There was a knock at the door today, which is already a serious event, and then a second knock right after it, which is not how anyone in this house knocks, and so before the door had even opened I understood we were dealing with an outsider.
I took up a position under the console table in the front hall, which offers excellent sightlines and also happens to be where the heating vent blows, so it is not purely a strategic choice, but I want it on record that I was there in a professional capacity and not because it’s warm.
The man who came in was carrying a bag. Not a nice bag. A stiff, zippered, unpleasant bag that clanked when it moved, the way things clank when they are full of metal teeth. He smelled like motor oil and cold outdoor air and something rubbery I couldn’t place, and he had a voice that was too loud for our hallway, and my human let him in like this was a completely normal thing to do, like she hadn’t just opened our door to a man with a bag full of teeth.
“It’s just the sink,” she told him, which I found deeply unhelpful information, since I don’t know what “the sink” has done to deserve a visit from a stranger, and nobody consulted me on whether the sink required outside intervention.
He went into the kitchen. I followed at a respectful distance, low to the ground, doing the specific walk I do when I want to be invisible, which involves keeping my belly close enough to the floor to leave a faint drag mark and has never once actually made me invisible, but I remain committed to it.
He knelt down and opened the cabinet under the sink, which is technically my territory, or at least I had assumed it was, since it’s dark and low and smells interesting and I go in there sometimes to sit among the sponges and think. He reached his whole arm into it. Into my cabinet. And started making noises with a tool that I can only describe as an argument between two pieces of metal, back and forth, back and forth, a horrible squeaking grinding sound that traveled up through the floor and into my paws even from the doorway.
I want to be clear that I did not run. I relocated. There is a difference, and the difference is dignity. I relocated to the hallway, and then, when the noise got worse, I relocated further, to the good armchair, and then, when it somehow got worse than that, I relocated to the top of the cat tree in the back room, from which I could see nothing of the kitchen at all but could at least be confident nothing was climbing the cat tree except me.
From up there I did the only thing left available to me, which was listening extremely hard. I heard the metal-teeth bag get opened and closed several more times. I heard my human’s voice, easy and unbothered, laughing at something the man said, which struck me as a strange time for laughing, given that a stranger had his whole arm inside our plumbing. I heard water run, then stop, then run again. I heard him say something about a part he didn’t have and would have to get, and I heard her say that was fine, and I thought: is it? Is it fine? Has anyone considered how not-fine any of this is?
He was in the house for what felt like an extremely long stretch of time, possibly an hour, possibly longer, long enough that I began to wonder whether he intended to simply live here now, whether this was how it happened, whether a man just kneels under your sink for long enough and eventually gets a key. I stayed on the cat tree through most of it, doing my listening, occasionally shifting my weight so the wood creaked, which I like to think served as a warning that I was still awake and watching, though realistically it probably just sounded like a cat shifting his weight on a piece of furniture.
At one point he came out of the kitchen to get something from a different bag by the door — there were, it turned out, several bags, an appalling number of bags for one plumbing issue — and he saw me on the cat tree and said, “hey, buddy,” in the same too-loud voice, and reached one hand toward me in a way I understood was meant to be friendly but which I met by flattening my ears and turning my whole body sideways to make myself look larger, which is a technique I have used successfully before and will continue to use, regardless of what anyone says about its effectiveness.
He didn’t try again after that. Good.
Eventually the noises stopped. There was a period of quiet, and then the sound of the metal-teeth bag being zipped shut for the last time, a sound I have decided means “the intruder is packing to leave,” and I permitted myself to come down from the cat tree and reoccupy a lower, more advantageous position by the kitchen doorway, from which I watched him gather his bags — plural, still an offensive number of bags — and walk to the front door with my human following him, still doing the easy laughing voice, and then the door closed and the smell of motor oil and cold air stayed behind in the hallway for a while like a guest who doesn’t know it’s time to go.
I did a full inspection of the kitchen the moment I was permitted. The cabinet under the sink was slightly rearranged — the sponges had been moved, an outrage I am still cataloguing — and there was a faint new smell down there, metallic and sharp, that wasn’t there this morning and that I don’t love. I sat in front of the cabinet for a while just breathing it in, trying to decide how I felt about it. I sniffed the floor where his bags had sat. I sniffed the spot by the door where he’d stood taking off his shoes, which smelled like outside and like a different house entirely, some other kitchen, some other cabinet that man had probably also stuck his arm into today.
The pipe under the sink, I am told, makes a different sound now when the water runs — quieter, if you can believe it, less of the knock it used to have — and my human seems satisfied by this, humming a little as she washed a mug afterward, entirely unaware of the ordeal that had just concluded around her. I don’t think she noticed the cat tree creaking. I don’t think she noticed the sideways stance I deployed against the man’s hand. I don’t think, honestly, that she noticed much of anything, which is either a sign that everything really was fine, or a sign that I am the only one in this house paying proper attention, and I know which one I believe.
I spent the rest of the evening sitting directly in front of the sink cabinet, not doing anything in particular. Just making sure it stayed shut, and stayed mine, and didn’t get any further ideas about who else might be allowed to put their arm in it.