Leonard (My Life as a Cat), Carlie Sorosiak [7 ebook reader .txt] 📗

in time. No major stops. No extended bathroom breaks. It was a delicate balance; we’d have to rush without looking like we were rushing. Otherwise, Norma might start asking questions like: Why do we have to be there by July twenty-first at 9:01 a.m.? Already, the tension was building, and I couldn’t help but yawn, my tongue curled, hoping to relieve the pressure. At the beginning of the month, I’d traveled across the universe on a beam of light—and this was more stressful by far.

It was also more enjoyable.

Together, Olive and I explored the motor home: we rolled back and forth on the springy bunk beds, searched the nooks and crannies for lost quarters, played cards at the small kitchen table. Well, Olive played cards—and I watched her flick the deck, so skilled with her human hands. Every two hours or so, we’d stop at a gas station and stretch our legs, Q buying stale French fries, Olive sipping from a wild-cherry Slurpee. Norma was meticulous about scraping all the bugs from the windshield, and I—resting on the dashboard—observed the squeegee with intense interest. It left streaks like shooting stars.

You could say that everything was going smoothly, according to plan.

Until we reached Asheville, North Carolina, and Norma insisted that we stop for biscuits.

“Not just any biscuits,” she said. “The best dang biscuits you’ve ever eaten. Turn left here.”

“Shouldn’t we wait until Tennessee?” Olive suggested, trying to keep up the momentum. She offered Norma a bag of potato chips. “Here, I grabbed these for you at the last stop.”

“Nuh-uh,” Norma said, adamant. “These biscuits are from the famous Tupelo Honey café. They’re an educational experience. That’s what we’re doing here, right? Don’t be so worried about the time. A good biscuit’s worth waiting for.”

No one contradicted her.

So we turned off the highway, in the direction of breakfast pastry.

Perhaps this would have been fine—if it didn’t happen again in the Nantahala National Forest, when Norma insisted that we take a long walk among the pines. “I’m not young like you,” she explained to Olive. “I’ve got to stretch my legs every once in a while.” Then, somewhere in east Tennessee, we lost half an hour to a farm stand, Norma picking over the fresh vegetables.

“We don’t need cucumbers,” Olive whispered to me. “We need to be on the road.”

I tried to reassure her with a headbutt to the shins, but the truth was, Norma’s dillydallying was making me shed. Maybe it was just a side effect of summer, but by Tennessee, I was losing so much fur, it appeared that I was cloning myself. A Leonard here, a Leonard there.

“You can use my brush,” Olive said sympathetically, then unloaded our stuff.

We stayed the night at a campground in Nashville—590 miles from Turtle Beach. It had a small pool that glittered under the moon, and several barbeque pits that left a strong scent of meat products in the air. Next to the Winnebago was a sun-bleached thicket of grass; in this, Q set up a circle of folding chairs—and whipped out his ukulele.

Norma protested.

Olive won.

“I could use a good song right now,” she said, and who could argue with that? Jumping on a chair, I wrapped myself into a comfortable ball, my fur shimmering in the light breeze. So I had a front-row seat to what happened next: the way Q began strumming chords, how Olive started bobbing her head back and forth.

“All summer,” Q said, “I’ve been thinking, you know what? Turtle Beach Aquarium needs a theme song. Absolutely it does. If tourists hear a catchy tune on TV, something good and cheesy, they’ll stop right in.” He was joking—you could tell by the playful grin on his face—but Olive caught on quickly.

“Come by to Turtle Beach Aquarium,” she sang. “Where the sharks are cool, and the fish are—”

“Scary-um,” Q added.

Olive quirked her head. “ ‘Scary-um’?”

“I know they’re not scary, but just go with it,” he said, then sang in a deep-throated gurgle: “You’ll have a blast, and time flies fast—”

“When you’re spending it with aquari . . . fun,” Olive finished.

Everyone agreed that it was a dreadful song. But we were laughing. We were laughing under a moonlit sky. And in that moment, it was difficult to imagine anyone in the universe but us.

I fell asleep that night in the crook of Olive’s arm, half beneath a patchwork quilt. I dreamed of Turtle Beach. I dreamed we were on the sand again, with the sea turtles, leading them to the water. But in the foggy distance, I felt it—time slipping away.

Only two days left, I woke up thinking. Two full days on Earth.

Stress tumbled in my belly, and I realized I’d shed a good deal in the night; there was a fuzzy outline where I’d slept. My fur looked greatly worse for wear, standing in pathetic tufts around my neck.

Olive was beginning to stir as Norma rummaged for mugs in the kitchen, the musky smell of coffee filling the motor home. “Is something wrong with Leonard?” Norma asked a minute later. She’d poured herself a strong cup and was glancing at me with her head askew.

Olive sat up on her elbows, grimacing at my fur. “He’s . . . I guess he’s tired?”

“Whatever he is, it’s making him rough around the edges.” Norma said this between glugs of coffee. “You think he could be carsick? We could take longer breaks if he—”

“No!” Olive responded, too quickly. She had to reel back the word. “I’m sorry. It’s just that Q and I were talking about traveling a lot today. Seven hundred and fifty miles.” With care, she smoothed the fur on my bib, where the tufts were spikiest. “Maybe we should take him to breakfast with us, though? Keep an eye on him?”

“Bring him to the diner?” Norma asked, at the same time Q popped from the bathroom and said, “Sure, let’s take Stanley, too.”

As the humans debated this, I took a moment to clean myself, trying