Squeaky the Cat
by Julie Teixiera
The baby was born on a Wednesday evening with a full head of hair. Tony was shocked by that hair. He’d been a bald, feral baby. His daughter was lovely, spectacular, luminous. He did hate her, though. For the first hour of her life, he could barely stand to look at her.
Tony’s wife, Gina, had been in labor for forty-eight hours before the doctor said “we’re done” and administered a c-section. Her blood pressure kept dropping in response to the epidural, and at one point she passed out. Their daughter had been born by then, swaddled, and placed in Tony’s arms. When a nurse saw how badly he was shaking, she came over and took the baby.
And oh, the sounds! The sound of blood pouring into the drain beside Gina’s operating table. The blood backed up and gurgled, and Tony felt his heart tighten. As he watched his wife’s eyelids flutter, his breath became ragged and strained.
“If you’re going to pass out, you should leave,” the anesthesiologist said. His voice was kind—he was trying to help—but Tony shot him a nasty look and stayed in his seat, even with the finger of nausea rising in his throat. The procedure got dicey, and the nurse who’d taken the baby returned for Tony. He followed her to a bench in the hall where she handed him his daughter.
“She’s beautiful,” the nurse said.
Tony nodded. He spent the next hour staring at the white wall in front of him. His father had died two years earlier in this very hospital. They did everything they could, which was pretty much nothing: he had no heartbeat when the ambulance arrived. “A massive heart attack,” the doctor had said.
Tony looked down at the baby in his arms. He knew that you should never, under any circumstances, shake a baby. And still, he felt the compulsion to give her a small shake. Like a fish, he thought. Because of you, Gina is splayed like a fish.
At the end of the hour, the doctor poked his head through the door and said that everything was fine. Just your average heart rate plummet—nothing to write home about. With a conspiratorial glance down the hall, he told Tony that he’d been a medic in Afghanistan. You think a c-section is bad? He’d pulled shrapnel from a man’s eyelid. His eyelid. Every time the doctor said eyelid, Tony’s own eyelid twitched.
In her hospital room, Gina insisted that she didn’t need Oxys, and then, an hour later, she buzzed the nurse to say that she desperately needed Oxys. The nurse stayed and watched her take them. She ran her fingers through Gina’s hair and called her a trooper. Together, the women admired Gina’s beautiful baby. Tony sat on a cot in the corner. He felt like he was watching the scene unfold through glass—had he been the only witness to his daughter’s bloody birth? How was everyone so calm?
The baby lay silent in the bassinet. They filled out her birth certificate, giving her the name Chloe. Chloe refused to latch, so Gina pumped breast milk and Tony fed her with a bottle. She drank greedily, slurping and puking and burping. Tony didn’t sleep for a minute. While his wife and his daughter snoozed, he paced the hospital room in his socks. He hovered over the bed and the bassinet to make sure they were breathing.
The next afternoon, Gina’s mother Luciana stopped by the hospital to relieve Tony. He drove to a sandwich shop and bought a grinder. By the time he’d returned, Luciana had decided that she was going to stay at their house for a couple weeks. Tony tried to protest, but when he saw his wife hobbling around in her hospital gown, he dropped it. Luciana was there when they returned home that Monday. It was mid-July, ninety degrees, and she’d decided to make soup. The kitchen was hot and swampy. Tony carried Chloe into the living room and set her on the couch. Immediately, Luciana was by his side.
“To put a baby on a couch is danger,” she said. “What are you thinking?”
Tony lifted Chloe and set her on the floor.
“Don’t step on her.”
Tony excused himself and went upstairs to unpack.
They’d never gotten along, he and his mother-in-law. They never fought, either. There existed between them a sort of tension that went unaddressed, like a ringing you might hear for months until you’re able to ignore it. Luciana was the one woman in Walton who was imperceptible to Tony’s charms. And not for a lack of trying. Last year, Tony had bought her a goat figurine for her birthday—Luciana had grown up on a farm with a goat named Enzo, and she spoke of Enzo the way you might speak of a deceased sibling. When he presented her with the figurine, she rolled it between her palms and said, “that’s nice.” She stuck the goat in a drawer, and he never saw it again.
Luciana moved through his house like water. She was a sturdy woman, but she could cross from the kitchen to the nursery in the time it took him to blink. Chloe’s needs were impeccably met—it was Luciana who insisted on waking with her, bottle-feeding her, and burping her. It seemed to Tony that he’d barely seen his daughter since they returned from the hospital. Instead, he caught up on sleep. He watched television. He hiked his feet up on the coffee table so that Luciana could vacuum underneath them. It was kind of like being on vacation, except instead of working on her tan, his wife spent four hours a day attached to a breast pump.
Poor Gina. Her hair was falling out. It clogged the drain, it clung to their socks. Tony spent every waking second asking what she needed. Food? Water? The remote? Gina waved him off. She insisted that she needed to sleep, but then she’d lay in bed with her eyes open.
When she filled out the postpartum screening at the obstetrician’s office, a look of concern crossed the doctor’s face.
“Do you want him in the room?” the doctor asked, nodding toward Tony.
Gina shook her head.
Tony stood on the other side of the door. He listened for some snatch of their conversation, but the walls were heavily insulated. When he was invited back in, the doctor clapped her hands together and put on her brightest smile.
“There are too many cooks in the kitchen,” she said with pep, as if she were announcing something positive.
He tried to catch his wife’s eye, but she turned away. On the counter, though, he saw her screening. Underneath the statement I have felt sad or miserable, Gina had checked Yes, most of the time. He tried to read more, but the doctor snatched the paper and stuck it to her clipboard.
And so, Tony returned to work the next morning, a mere week after his daughter had been born. The guys at the yard were perplexed.
“I thought you took the month,” his best friend, Sam Cash, said.
“I did. Gina kicked me out.”
Their construction company—the company that had once belonged to Tony’s father but was now co-owned by Tony and Sam—was working on two projects at the moment. Sam brought a team to do work at the women’s prison while Tony spent the day installing catch basins around Walton. He remembered bidding on the job, but he had no idea they’d won it. The work was grueling. By the time he returned to the yard, his limbs ached, and he could feel the muscles in his back gripping and writhing.
