There are some mornings when your brain quietly eases into the day. You make a cup of coffee, open a window, enjoy a few peaceful minutes, and gradually become a functioning member of society. Then there are mornings like this one, when you notice one tiny thing that’s out of place and suddenly spend the next twenty minutes questioning reality. I hadn’t even poured my coffee yet when I noticed Pandora’s phone sitting on the kitchen counter.
That, by itself, wasn’t impossible. Pandora spent plenty of time at the apartment, and she’d occasionally leave a sweater behind or forget a book on the coffee table. Her phone, though, was another matter. Pandora treated it the way some people treated their wallets. Before leaving anywhere, she’d pat every pocket, check her bag twice, then somehow manage to check it a third time just to be absolutely certain. If her phone was still here, something unusual had happened. I picked it up just long enough to move it away from the edge of the counter. The screen lit for a moment, revealing the lock screen before fading back to black. It was the picture from our trip to the beach last summer.
That caught me off guard because only a few days earlier she’d laughed and told me she’d finally changed the wallpaper after getting tired of looking at the same photograph. Apparently she hadn’t. Or maybe she’d changed it back. Or maybe I’d remembered the conversation incorrectly. My confidence in my own memory lasted about three seconds before it wandered off to find something else to worry about. Behind me, Mr. Whiskers jumped onto one of the kitchen chairs, and I didn’t think much of it until I realized he wasn’t watching me. He wasn’t watching the coffee maker either. His attention was fixed entirely on Pandora’s phone.
I set my mug on the table and watched him for a while. He wasn’t trying to knock the phone onto the floor, which would have been perfectly normal cat behavior. He wasn’t sniffing it or rubbing against it. He simply sat there, perfectly still, staring at it with the quiet concentration of someone waiting for an important announcement. A sensible person would probably have assumed he’d noticed a reflection on the glass. Unfortunately, I’ve never been especially talented at being sensible. The longer I watched him, the more convinced I became that he was trying to communicate something.
“You know something, don’t you?” I asked.
Mr. Whiskers blinked once.
It wasn’t exactly an answer, but it also wasn’t not an answer.
At that exact moment, John Mercer wandered into the kitchen looking as though he’d spent the night arguing with gravity and lost. His hair pointed in several different directions, and his expression suggested he hadn’t fully accepted that morning was happening.
“You look terrible,” I said.
“I feel terrible.”
“Coffee?”
“I was hoping you’d offer before I had to ask.”
He reached for a mug before noticing Mr. Whiskers sitting motionless on the chair.
“What’s he doing?”
“I think he’s trying to tell me something.”
John followed the cat’s gaze until he found Pandora’s phone sitting on the counter.
“He’s looking at the phone.”
“I know.”
“So?”
“So why is he looking at the phone?”
John rubbed his eyes and sighed.
“Because it’s there.”
I hated how reasonable that sounded.
Before I could explain why I thought the situation was far more complicated than that, Pandora’s phone suddenly began to ring. Mr. Whiskers sprang off the chair so quickly that I nearly spilled my coffee. He hurried to the counter, stretched as high as he could, and stared at the vibrating phone with complete concentration.
John immediately started laughing.
“What?”
“Hal…”
“What?”
“Listen to the ringtone.”
I stopped talking and listened.
Instead of music, Pandora’s phone was playing the unmistakable sound of an old-fashioned can opener turning.
Mr. Whiskers looked at me with complete expectation, absolutely convinced someone had just opened a fresh can of tuna.
I stared at the cat.
The cat stared back at me.
John laughed so hard he had to lean against the counter to stay upright.
After spending the better part of twenty minutes convincing myself Mr. Whiskers was trying to reveal some great mystery, I finally realized he’d been trying to tell me something all along.
He just thought breakfast was about to be served.