The Insulin I Carried to My Mother’s Door

What I didn’t do

I want to say clearly what I did not do next, because I thought about it. I did not give him his shot right there on the rug.

You do not give insulin to a cat who won’t eat, not when he’s like that. His sugar was high, but if he wasn’t eating and I gave insulin, it could crash him too far the other way. He needed fluids and a vet, not a nurse with a pen on her mother’s living room floor.

I put the cap back on the pen and zipped it into the bag so nobody would think I was about to use it.

“He needs the emergency clinic,” I said. “Tonight. Now.”

“I’ll drive,” my mother said.

I looked up at her. She had the dish towel in both hands, wringing it.

“Mom, I can drive.”

“You’ve been awake all day and all night,” she said. “I’ll drive. Please.”

The twenty minutes

The emergency animal clinic is in Kearney, on the east side by the interstate, twenty minutes from my mother’s house.

I sat in the passenger seat of her Buick LeSabre with Tucker in my lap, wrapped in a bath towel, the way I have held a lot of things that were scared.

Nobody said anything for the first five miles. The dash lights were green, and my mother drove with both hands on the wheel at ten and two, the way she taught me when I was fifteen.

“His tail is crooked,” she said finally.

“It’s always been crooked.”

“I know. I used to hold it straight on your couch and it would curl right back.”

I turned and looked at her in the dark.

“How many times, Mom?”

She didn’t pretend not to understand.

“Tuesdays and Thursdays,” she said. “Sometimes Wednesdays, after supper, after everybody went home. Since about August.”

“You’ve been going to my apartment two and three nights a week. While I’m at work.”

“I’d sit with him. We’d watch the news.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Your father’s been gone eighteen days. You don’t know what that house is like, Megan. It’s so quiet I can hear the refrigerator.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. So I didn’t say anything.

“Tuesday he climbed in my lap and I could feel every bone in his back,” she said. “His bowl was empty and it was ten o’clock at night, and the box hadn’t been done, and I thought, she’s never home. She’s working herself to death and she’s forgotten this poor animal. I thought I was saving him.”

“His feeder fills at midnight,” I said. “The box gets done when I get home at seven forty. That’s the routine. I built it so he’d never miss a shot.”

My mother drove another mile.

“I put a picture on the chat,” she said. “I told everybody you were starving him.”

“I know, Mom. I read it.”

“Everybody read it.”

“Forty-one messages worth.”