He found Sam out back, nursing a beer with his feet on the cooler. He was watching the junkyard cats squabble. They’d named the kingpin cat Domingo after their coworker, Domingo Osorio, a thick, broad-shouldered man who Tony brought along as muscle when clients wouldn’t pay. Domingo was chasing after a smaller cat. The smaller cat limped and wailed as Domingo pawed at him. Tony took a few steps toward them, yelling nonsense. The cats scattered, and he collapsed into a folding chair. Sam passed him a beer.
“The new cat came from Eric’s apartment,” Sam said. “His name is Squeaky.”
“What’s wrong with his leg?”
“I think Domingo broke it.”
Squeaky retreated to an empty corner of the yard. He rubbed his head against a concrete block and moaned. He was a small cat, gray, with a white underbelly. Squeaky looked almost identical to the cat Tony had as a child—a cat he’d named Little Gray, who died after eating powdered laundry detergent.
That night, Tony woke to the sound of Chloe crying. Her nursery was across the hall from his bedroom, but somehow Luciana beat him to the bassinet. Tony settled back in bed. He listened through the monitor as Luciana spoke to the baby. Although his Italian wasn’t great, he could make out a phrase here and there: I love you… beautiful girl… sweet girl… I love you.
“Turn that off,” Gina said.
He felt around for the button that lowered the volume. Through the video display, he watched Luciana rock Chloe and kiss her forehead. His daughter’s cry softened into a whimper. Tony felt a flicker of envy—he wanted to kiss her fat, pink cheeks.
“Turn it off,” Gina said.
The next morning, Tony laced his boots and grabbed a cup of coffee from McDonald’s. As he unlocked the gate at the yard, Squeaky came limping over. He nuzzled up against Tony’s leg. Tony bent down to pet him but stopped when he realized that Squeaky was covered in blood.
“Jesus,” he said. “You look like shit, little man.”
He brought Squeaky into the office and filled the sink with warm water. With a damp rag, he wiped Squeaky’s bloody fur. Squeaky turned his face toward the rag, allowing himself to be washed. The water in the sink became rust-colored. Squeaky would have to stay in the office that day, for his own safety. Tony asked that everyone keep the door closed.
Every time Tony walked into the office to do billing or file paperwork, Squeaky limped over. Tony scratched his head and fed him pieces of Smartfood popcorn. When night came, Tony couldn’t figure out what to do. They didn’t have a litter box in the office, but he was pretty sure that if he let Squeaky out, Domingo would kill him.
“You can’t take him back to your apartment?” he asked Eric.
Eric shook his head.
“I moved in with my girlfriend, and her landlord said no pets.”
“Maybe your brother will take him? Your mom?”
“No one wants him,” Eric said. He gestured to Squeaky’s writhing, emaciated frame. “He’s all fucked up.”
With a sigh, Tony lifted Squeaky and held him in his arms. He saw that Squeaky’s pupils were crossed and jagged. One eyeball had been gouged. The other was rimmed with pus.
Tony put Squeaky in his truck and drove to Petco. He bought a litter box, cat litter, and food pellets while Squeaky slept in the passenger seat. Tony stroked his head as he drove home. He texted Gina, I have a surprise for you.
I’m not hungry, she wrote back.
He unlocked the front door and set Squeaky down on the welcome mat. Gina and her mother were sitting on the couch. The silence in the room suggested that Tony had interrupted something—both women looked annoyed. As they registered Squeaky, their faces clouded.
The cat stumbled toward them, changed directions, and ran into a wall. He ricocheted off and landed on the hardwood floor. Gina and her mother looked at each other and back at Tony, who gave them a little smile.
“His name is Squeaky,” he said.
For a long time, it was silent. Then Gina spoke.
“Is Squeaky blind?”
“Maybe,” Tony said. “We’re not certain. There’s a chance he was blinded by Domingo.”
Her eyebrows went in separate directions. “Domingo Osorio?”
“No, Domingo the junkyard cat.”
Gina massaged her forehead.
“Does Squeaky have his shots?”
“I think so.”
“Cats are dirty,” Luciana said. “They are for outside.”
“Not this one. He stays inside.”
The monitor sounded. He heard his daughter wailing. He moved toward the nursery, but Luciana waved him off. He heard her say “hello baby.” He listened to his daughter settle. He hadn’t held her in days—Luciana treated him like an emblem of masculine stupidity. Whenever he was in the same room as the baby, she hovered nearby, anxiously tending to Chloe’s needs while Tony looked on like a buffoon. In response, Tony had been waging small battles: he’d stopped putting the toilet seat down, for one. And the night before, when Luciana was watching Everybody Loves Raymond, he wordlessly switched to a documentary about President Carter (which was very, very boring). It was stupid, yes—but what else could he do? She wasn’t his mom. And Gina was no help. She’d started sleeping on a futon in their living room, complaining that their memory foam mattress irritated her incision.
Squeaky shuffled across the living room, slamming into the coffee table and eventually returning to the front door. He nibbled at Tony’s boots, gagging on one of the laces. When he coughed, a blob of phlegm shot onto the floor by Tony’s feet.
“He needs to go to the vet tomorrow,” Gina said.
The next morning, Tony called Sam to say that he’d be late for work. He kissed his daughter goodbye and drove Squeaky to the veterinarian. The vet was a young, slender woman with full, pink lips. When she spoke, Tony found himself hypnotized, nodding blindly along with whatever she was saying.
She gave Squeaky some shots, which he handled without flinching.
“What a little badass,” Tony said.
They made small talk. The vet asked if they lived in town and Tony said yeah, he’d grown up in Walton. So had his wife. They lived in a cape down on Sullivan with their daughter and Squeaky.
The vet’s eyes lit up.
“Sullivan Street?”
“Yup. We moved in a couple months ago.”
“There’s a stray cat up there,” the vet said. She used her feet to slide her rolling chair across the office, where she began opening and closing cabinets. “He’s getting all the cats in the neighborhood pregnant—it’s awful. I’ve had to perform two cat abortions this month.”
Cat abortions, Tony mouthed. Squeaky let out a soft purr.
“If I gave you a trap, could you catch him and bring him to me? He needs to be neutered. And I’ll cover your cost for the visit today.”
Squeaky rolled over in Tony’s lap, exposing his belly. Tony scratched him. The vet looked on expectantly.
“Let me get this straight,” Tony said. “You want me to kidnap a cat and bring him to you so that you can neuter him?”
