by Angela Townsend
If Lana knows that people underestimate her, she does not show it.
She shows up to committee meetings with freshly purpled hair. It is not intended to be subtle or ironic, qualities that search in vain for a place to touch down in Lana. Big birds have left footprints around her eyes, but Lana remains a duckling at fifty-nine.
Lana owns three-dozen headbands with cat ears, tiger striped and long ribboned. She has the spiritual gift of holding innocence and honesty in the same hand.
Lana spun into my twenties like cotton candy, too sweet for most, too sweet to mind. I was the new Development Director at the animal shelter. I was invisible, typing newsletters behind the front lines of rescue. There were no scratches on my arms. I was the only staff member not required to maintain rabies boosters. I was the only staff member without a full Bingo card of heroics.
“You are my goddess.” The sizable woman in the BE KIND sweatshirt leaned on my door jamb.
“I’ve asked everyone to greet me that way.” I stood to shake her hand—
“Don’t get up, I’ll come to you.” Lana lofted my way. “I’m Lana Greene. You’re my hero.”
“You’re swiftly becoming mine.” I got up anyway. “Who are you, and what did my mother pay you to say all this?”
“I just read the newsletters!” Lana sat on the edge of my desk. She was wearing carpenter capris, a style I had not seen since 1998. Her earrings were enormous green eyeballs. “I love you! You make me cry every day!”
The cat who lived behind my computer monitor, spewing hatred in humanity’s direction, oozed dangerously towards Lana. “Oh, watch out for Sapphira—”
“I love tabbies!” Lana extended her hands. Sapphira collapsed into her lap as though it were base camp.
“She’ll bite—”
“I don’t mind!” Lana was kissing an animal whose core competency was leaving scars. “I love them all. That’s why I love you.”
“I am a complicated animal,” I acknowledged. Sapphira appeared to have entered a celestial coma.
“No, you love them, you love them so much you make everyone love them, and you do it with words!” Lana dropped her jaw for effect, then returned to her own core competency of smiling. “You are the storyteller. I wish I could tell stories. You are my goddess!”
I learned that Lana had been volunteering for three days, and she had signed up to scoop litter boxes, represent Cat Haven at community festivals, and solicit local businesses for non-monetary donations. It was this last odyssey that brought her to my office. That, and the fact that—
“You’ve changed my life.”
“You’re going to give me the ego of a cat.” I watched Sapphira’s brown stripes turn to streusel under Lana’s purple canopy.
“I mean it. You write about cats, and somehow I walk away thinking everything is going to be okay. You write about cats, and you’re not writing about cats.”
I sneezed, and it smelled like cinnamon. “I think I love you.”
“I know I love you!”
Knowledge of Lana caramelized the shelter, exploding in lunchtime exasperation. “She’s too much,” our Executive Director groaned. “She told me I look like Bruce Springsteen.”
Neil did not look like Bruce Springsteen, but “Isn’t that a compliment?”
He threw a cat toy at me. “It’s delusional.”
“She’s a storybook character,” our Director of Volunteers, Siobahn, countered, stirring a bowl of vegan-cheese soup that smelled like feet. “She’s just innocent. I think she’s adorable.”
“I think she exceeds ‘adorable,’” I suggested.
“Is there any greater quality?” Neil snorted. Neil may have founded a sanctuary for broken cats, but he needed an EpiPen for his allergy to “adorable.” I had survived my interview largely on the strength of our blood vow to avoid the word “purrfect.” That, and the fact that he was intrigued by a “defrocked priest” who came to the cat sanctuary by way of seminary.
“Couldn’t hack it as a holy woman, huh?”
“Too feral.”
“You gotta love people as the fundraiser,” he’d warned. “Most animal rescue people don’t. I don’t. That’s why we’re here.”
If the God who clawed me out of ministry still gives real-time guidance, surely he gave me the correct answer: “Well, I’m peculiar.”
And now I was surveying five hundred individually wrapped samples of Cabot sharp cheddar with a purple-haired woman in a MEOWZARELLA shirt.
“Lana, this is great.” That wasn’t the first adjective to have auditioned for that sentence, but my love of Lana made the final call. “This is impressive. The cats would appreciate it. But, um, can you tell me what you had in mind?”
“Cabot will give us this many every year!” She had a live kitten bouncing from the pouch of her hoodie. “I called, and they were thrilled to help. They’d never received a donation request from a place like Cat Haven!”
So much cheddar. “What was, uh, your vision for these cheeses?”
Lana pressed her hands together as though in prayer. “We give them out at the county fair!”
Save a cat, get a dairy cube. “That’s creative.”
“Trust me!”
Our 4-H Fair booth went on to earn five times more than ever before.
“She does go rogue,” Siobahn worried. “Last week she dumped a crate of Floam in my office.”
“Floam?” I appreciated this noun without knowing.
“It’s gruesome chunky slime for children to play with. What the hell are we supposed to do with Floam?”
