Sketch: Cat Names

It wasn’t until the day after my grandfather’s funeral that I remembered this story, having nothing to do with his death but rather the infection that had laid me low, at rest in my bed in cold sweats. While traveling, on a bus because it was all my youthful budget would allow, I met a man who had just been let out from prison. He had served his sentence, that his time was up and so was moving to Portland for a fresh start. This was around 2001, before the coffee and preciousness had formed a film like a fine soot. He was arrested for stealing a pair of sneakers, although when he really thought about it he was caught because he had been smoking a joint a few blocks from the store, and the police had only found the sneakers as a matter of happenstance. While he had been in prison, he had had infrequent visitations from a woman he had been seeing, when I say infrequent visitations really I mean that she had regularly visited every three weeks, but this seemed like an eternity in their elongating interims, because the man wished back for a taste of home. After about five months, she altogether stopped, or at least, the gap grew first to four weeks, then to six, then she altogether disappeared. He had become coarser throughout, and he chalked it up to that. After about four months had passed between the visits, he received a letter from this estranged paramour, initially stumbling but then quickly shifting to apologetic. She said she had wanted to stay in touch, but in the interim it had become too painful, that she had had a miscarriage shortly after the sentencing had come through, and that with the subsequent internment she had felt it was inappropriate to pile onto his situation, that it was fine anyway because she had decided to abort regardless, and that she had only decided to come clean, to clear her conscience, as it were, because around the same time, the cat had run off only to be found dead, hit by a car, an old Pontiac that released black fumes when the pedal was depressed, the letter went on about how her decision fraught but felt to be the right thing, and that now they should both focus on moving forward with their lives and forgetting. He relayed this story to me, only stopping to give me the cat’s name, specifically Chevy, specifically a name he had always had misgivings about because he'd never liked his original Chevy and thought it might have led to exactly such an untimely end, and to show me the tattoo he’d had installed while incarcerated. As the morning began to break and we pulled into the Portland station to separate, he asked me if I had any money for his next leg. In the idling bus, while the other passengers pushed past to get out of the confines, I gave him the twenty dollars I had on hand and wished him luck.