The vet crossed her legs. The angle of her mouth suggested that men—especially short, brutish men like Tony—rarely told her no. Even Tony was surprised by how quickly he’d shut her down. There was a period in his early twenties when he would have skinned and eaten a cat if a good looking woman asked him to. But not anymore. He was a father now. He couldn’t kidnap a cat just because a veterinarian asked him to—even if she was quite sexy.
“Let me know if you change your mind,” she said.
He found Gina in their bedroom pumping breast milk. She was sitting with her back against the headboard, her eyes on the window. Tony set Squeaky down on the rug, where he curled into a ball and began licking his genitals.
“Good news,” he said, “Squeaky has a clean bill of health.”
Gina gave him a curt nod. “What a relief.”
“Where’s Chloe?”
“My mom took her for a walk.”
“You didn’t go with them?”
Gina’s eyes flicked in his direction and then back to the window.
“My mom told me to stay here.”
Her breast pump creaked and wheezed. She used both hands to hold the pump parts to her chest. The attached cups were filled with yellowish liquid. From the way she pursed her lips, he could tell she was in pain. That postpartum screening came to him then--I have felt sad or miserable. Yes, most of the time. He almost said something, and then it occurred to him that he wasn’t supposed to see the screener in the first place. When Gina spoke with the doctor, she’d wanted him out of the room.
Tony glanced at his watch.
“I’ll be back tonight,” he said.
By the time he got to work, Sam had already left with the crew doing catch basins, so Tony and Domingo went to the women’s prison. Tony had never worked a prison job, but Domingo knew the routine. He said they needed to leave their cellphones in the car—they were going to be patted down at the entrance. They grabbed their supplies and went inside. A guard led them to the kitchen and showed them what yesterday’s crew had done. Domingo began patching the concrete underneath an industrial refrigerator while Tony measured the floor for a trough drain. The guard said that their current drainage system was “irrecably fucked,” and Tony couldn’t shake the feeling that irrecably wasn’t a word.
They took a break for lunch. The guard let them eat in his office. He ate with them. He wanted to know if either of them had ever been inside a prison.
“Domingo did work here a couple years ago,” Tony said, “but it’s my first time.”
“What do you think?”
Tony looked around.
“It’s okay,” he said.
The guard launched into a speech about how, in a prison, you’re constantly outnumbered. At any moment, a gang could violently descend upon you and drive a homemade shiv into your neck. It was important to never let your guard down—not even for a minute. Simply glancing at your shoes meant certain death.
Domingo asked, “This is women’s prison, yes?”
“Yes,” the guard said, “but don’t let that fool you. In some ways, the women are worse than the men.”
Tony wanted to know how often guards were attacked.
“It hasn’t happened since I started working here.” The guard scratched his chin. “So maybe eight years.”
Tony and Domingo had been robbed at knifepoint a few months ago—the bandits made off with their power tools, which were a bitch to replace. They exchanged a glance, and the guard jumped in to add that the reason attacks were so infrequent was because they were so, so careful.
Tony and Domingo worked for a couple hours after lunch, taking turns using the electric jackhammer. They loaded chunks of concrete into a wheelbarrow, and the guard escorted them to a dumpster outside the prison gates. In the yard, they ran into a couple of inmates. The women chatted as they walked laps. They made room for the men to pass by. Everyone nodded politely. Tony imagined that exchanges such as these happened regularly on golf courses.
“That was a close one,” he whispered to Domingo, and the two of them chuckled until the guard told them to settle down.
They made it back to the truck around four. When Tony was reunited with his phone, he had three missed calls and a text message from Gina: Your cat is pissing blood. I’m going to the vet. He tried calling her back, but she didn’t pick up. Tony sent a string of texts.
Is he okay?
What’d the vet say?
Are you cleared to drive?
Gina responded with a thumbs up emoji.
Back at the yard, Tony and Domingo told Sam Cash about the guard.
“I know who you’re talking about,” Sam said. “He acts like that place is Rikers.”
“Such a tough guy.”
“You see what he did when we walked past the ladies?” Tony asked. “He put his hand on his nightstick.”
Domingo snorted, and Sam gestured toward Big Tony’s framed obituary. It hung—or, rather, it loomed—above their desk.
“Your dad would have said, okay big guy, how about you help us move this concrete?”
Domingo and Sam laughed. Tony was quiet. Yeah, his dad would have said something like that. Tony missed him then. He was startled by how much he missed his father—he thought of him from time to time, but rarely did he notice the black hole in his chest. If Big Tony was still around, he’d be at Tony’s house right now asking Luciana to make him ravioli. When Luciana tried to get between Tony and the baby, he’d say, don’t start with that shit—let my boy hold his daughter. And if she didn’t listen, he’d say it in Italian, he’d yell it, he’d take the baby himself. He wasn’t a kind man, Big Tony, but he was a man.
A text popped up on his phone from Gina: Squeaky has a UTI. I’m picking up antibiotics.
Tony made it home a little before five. He found Luciana on the couch, holding the baby. She watched Judge Judy while she rocked Chloe. Gina sat on the loveseat, pumping, with Squeaky curled up next to her. Beneath him lay a ream of paper towels stained with pink urine.
“My girls,” Tony said. “Squeaky.”
No one so much as glanced in his direction.
He asked if he could hold Chloe, and Luciana shook her head.
“She is asleeping,” she said, “and you let her neck flop.”
He turned toward Gina to see if she’d defend him, but her eyes were vacant. He shifted his gaze from Gina to her mother and back. Both women had the same line between their brows, the same brooding expression. Tony had always thought of Luciana as oafish, but Gina was a songbird or a lilac tree. Now his mother-in-law’s genes were making themselves apparent.
He looked at Chloe. She slept with her mouth open, her lips in an angelic o. He knelt in front of his mother-in-law, resting his fingers on top of Chloe’s head.
“I want to hold her.”
“Asbetta. She is asleeping.”
“Let him hold the baby, Ma,” Gina said.
“Hold the cat, Tony. You hold the baby later.”