We were, apparently, supposed to bring it to the local high school, where Floam would personally recruit new volunteers. Fifty signed up.
Between acquiring zero-carb lollipops and cat-shaped stress balls with bulging eyes, Lana was downsized from her “real” job. It was the first time the big woman ever looked pale.
“Lana, I’m so sorry. They’re fools. I’ll write you a thousand reference letters,” I promised.
She brightened. “If you do, I’ll get a thousand jobs!”
“I don’t know about that, but . . . what was your job, anyway? I’m sorry I never asked what you do when you’re not here.”
“Vice President of Event Planning for Johnson & Johnson.”
I fell out of my cat tree. I was and was not shocked. “That’s . . .”
“It was fun. But what a bunch of cranky-panks.” She sighed. “I’ve never met people so unimpressed with cupcakes. They actually got mad when I decorated their offices on their birthdays.” She leaned in, close enough to tint my chin purple. “And most of them rolled their eyes when I talked about cats.”
“To hell with them.” I carefully stepped between Lana and Sapphira.
“To hell with them!” She raised both fists. “Besides, now I have more time here.” Her arms fell suddenly. “Daisy, can I ask you something? And if you say ‘no,’ I totally understand.”
“Of course.”
“Would you ever consider letting me write for a cat?”
At Cat Haven, every cat had a “correspondent.” This volunteer wrote updates for our recurring donors. The monthly sponsorship program was our golden goose and my personal kitten. I vetted correspondents as though reading for The Paris Review.
Visions of “purrfects” and “fur-babies” shredded my head. “Of course you can.”
Lana’s updates on Buttermuffin made the diabetic calico the most-sponsored cat in Cat Haven history.
Neil called me into his office. “Have you read Lana’s updates?”
“Of course.”
“Can she get Pepto-Bismol to donate a fifty-five-gallon drum?” His eyebrow was twitching visibly. “Daisy, it’s horrifying. It’s content free. Everything from a fart to an adoption makes her write ‘paws up!’”
I showed him the statistics. “Baby, she was born to run.”
“Crap. Look at that. OK. Just tell her I’m not reading anything she writes. I would prefer we keep her in a pen.”
I did not tell her, and Lana’s purple ink flowed. She began covering the reception desk on Fridays, and when I walked by on a donor tour, she exploded in the opposite of expletives.
“That’s Daisy! She’s my goddess! She’s not an earth woman!”
Donors in button-down shirts and unscuffed shoes stared in the purple direction.
“Daisy was commissioned to be our angel! You are so lucky that she’s giving you a tour!”
Imperious donors ended up hugging both Lana and me. “You’re quite a crew here,” one crisp curmudgeon declared, layers of sediment breaking off his face.
“They can see the love from space,” Lana whispered.
“And it has a purple halo,” I added.
The tint covered the realm, far beyond my anxious ivory tower. I may have been Lana’s goddess, but Siobahn was her Valkyrie, and Neil was her King, and of course the cats, collectively and individually, were her life. Whenever one died, she wrote seventeen paragraphs on Facebook meditating on how blessed she was to have ever had such a meowvelous friend.
Neil had not yet outgrown underestimating Lana. “She can’t love each one like they’re the only friggin’ cat who ever lived.”
“But she does. That’s what makes her Lana.”
“She sounds like a child.”
Something from my past bubbled up like maple syrup. “That’s what makes her glorious. Like, in a theological sense.”
“Oh boy.”
I hesitated. “Underestimate her at your peril.”
“I’m a perilous guy.”
“Noted.” One of my invisible roles was Neil’s Reminder. “You’re also the guy who founded a sanctuary for hoodlums with tails.”
“Crap, you’re right.” He nearly smiled. “Well, then I’ll tell you something, as long as you don’t blog about it.”
Blogging at Cat Haven was a risky proposition. I was incapable of describing a cat without appreciation, so we regularly received adoption applications for animals who abhorred people. “You need to stop that,” the Director of Adoptions pleaded without success.
“I can’t promise anything,” I admitted.
“Well, I’ll fire you if you publicize this.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
“I friggin’ love Lana Greene.”
I knew this. “Does Lana know that?” I knew the answer. “I’m sure Lana knows that. But you should tell her.”
“Crap.”
“You should.” I knew my colors. “People who tell people how much they love people . . . they need to hear how much people love them back. They don’t hear it that often.”
“That’s why I prefer cats.” A gelatinous orange individual landed in Neil’s lap. “Like Buttermuffin.” He vigorously stroked the cat’s head, pulling her ears back as though his hand was a scrunchie.
“You founded a sanctuary.” I knew when to disagree with Neil. “If there’s a pink glow over everything here, it’s your fault.”
Lana happened to float by at just that moment. “Buttermuffin, Bruce, and the goddess in one room! The world is not worthy! I’m going to go sew some catnip socks!” She sashayed off.
“I think that may be the most powerful woman in the world,” I observed.
“Crap.” Neil nodded. “I’m pretty sure you’re right.”
Category: Featured, Fiction, Short Story