When I started working at the store, Molly, our beloved shop cat, was fourteen, and a year later, when she had mostly stopped going out on the floor to receive cuddles from her adoring public, she was, of course fifteen. Very senior for a cat, as we often explained to children who asked where she was. Towards the end, she’d often hide. Her special spot was a blanket on a chair positioned behind the desk where we do online orders, to give her some protection from the bevy of hands that reached out for her daily.
Molly was a great snuggler and lunchtime companion. In the early days of our professional relationship, she’d yowl and scratch me when I tried to remove her from my lap, her claws penetrating denim to reach my thighs, and she’d walk away scorned, tail in the air. When I crouched down on the floor to rearrange books on bottom shelves, I could also sit on the floor for a few minutes and have a Molly petting session. She’d sleep in my lap as I fulfilled online orders during my evening shifts.
Then she wasn’t into laps so much. She slept a lot. She threw up on the floor. Towards the end, some of us at the store felt like she needed to be protected from handsy children and less conscientious admirers. You could tell she didn’t feel well.
Then, one day last August, my coworkers and I got an email letting us know that Molly was gone.
Bookstore cat has got to be one of the highest levels of existence. Absolute nirvana, to rule over an entire room full of books AND have many humans adoring you all the time. Although sometimes I’d look at Molly and think of that old quote by Janis Joplin: “I make love to thousands every night and go home alone.” She’d spend the day in her sun spot, eat her food, get loved on by many, and then at the end of the day, we’d lock her inside the store for the night. I wondered if she missed having humans around for the twelve hours a day we were closed or if she needed some downtime, like people need downtime.
The first week after Molly died, we had a sign by the registers explaining that she had passed on and inviting people to send us their memories and photos of her over the years.
Two weeks after she died, we started to get the question, “When are you getting another cat?”
I hated that question. She hadn’t been gone all that long and these people were already talking about replacing her? Like we OWE YOU A CAT? Like we can’t take some time to grieve our dear Molly?
The question seemed crass to me in that first month, but so many people asked.
Six months on, we still get asked about the cat. Like, “where is the cat?” Word is slow to move. Customers who rarely shop with us tend not to know that the cat passed on until they come in again.
And every day: when are we getting a new cat?
There were a few customers who asked more than once where the cat was after I had explained. This felt strange. I knew I had told them that Molly had passed, but they came back and asked again, and in one case, a third time. Like they wanted to have that conversation more than once. And they didn’t take the news lightly. Some gave grand mal performances of grief befitting an Italian widow flinging herself onto a coffin.
Look: it took me at least four months to not reflexively go to where her food bowl was to check it, or expect her to be on her chair blanket. And then one day I stopped and I noticed I stopped and I felt time slipping away. How quickly things become normal.
The thing about bookselling is: it’s a retail customer service job. I have to bear witness to these moments of grief, nod, participate. I have to suck up my own feelings and be the bearer of bad news over and over. And this is fine. We as a culture have so few public rituals around death, it’s no wonder that, instead of a proper memorial, we have these scattered moments at the cash register.
A shop cat is forever. Their bodies may die, but they are an indelible part of store memory. People may choose your store BECAUSE OF THE CAT. Even if they never buy anything. And maybe that’s a good enough reason to get another cat. Maybe in this field, a cat is marketing. It’s a reason people come in. Probably good luck, too! We all want something to love, and a cat that lives at a bookstore is easy to love.
I miss Molly’s warmth in my lap and the way she stared down this giant shaggy dog that would come in the store. This dog was ten times her size, but an agreeable, dopey big dog, and she’d stare it down like she was saying THIS IS MY STORE, AND THIS IS NOT YOUR STORE, DOG. MY STORE!
It was her store.
And no, I don’t know if we’re getting another cat. But if we do, I think it should be named Leo, after Leopold Bloom, husband of Molly in Ulysses.
CURRENTLY READING: The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
Marvelous!