Tony shook his head. He picked Squeaky up and carried him into the bedroom. He placed him on the bed and stroked his fur, nuzzled his ears. Downstairs, he could hear Gina and her mother arguing. At first he thought they were talking about him, but when he strained to listen, he caught Luciana saying something about the benefits of formula. This shit again. They had argued about it yesterday, too—Luciana couldn’t see why Gina wasted so much time pumping. Gina said it wasn’t a waste. They went back and forth, hurling insults. And then there was silence. Someone must have said something they couldn’t un-say.
Tony heard Gina’s footsteps on the stairs. She got into bed with him, and he touched her waist gently, careful to avoid her incision. Her body had changed—her skin hung over her incision, stretched and sagging. He thought of the hospital. The blood and the drain. Gina’s mouth hanging open with white crust around her lips. A shiver ran through him, and he pulled her closer. He felt the urge to tell her, then, how scared he’d been. But, you know, marriage. Masculinity. And he was suddenly so tired.
He awoke to Gina sitting on the edge of the bed. The mattress tilted towards her as she slipped on one sandal and then another. He looked out the window, where the last wisps of daylight streaked the sky.
“I set up a trap for the vet at the end of the road,” Gina said. “There’s a stray cat who’s been getting all the neighborhood cats pregnant, and she asked me to catch him and bring him in to be neutered.”
Tony started to laugh.
“I can’t believe that you got sucked into that.”
“Sucked into what?”
“She asked if I would catch him, and I said no.”
It must have been the same pretty vet, because Gina’s eyebrows shot up. It was as if Tony had said she asked if she could give me a blowjob, but I declined. Gina had known Tony since they were in diapers. She knew that, much like Clark Kent with kryptonite, a good looking woman could bring Tony to his knees. Twice, she started to speak and then stopped. He put his hand on her shoulder and said he’d come with her to check the trap.
As they walked down the street, night settled over them. There was insect chatter in the brush along the road. Their neighborhood was a combination of rural and suburban—strips of forest separated single-family homes. Tony took Gina’s hand and they went along slowly, moonlight limning the pavement. She kept one palm flat against her incision.
“I can’t stand my mother,” Gina said.
“That makes two of us.”
Her grip on his hand tightened.
“She’s always trying to prove what a shit mom I am.”
“She acts like I’m going to—I don’t know. Drop Chloe.”
“Oh my god, and the stuff about breastfeeding.”
“I heard that.”
“Why you can’t use formula, Regina? Why you waste-a the time? I think she feels guilty because she gave me formula, and she needs to prove that she’s the better mom. But she was a horrible mother. I love her, but—you know?”
Tony had known Gina his entire life, and he could confirm that her mother was, indeed, horrible. Once, when Gina’s family was over for dinner, Luciana called Gina ugly right there at the table. They had been talking about how Tony was taking Michelle Arnold to prom, and when Tony’s mom asked who Gina was going with, Luciana cut in and said, “no one. Who will take her to a dance? Look at her.” Gina had sat there, stoic and silent. She’d been in a sort of gothic phase—her hair was dyed jet black, and she wore a lacy, thrifted dress. Tony remembered watching her from across the table, waiting for a tear or a sniffle. Nothing. The next words out of Gina’s mouth were, “can someone pass the grated cheese?”
Tony had worried that Luciana would treat Chloe with the same thoughtless cruelty, but it was quite the opposite. She loved her granddaughter. She loved her in a way that she couldn’t love Gina. And if he could see it, that meant his wife could too. It probably made her feel ugly and unspecial, the same way she must have felt at his parents’ dinner table all those years ago.
“I’ll tell her she needs to leave,” Tony said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’ll tell her when we get back.”
They reached the forest at the end of their cul-de-sac. Decades earlier, before Gina and Tony were born, wealthy Walton benefactors had donated two hundred acres to a land trust. The woods went on for miles, thick and dense as fog. Gina took her phone out of her pocket and switched on the flashlight. She led Tony to a plastic cage with a steel door. Inside, something rattled.
Together, they knelt down in front of the trap. Gina shined her light through the slats in the door. A baby skunk stared back at them. Gina and Tony both jumped back like they’d been electrocuted.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Tony said.
They discussed their options. Gina didn’t want to get sprayed. She also didn’t want to leave the skunk in the trap to starve. They debated whether baby skunks could spray. A quick Google search revealed that skunks as young as four months old could spray “with perfect accuracy.” As they spoke, the skunk stared at them with his big, dark eyes. He pushed himself into the far corner of the cage. His expression was one of terror. Tony walked around the trap and tilted it forward, feeling the bottom with his fingertips.
“How do I open it?”
“There’s a latch on top,” Gina said. “When you flip it, the door will snap open.”
“This thing is heavy as shit. How did you get this up here?”
“I put it in the stroller.”
With his finger, Tony was able to find the latch. He ran his thumb over it, testing how hard he’d have to push to get the cage door to snap open. It seemed like his best option was to kick the latch and then take off running. He told Gina to start walking back—he’d meet her at the house.
“And then you’ll talk to my mother?”
“Yes, I’ll talk to your mother.” He gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Let Daddy handle it.”
“Ew,” Gina said.
He listened to the slap of her sandals as she left the forest and trudged along the road. Her footsteps faded into silence. As the skunk skittered in the cage, he recited what he was going to say to his mother-in-law. He settled on something simple: Luciana, let’s pack the car and tomorrow you can head out of here. Gina and I have this under control. He ran through Luciana’s potential responses and practiced batting each of them away. We have enough food. I’ll clean the house. The baby will be fine. Tony’s own mother was Italian and overbearing; he’d spent decades training for this very confrontation.
When he was certain that Gina had reached the house, he turned his attention back to the cage. Once, twice, he tapped the latch with the tip of his boot. He took a deep breath, giving the latch a sharp kick. The metal door snapped open, and Tony tore out of the woods like he was being chased by a swarm of bees. Down the hill he ran, past white colonials and glades of trees. His house appeared in the distance. Gina stood on the porch holding Squeaky in her arms. She lifted his paw to make it look like he was waving. Chloe was framed in the front window; she drank from a bottle while Luciana held her.
Tony saw them, then, for what they were. He saw a fall evening on the porch, their daughter in flannel pajamas. He saw his wife in a sweatshirt, drinking wine with that distant, pretty smile. He saw Squeaky asleep on the welcome mat. He saw his mother-in-law, who needed to leave immediately, but she could come back for dinner in a few days. Or months.
He saw a family—he saw his family.
