She left the canvas shoes by the door again, toes pointed inward the way she always leaves them, like they’re ashamed of something. I want to be clear that under normal circumstances I do not dignify shoes with my attention. Shoes are beneath me, literally and philosophically. But today the shoes smelled wrong, and when something smells wrong I consider it my professional obligation to find out why.
The smell was smoke, but not our smoke — we don’t have a smoke, we have a candle she lights sometimes that smells like nothing in particular, “vanilla something,” and I’ve made my peace with it. This was a different smoke. Woodier. Outdoorsy. Underneath it, faint but unmistakable, there was orange peel. Not orange candle. Actual orange — the kind she peels with her own hands, so the smell gets on her skin, and then later it gets on my fur when she pets me, whether I asked for that or not.
I sat with the shoes for a long time. I want to say I sniffed them once and drew a conclusion, quick and clean, but that’s not how I work. I did three separate passes — one at each shoe individually, one comparing the left to the right in case they told different stories, and one final pass just to be sure I hadn’t imagined the whole thing out of boredom, which does happen to me sometimes, boredom manifesting as false leads.
Both shoes agreed. Smoke. Orange. And something faintly green underneath both of those, which I could not place, which bothered me more than the other two combined, because an unidentifiable smell is basically an open case with no suspects.
Here is where I want to be honest with the diary, because the diary is the one place I don’t perform for anybody. I do not actually think she was doing anything wrong. I don’t think there’s a version of her day that involves betrayal. But knowing that didn’t stop my brain from building the entire case anyway, the way you can know a noise downstairs is just the house settling and still lie awake constructing an intruder with a face and a motive.
By late morning I had a working theory: campfire. Somewhere with campfire and citrus fruit and a patch of grass she’d walked through, because the green smell, on the fourth pass, resolved itself into something like crushed stems. I pictured her standing at a fire that was not our fire, being handed an orange by a hand that was not my hand, on grass I have never once been permitted to inspect. I do not know why this bothered me at the level it bothered me. I don’t attend campfires. I have expressed no interest in campfires. And yet I spent a solid twenty minutes on the windowsill working through what I can only describe as a grievance on principle.
I considered following up with a full sock audit but she’d already put the laundry away, which felt, frankly, like evidence tampering, even though I’m fairly sure it was just Tuesday.
When she got home I had a plan. The plan was to be aloof. Not cruel — I don’t do cruel, cruel is beneath the same category as shoes — just aloof, the kind of aloof where I glance at her once, register her presence, and then continue staring at a spot on the wall like the wall has said something more interesting than she has. I wanted her to feel, just slightly, that I had noticed a gap in the account of her day and was withholding forgiveness pending further disclosure.
This lasted four minutes. She sat down on the floor — she does this sometimes, gets down to my level instead of making me come up to hers, which I’ve never told her I appreciate but I do, deeply — and she said something about a park, and a friend, and someone’s kid’s birthday, and a firepit, and here I lost the thread a little because she was scratching under my chin at the same time and I have never in my life been able to hold two thoughts during a chin scratch. One thought total, maximum, and the thought was not “interrogate her further,” the thought was just a low pleasant static, like a radio between stations.
So the case is closed, I suppose, in the sense that all my cases eventually close on the floor of whatever room she happens to be sitting in. There was no rival cat at a firepit. There was no betrayal wearing an orange peel as a disguise. There was just an afternoon that happened without me in it, which I’ve decided is the actual crime, if I’m being honest about the charge sheet. Not smoke. Not citrus. Just the fact that a whole several hours of her life took place somewhere I’ve never seen, with people I’ve never smelled before today, doing something that made her come home smelling like grass instead of like the inside of our apartment, which is the only smell I’ve ever fully approved of.
I don’t say any of this to her, obviously. I let her think I was aloof for entirely separate reasons, dignity-related, unspecified. But I did sleep on the shoes tonight, which I never do, curled half over the left one with my chin resting near the toe, and if she noticed she didn’t say anything, she just stepped around me on her way to bed like I was a piece of furniture she’d always planned for.
Tomorrow the shoes will smell like nothing again, or like us, which to me is the same thing. I plan to let the whole matter drop. I am, ultimately, a reasonable and forgiving creature, provided the chin scratching continues at the current rate and provided nobody tells me the name of whoever’s kid had that birthday, because I don’t think I could hear it without forming an opinion about them I have no right to form.