walks, pawed playfully at her frayed compression bandages and rubbed noses with her when she knelt down to greet them. Normally quite aloof, my cousin’s orange tabby, Sheldon, took refuge in grandma’s lap. I understood. There was no place I’d rather be.
“Why do kitties love you so much, grandma?,” I asked, my head cradled in the hammock of her dress.
“I dunno,” she said, petting my head. “Maybe day think I’m not wanna hurt them. Just like you know I’m never wanna hurt you.”
Her words were the gospel of my childhood. When plumes of parental napalm flared; when my dead-end cohorts razzed me over my pencil-thin limbs; when my feverish forehead burned holes through a damp washcloth, grandma pulled out my favorite picture book about a black cat so teased about his white paws, he dipped them in ink to hide them. Grandma never learned to read English. But in her Ladino-peppered English, she regaled me with tales — each unique, but no less genuine — about how the cat triumphed over his most fierce detractor: himself. Her unwavering message: never hide your paws.
Grandma’s stories may have been made up, but her love sure wasn’t.
And every cat knew it.