In the driveway he bent forward and put his hands on his knees. It took a minute to catch his breath. Gina came over and asked if he’d done it.
“Yeah,” he said. “We did it.”
Tony’s wife, Gina, had been in labor for forty-eight hours before the doctor said “we’re done” and administered a c-section. Her blood pressure kept dropping in response to the epidural, and at one point she passed out. Their daughter had been born by then, swaddled, and placed in Tony’s arms. When a nurse saw how badly he was shaking, she came over and took the baby.
And oh, the sounds! The sound of blood pouring into the drain beside Gina’s operating table. The blood backed up and gurgled, and Tony felt his heart tighten. As he watched his wife’s eyelids flutter, his breath became ragged and strained.
“If you’re going to pass out, you should leave,” the anesthesiologist said. His voice was kind—he was trying to help—but Tony shot him a nasty look and stayed in his seat, even with the finger of nausea rising in his throat. The procedure got dicey, and the nurse who’d taken the baby returned for Tony. He followed her to a bench in the hall where she handed him his daughter.
“She’s beautiful,” the nurse said.
Tony nodded. He spent the next hour staring at the white wall in front of him. His father had died two years earlier in this very hospital. They did everything they could, which was pretty much nothing: he had no heartbeat when the ambulance arrived. “A massive heart attack,” the doctor had said.
Tony looked down at the baby in his arms. He knew that you should never, under any circumstances, shake a baby. And still, he felt the compulsion to give her a small shake. Like a fish, he thought. Because of you, Gina is splayed like a fish.
At the end of the hour, the doctor poked his head through the door and said that everything was fine. Just your average heart rate plummet—nothing to write home about. With a conspiratorial glance down the hall, he told Tony that he’d been a medic in Afghanistan. You think a c-section is bad? He’d pulled shrapnel from a man’s eyelid. His eyelid. Every time the doctor said eyelid, Tony’s own eyelid twitched.
In her hospital room, Gina insisted that she didn’t need Oxys, and then, an hour later, she buzzed the nurse to say that she desperately needed Oxys. The nurse stayed and watched her take them. She ran her fingers through Gina’s hair and called her a trooper. Together, the women admired Gina’s beautiful baby. Tony sat on a cot in the corner. He felt like he was watching the scene unfold through glass—had he been the only witness to his daughter’s bloody birth? How was everyone so calm?
The baby lay silent in the bassinet. They filled out her birth certificate, giving her the name Chloe. Chloe refused to latch, so Gina pumped breast milk and Tony fed her with a bottle. She drank greedily, slurping and puking and burping. Tony didn’t sleep for a minute. While his wife and his daughter snoozed, he paced the hospital room in his socks. He hovered over the bed and the bassinet to make sure they were breathing.
The next afternoon, Gina’s mother Luciana stopped by the hospital to relieve Tony. He drove to a sandwich shop and bought a grinder. By the time he’d returned, Luciana had decided that she was going to stay at their house for a couple weeks. Tony tried to protest, but when he saw his wife hobbling around in her hospital gown, he dropped it. Luciana was there when they returned home that Monday. It was mid-July, ninety degrees, and she’d decided to make soup. The kitchen was hot and swampy. Tony carried Chloe into the living room and set her on the couch. Immediately, Luciana was by his side.
“To put a baby on a couch is danger,” she said. “What are you thinking?”
Tony lifted Chloe and set her on the floor.
“Don’t step on her.”
Tony excused himself and went upstairs to unpack.
They’d never gotten along, he and his mother-in-law. They never fought, either. There existed between them a sort of tension that went unaddressed, like a ringing you might hear for months until you’re able to ignore it. Luciana was the one woman in Walton who was imperceptible to Tony’s charms. And not for a lack of trying. Last year, Tony had bought her a goat figurine for her birthday—Luciana had grown up on a farm with a goat named Enzo, and she spoke of Enzo the way you might speak of a deceased sibling. When he presented her with the figurine, she rolled it between her palms and said, “that’s nice.” She stuck the goat in a drawer, and he never saw it again.
Luciana moved through his house like water. She was a sturdy woman, but she could cross from the kitchen to the nursery in the time it took him to blink. Chloe’s needs were impeccably met—it was Luciana who insisted on waking with her, bottle-feeding her, and burping her. It seemed to Tony that he’d barely seen his daughter since they returned from the hospital. Instead, he caught up on sleep. He watched television. He hiked his feet up on the coffee table so that Luciana could vacuum underneath them. It was kind of like being on vacation, except instead of working on her tan, his wife spent four hours a day attached to a breast pump.
Poor Gina. Her hair was falling out. It clogged the drain, it clung to their socks. Tony spent every waking second asking what she needed. Food? Water? The remote? Gina waved him off. She insisted that she needed to sleep, but then she’d lay in bed with her eyes open.
When she filled out the postpartum screening at the obstetrician’s office, a look of concern crossed the doctor’s face.
“Do you want him in the room?” the doctor asked, nodding toward Tony.
Gina shook her head.
Tony stood on the other side of the door. He listened for some snatch of their conversation, but the walls were heavily insulated. When he was invited back in, the doctor clapped her hands together and put on her brightest smile.
“There are too many cooks in the kitchen,” she said with pep, as if she were announcing something positive.
He tried to catch his wife’s eye, but she turned away. On the counter, though, he saw her screening. Underneath the statement I have felt sad or miserable, Gina had checked Yes, most of the time. He tried to read more, but the doctor snatched the paper and stuck it to her clipboard.
And so, Tony returned to work the next morning, a mere week after his daughter had been born. The guys at the yard were perplexed.
“I thought you took the month,” his best friend, Sam Cash, said.
“I did. Gina kicked me out.”
Their construction company—the company that had once belonged to Tony’s father but was now co-owned by Tony and Sam—was working on two projects at the moment. Sam brought a team to do work at the women’s prison while Tony spent the day installing catch basins around Walton. He remembered bidding on the job, but he had no idea they’d won it. The work was grueling. By the time he returned to the yard, his limbs ached, and he could feel the muscles in his back gripping and writhing.
He found Sam out back, nursing a beer with his feet on the cooler. He was watching the junkyard cats squabble. They’d named the kingpin cat Domingo after their coworker, Domingo Osorio, a thick, broad-shouldered man who Tony brought along as muscle when clients wouldn’t pay. Domingo was chasing after a smaller cat. The smaller cat limped and wailed as Domingo pawed at him. Tony took a few steps toward them, yelling nonsense. The cats scattered, and he collapsed into a folding chair. Sam passed him a beer.
