Something was wrong with her today and I want it on the record that I noticed immediately, before the sighing even started, back when she was still just standing at the counter holding her phone like it had personally disappointed her. I have a very good nose for the ordinary chemistry of the house — coffee, the specific plastic smell of the mail, whatever she cooked the night before lingering in a blanket she forgot on the couch — and today none of that was wrong, but something underneath all of it was off, the way a room feels different when a window’s been left open somewhere you can’t see.
She didn’t do the normal morning things in the normal morning order. She skipped the part where she talks to me in that voice reserved entirely for informing me that I am magnificent and formidable and in her way. She just moved through the kitchen like she was following someone else’s instructions for how to be a person, and then she sat down at the table and put her head in her hands for a length of time that, in my professional estimation, exceeded any reasonable amount of head-in-hands time for a person who is fine.
I want to be clear that I did not panic. Panicking is beneath me and also ineffective. What I did instead was begin what I think of as the Watching Job, which is a role I have held on prior occasions and take extremely seriously, even though nobody has ever formally assigned it to me. The Watching Job requires a cat to station himself somewhere with a clear sightline to the human in question and simply observe, cataloguing changes, ready to escalate to Phase Two procedures the moment escalation is warranted.
I selected the arm of the couch, which gives me the kitchen table, the hallway, and a reasonable diagonal view of the front window in case whatever was wrong with her turned out to be something arriving from outside. I sat very upright. I did not blink more than necessary. This is not a position I hold for comfort — it is uncomfortable, actually, the couch arm digs into me in a way that requires real dedication — but the Watching Job isn’t about comfort.
She stayed at the table a long time. At one point she made a sound that wasn’t crying exactly but was clearly some cousin of it, a sound with the shape of crying but none of the wetness, and that was when I decided we had reached Phase Two.
Phase Two is direct intervention, and I have three approaches, deployed in order of escalating commitment. The first is the headbutt, which I performed against her elbow with what I felt was appropriate firmness — not a passing brush but a real, deliberate press, the kind that says I am here and I have weight and I am putting some of it on you now. She lifted her arm and let me under it without really looking at me, which is not the reaction the headbutt usually gets. Usually there is a laugh, or at least a “hi, buddy,” or some acknowledgment that I have arrived to handle things. Today there was just the arm, lifting automatically, like her body knew what to do with me even while the rest of her was somewhere else.
This concerned me enough to move straight to the second approach, which is the delivery of an object. I don’t have toys in the traditional sense that get delivered proudly to feet — I’ve never developed a taste for that particular performance — but I do have the sock. There is a specific sock, gray, slightly too small to be one of hers, that lives under the radiator in the back room and that I visit sometimes for reasons I’ve never fully worked out myself. I retrieved the sock. I brought the sock to the kitchen and placed it directly on top of her foot, which required some maneuvering because her foot was tucked under the chair and not making itself available.
She looked down at the sock. She looked at me. Something happened in her face that wasn’t quite a smile but was standing near where a smile would eventually be, if it decided to show up. “Where do you even find these,” she said, which is not the reaction I was hoping for — I was hoping for the full recovery, an immediate return to the woman who calls me magnificent and formidable — but it was something. It was a data point in the right direction.
Phase Three, the last resort, is the full-body deployment: I get on the lap, all of me, no negotiation, no polite testing of whether the lap is currently accepting visitors. This is a significant undertaking given my size and I don’t do it lightly, because it means real commitment on both our parts — she has to accept a substantial and largely immovable weight, and I have to accept that I will be stuck there, by my own doing, for however long the job requires.
She’d moved to the couch by then, phone face-down beside her like she was punishing it, and I climbed up and arranged myself across as much of her as I could reasonably cover, which is most of a lap and some of what’s adjacent to it. I put my chin on her knee. I did not purr right away — the purr is not automatic for me, it has to be earned by the moment, and the moment wasn’t there yet — but I stayed very still and let my weight do whatever weight does.
It took a while. I could feel something in her shoulders through the couch cushion, some tightness that didn’t want to let go easily, and I understood that whatever this was, it hadn’t arrived that morning — it had been building for a while and I’d simply missed the early signs, which bothered me more than I let on, because the Watching Job is supposed to catch things early, that’s the whole point of it.
Eventually her hand came down and started doing the thing along my spine that she does, and I let the purr start then, because it seemed like the right moment to offer it rather than force it, and I have opinions about that distinction even if I couldn’t explain them to anyone. She said something quiet that I didn’t have the vocabulary for, just tone, just a long breath out with words riding along on top of it, and I didn’t need the words. The tone told me enough. The tone said something had been carried around all day and had just now been put down somewhere.
We stayed like that long enough that my back leg went numb in the way it does, and I didn’t move it, because moving it would have meant moving all of me, and the job wasn’t done yet as far as I could tell.
By evening she was mostly back — not entirely, there was still something a little quieter in her than usual, something I’ll be keeping an eye on tomorrow — but she laughed at something on her phone, an actual laugh, and got up to make food, and stepped over the sock, which was still on the kitchen floor where she’d left it, without picking it up. I took that as a good sign. A person who’s really fine puts the sock back under the radiator immediately. A person who’s getting there leaves it exactly where the cat left it, like she’s not ready yet to erase all the evidence that something happened today, and that someone showed up for it.
I retrieved the sock myself, later, once she’d gone to bed. Not because the job was finished. Because it never really is, and there’s no sense leaving equipment lying around when there’s always a chance you’ll need it again tomorrow.