“The new cat came from Eric’s apartment,” Sam said. “His name is Squeaky.”
“What’s wrong with his leg?”
“I think Domingo broke it.”
Squeaky retreated to an empty corner of the yard. He rubbed his head against a concrete block and moaned. He was a small cat, gray, with a white underbelly. Squeaky looked almost identical to the cat Tony had as a child—a cat he’d named Little Gray, who died after eating powdered laundry detergent.
That night, Tony woke to the sound of Chloe crying. Her nursery was across the hall from his bedroom, but somehow Luciana beat him to the bassinet. Tony settled back in bed. He listened through the monitor as Luciana spoke to the baby. Although his Italian wasn’t great, he could make out a phrase here and there: I love you… beautiful girl… sweet girl… I love you.
“Turn that off,” Gina said.
He felt around for the button that lowered the volume. Through the video display, he watched Luciana rock Chloe and kiss her forehead. His daughter’s cry softened into a whimper. Tony felt a flicker of envy—he wanted to kiss her fat, pink cheeks.
“Turn it off,” Gina said.
The next morning, Tony laced his boots and grabbed a cup of coffee from McDonald’s. As he unlocked the gate at the yard, Squeaky came limping over. He nuzzled up against Tony’s leg. Tony bent down to pet him but stopped when he realized that Squeaky was covered in blood.
“Jesus,” he said. “You look like shit, little man.”
He brought Squeaky into the office and filled the sink with warm water. With a damp rag, he wiped Squeaky’s bloody fur. Squeaky turned his face toward the rag, allowing himself to be washed. The water in the sink became rust-colored. Squeaky would have to stay in the office that day, for his own safety. Tony asked that everyone keep the door closed.
Every time Tony walked into the office to do billing or file paperwork, Squeaky limped over. Tony scratched his head and fed him pieces of Smartfood popcorn. When night came, Tony couldn’t figure out what to do. They didn’t have a litter box in the office, but he was pretty sure that if he let Squeaky out, Domingo would kill him.
“You can’t take him back to your apartment?” he asked Eric.
Eric shook his head.
“I moved in with my girlfriend, and her landlord said no pets.”
“Maybe your brother will take him? Your mom?”
“No one wants him,” Eric said. He gestured to Squeaky’s writhing, emaciated frame. “He’s all fucked up.”
With a sigh, Tony lifted Squeaky and held him in his arms. He saw that Squeaky’s pupils were crossed and jagged. One eyeball had been gouged. The other was rimmed with pus.
Tony put Squeaky in his truck and drove to Petco. He bought a litter box, cat litter, and food pellets while Squeaky slept in the passenger seat. Tony stroked his head as he drove home. He texted Gina, I have a surprise for you.
I’m not hungry, she wrote back.
He unlocked the front door and set Squeaky down on the welcome mat. Gina and her mother were sitting on the couch. The silence in the room suggested that Tony had interrupted something—both women looked annoyed. As they registered Squeaky, their faces clouded.
The cat stumbled toward them, changed directions, and ran into a wall. He ricocheted off and landed on the hardwood floor. Gina and her mother looked at each other and back at Tony, who gave them a little smile.
“His name is Squeaky,” he said.
For a long time, it was silent. Then Gina spoke.
“Is Squeaky blind?”
“Maybe,” Tony said. “We’re not certain. There’s a chance he was blinded by Domingo.”
Her eyebrows went in separate directions. “Domingo Osorio?”
“No, Domingo the junkyard cat.”
Gina massaged her forehead.
“Does Squeaky have his shots?”
“I think so.”
“Cats are dirty,” Luciana said. “They are for outside.”
“Not this one. He stays inside.”
The monitor sounded. He heard his daughter wailing. He moved toward the nursery, but Luciana waved him off. He heard her say “hello baby.” He listened to his daughter settle. He hadn’t held her in days—Luciana treated him like an emblem of masculine stupidity. Whenever he was in the same room as the baby, she hovered nearby, anxiously tending to Chloe’s needs while Tony looked on like a buffoon. In response, Tony had been waging small battles: he’d stopped putting the toilet seat down, for one. And the night before, when Luciana was watching Everybody Loves Raymond, he wordlessly switched to a documentary about President Carter (which was very, very boring). It was stupid, yes—but what else could he do? She wasn’t his mom. And Gina was no help. She’d started sleeping on a futon in their living room, complaining that their memory foam mattress irritated her incision.
Squeaky shuffled across the living room, slamming into the coffee table and eventually returning to the front door. He nibbled at Tony’s boots, gagging on one of the laces. When he coughed, a blob of phlegm shot onto the floor by Tony’s feet.
“He needs to go to the vet tomorrow,” Gina said.
The next morning, Tony called Sam to say that he’d be late for work. He kissed his daughter goodbye and drove Squeaky to the veterinarian. The vet was a young, slender woman with full, pink lips. When she spoke, Tony found himself hypnotized, nodding blindly along with whatever she was saying.
She gave Squeaky some shots, which he handled without flinching.
“What a little badass,” Tony said.
They made small talk. The vet asked if they lived in town and Tony said yeah, he’d grown up in Walton. So had his wife. They lived in a cape down on Sullivan with their daughter and Squeaky.
The vet’s eyes lit up.
“Sullivan Street?”
“Yup. We moved in a couple months ago.”
“There’s a stray cat up there,” the vet said. She used her feet to slide her rolling chair across the office, where she began opening and closing cabinets. “He’s getting all the cats in the neighborhood pregnant—it’s awful. I’ve had to perform two cat abortions this month.”
Cat abortions, Tony mouthed. Squeaky let out a soft purr.
“If I gave you a trap, could you catch him and bring him to me? He needs to be neutered. And I’ll cover your cost for the visit today.”
Squeaky rolled over in Tony’s lap, exposing his belly. Tony scratched him. The vet looked on expectantly.
“Let me get this straight,” Tony said. “You want me to kidnap a cat and bring him to you so that you can neuter him?”
The vet crossed her legs. The angle of her mouth suggested that men—especially short, brutish men like Tony—rarely told her no. Even Tony was surprised by how quickly he’d shut her down. There was a period in his early twenties when he would have skinned and eaten a cat if a good looking woman asked him to. But not anymore. He was a father now. He couldn’t kidnap a cat just because a veterinarian asked him to—even if she was quite sexy.
“Let me know if you change your mind,” she said.
He found Gina in their bedroom pumping breast milk. She was sitting with her back against the headboard, her eyes on the window. Tony set Squeaky down on the rug, where he curled into a ball and began licking his genitals.
“Good news,” he said, “Squeaky has a clean bill of health.”
Gina gave him a curt nod. “What a relief.”
“Where’s Chloe?”
“My mom took her for a walk.”
“You didn’t go with them?”
Gina’s eyes flicked in his direction and then back to the window.
“My mom told me to stay here.”
Her breast pump creaked and wheezed. She used both hands to hold the pump parts to her chest. The attached cups were filled with yellowish liquid. From the way she pursed her lips, he could tell she was in pain. That postpartum screening came to him then--I have felt sad or miserable. Yes, most of the time. He almost said something, and then it occurred to him that he wasn’t supposed to see the screener in the first place. When Gina spoke with the doctor, she’d wanted him out of the room.
Tony glanced at his watch.
“I’ll be back tonight,” he said.
By the time he got to work, Sam had already left with the crew doing catch basins, so Tony and Domingo went to the women’s prison. Tony had never worked a prison job, but Domingo knew the routine. He said they needed to leave their cellphones in the car—they were going to be patted down at the entrance. They grabbed their supplies and went inside. A guard led them to the kitchen and showed them what yesterday’s crew had done. Domingo began patching the concrete underneath an industrial refrigerator while Tony measured the floor for a trough drain. The guard said that their current drainage system was “irrecably fucked,” and Tony couldn’t shake the feeling that irrecably wasn’t a word.
They took a break for lunch. The guard let them eat in his office. He ate with them. He wanted to know if either of them had ever been inside a prison.
“Domingo did work here a couple years ago,” Tony said, “but it’s my first time.”
“What do you think?”
Tony looked around.
“It’s okay,” he said.
The guard launched into a speech about how, in a prison, you’re constantly outnumbered. At any moment, a gang could violently descend upon you and drive a homemade shiv into your neck. It was important to never let your guard down—not even for a minute. Simply glancing at your shoes meant certain death.
Domingo asked, “This is women’s prison, yes?”
“Yes,” the guard said, “but don’t let that fool you. In some ways, the women are worse than the men.”
Tony wanted to know how often guards were attacked.
“It hasn’t happened since I started working here.” The guard scratched his chin. “So maybe eight years.”
Tony and Domingo had been robbed at knifepoint a few months ago—the bandits made off with their power tools, which were a bitch to replace. They exchanged a glance, and the guard jumped in to add that the reason attacks were so infrequent was because they were so, so careful.
Tony and Domingo worked for a couple hours after lunch, taking turns using the electric jackhammer. They loaded chunks of concrete into a wheelbarrow, and the guard escorted them to a dumpster outside the prison gates. In the yard, they ran into a couple of inmates. The women chatted as they walked laps. They made room for the men to pass by. Everyone nodded politely. Tony imagined that exchanges such as these happened regularly on golf courses.
“That was a close one,” he whispered to Domingo, and the two of them chuckled until the guard told them to settle down.
They made it back to the truck around four. When Tony was reunited with his phone, he had three missed calls and a text message from Gina: Your cat is pissing blood. I’m going to the vet. He tried calling her back, but she didn’t pick up. Tony sent a string of texts.
Is he okay?
What’d the vet say?
Are you cleared to drive?
Gina responded with a thumbs up emoji.
Back at the yard, Tony and Domingo told Sam Cash about the guard.
“I know who you’re talking about,” Sam said. “He acts like that place is Rikers.”
“Such a tough guy.”
“You see what he did when we walked past the ladies?” Tony asked. “He put his hand on his nightstick.”
Domingo snorted, and Sam gestured toward Big Tony’s framed obituary. It hung—or, rather, it loomed—above their desk.
“Your dad would have said, okay big guy, how about you help us move this concrete?”
Domingo and Sam laughed. Tony was quiet. Yeah, his dad would have said something like that. Tony missed him then. He was startled by how much he missed his father—he thought of him from time to time, but rarely did he notice the black hole in his chest. If Big Tony was still around, he’d be at Tony’s house right now asking Luciana to make him ravioli. When Luciana tried to get between Tony and the baby, he’d say, don’t start with that shit—let my boy hold his daughter. And if she didn’t listen, he’d say it in Italian, he’d yell it, he’d take the baby himself. He wasn’t a kind man, Big Tony, but he was a man.
A text popped up on his phone from Gina: Squeaky has a UTI. I’m picking up antibiotics.
Tony made it home a little before five. He found Luciana on the couch, holding the baby. She watched Judge Judy while she rocked Chloe. Gina sat on the loveseat, pumping, with Squeaky curled up next to her. Beneath him lay a ream of paper towels stained with pink urine.
“My girls,” Tony said. “Squeaky.”
No one so much as glanced in his direction.
He asked if he could hold Chloe, and Luciana shook her head.
“She is asleeping,” she said, “and you let her neck flop.”
He turned toward Gina to see if she’d defend him, but her eyes were vacant. He shifted his gaze from Gina to her mother and back. Both women had the same line between their brows, the same brooding expression. Tony had always thought of Luciana as oafish, but Gina was a songbird or a lilac tree. Now his mother-in-law’s genes were making themselves apparent.
He looked at Chloe. She slept with her mouth open, her lips in an angelic o. He knelt in front of his mother-in-law, resting his fingers on top of Chloe’s head.
“I want to hold her.”
“Asbetta. She is asleeping.”
“Let him hold the baby, Ma,” Gina said.
“Hold the cat, Tony. You hold the baby later.”
Tony shook his head. He picked Squeaky up and carried him into the bedroom. He placed him on the bed and stroked his fur, nuzzled his ears. Downstairs, he could hear Gina and her mother arguing. At first he thought they were talking about him, but when he strained to listen, he caught Luciana saying something about the benefits of formula. This shit again. They had argued about it yesterday, too—Luciana couldn’t see why Gina wasted so much time pumping. Gina said it wasn’t a waste. They went back and forth, hurling insults. And then there was silence. Someone must have said something they couldn’t un-say.
Tony heard Gina’s footsteps on the stairs. She got into bed with him, and he touched her waist gently, careful to avoid her incision. Her body had changed—her skin hung over her incision, stretched and sagging. He thought of the hospital. The blood and the drain. Gina’s mouth hanging open with white crust around her lips. A shiver ran through him, and he pulled her closer. He felt the urge to tell her, then, how scared he’d been. But, you know, marriage. Masculinity. And he was suddenly so tired.
He awoke to Gina sitting on the edge of the bed. The mattress tilted towards her as she slipped on one sandal and then another. He looked out the window, where the last wisps of daylight streaked the sky.
“I set up a trap for the vet at the end of the road,” Gina said. “There’s a stray cat who’s been getting all the neighborhood cats pregnant, and she asked me to catch him and bring him in to be neutered.”
Tony started to laugh.
“I can’t believe that you got sucked into that.”
“Sucked into what?”
“She asked if I would catch him, and I said no.”
It must have been the same pretty vet, because Gina’s eyebrows shot up. It was as if Tony had said she asked if she could give me a blowjob, but I declined. Gina had known Tony since they were in diapers. She knew that, much like Clark Kent with kryptonite, a good looking woman could bring Tony to his knees. Twice, she started to speak and then stopped. He put his hand on her shoulder and said he’d come with her to check the trap.
As they walked down the street, night settled over them. There was insect chatter in the brush along the road. Their neighborhood was a combination of rural and suburban—strips of forest separated single-family homes. Tony took Gina’s hand and they went along slowly, moonlight limning the pavement. She kept one palm flat against her incision.
“I can’t stand my mother,” Gina said.
“That makes two of us.”
Her grip on his hand tightened.
“She’s always trying to prove what a shit mom I am.”
“She acts like I’m going to—I don’t know. Drop Chloe.”
“Oh my god, and the stuff about breastfeeding.”
“I heard that.”
“Why you can’t use formula, Regina? Why you waste-a the time? I think she feels guilty because she gave me formula, and she needs to prove that she’s the better mom. But she was a horrible mother. I love her, but—you know?”
Tony had known Gina his entire life, and he could confirm that her mother was, indeed, horrible. Once, when Gina’s family was over for dinner, Luciana called Gina ugly right there at the table. They had been talking about how Tony was taking Michelle Arnold to prom, and when Tony’s mom asked who Gina was going with, Luciana cut in and said, “no one. Who will take her to a dance? Look at her.” Gina had sat there, stoic and silent. She’d been in a sort of gothic phase—her hair was dyed jet black, and she wore a lacy, thrifted dress. Tony remembered watching her from across the table, waiting for a tear or a sniffle. Nothing. The next words out of Gina’s mouth were, “can someone pass the grated cheese?”
Tony had worried that Luciana would treat Chloe with the same thoughtless cruelty, but it was quite the opposite. She loved her granddaughter. She loved her in a way that she couldn’t love Gina. And if he could see it, that meant his wife could too. It probably made her feel ugly and unspecial, the same way she must have felt at his parents’ dinner table all those years ago.
“I’ll tell her she needs to leave,” Tony said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’ll tell her when we get back.”
They reached the forest at the end of their cul-de-sac. Decades earlier, before Gina and Tony were born, wealthy Walton benefactors had donated two hundred acres to a land trust. The woods went on for miles, thick and dense as fog. Gina took her phone out of her pocket and switched on the flashlight. She led Tony to a plastic cage with a steel door. Inside, something rattled.
Together, they knelt down in front of the trap. Gina shined her light through the slats in the door. A baby skunk stared back at them. Gina and Tony both jumped back like they’d been electrocuted.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Tony said.
They discussed their options. Gina didn’t want to get sprayed. She also didn’t want to leave the skunk in the trap to starve. They debated whether baby skunks could spray. A quick Google search revealed that skunks as young as four months old could spray “with perfect accuracy.” As they spoke, the skunk stared at them with his big, dark eyes. He pushed himself into the far corner of the cage. His expression was one of terror. Tony walked around the trap and tilted it forward, feeling the bottom with his fingertips.
“How do I open it?”
“There’s a latch on top,” Gina said. “When you flip it, the door will snap open.”
“This thing is heavy as shit. How did you get this up here?”
“I put it in the stroller.”
With his finger, Tony was able to find the latch. He ran his thumb over it, testing how hard he’d have to push to get the cage door to snap open. It seemed like his best option was to kick the latch and then take off running. He told Gina to start walking back—he’d meet her at the house.
“And then you’ll talk to my mother?”
“Yes, I’ll talk to your mother.” He gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Let Daddy handle it.”
“Ew,” Gina said.
He listened to the slap of her sandals as she left the forest and trudged along the road. Her footsteps faded into silence. As the skunk skittered in the cage, he recited what he was going to say to his mother-in-law. He settled on something simple: Luciana, let’s pack the car and tomorrow you can head out of here. Gina and I have this under control. He ran through Luciana’s potential responses and practiced batting each of them away. We have enough food. I’ll clean the house. The baby will be fine. Tony’s own mother was Italian and overbearing; he’d spent decades training for this very confrontation.
When he was certain that Gina had reached the house, he turned his attention back to the cage. Once, twice, he tapped the latch with the tip of his boot. He took a deep breath, giving the latch a sharp kick. The metal door snapped open, and Tony tore out of the woods like he was being chased by a swarm of bees. Down the hill he ran, past white colonials and glades of trees. His house appeared in the distance. Gina stood on the porch holding Squeaky in her arms. She lifted his paw to make it look like he was waving. Chloe was framed in the front window; she drank from a bottle while Luciana held her.
Tony saw them, then, for what they were. He saw a fall evening on the porch, their daughter in flannel pajamas. He saw his wife in a sweatshirt, drinking wine with that distant, pretty smile. He saw Squeaky asleep on the welcome mat. He saw his mother-in-law, who needed to leave immediately, but she could come back for dinner in a few days. Or months.
He saw a family—he saw his family.
In the driveway he bent forward and put his hands on his knees. It took a minute to catch his breath. Gina came over and asked if he’d done it.
“Yeah,” he said. “We did it.”