Kenny

I live in a small town with my dear husband, and our cat, Kenny, who came to live with us about a year ago. I watched the Humane Society Kitten Watch page for months before finding the perfect feline, and dragged Fred down to pick him out one day when our desire to once again love and take care of a precious little thing overwhelmed us.
Fred didn’t really want to get another cat after losing perhaps his favorite pet ever. Jack was a gorgeous, Tiffany breed cat whose lustrous mink/black coat just begged to be petted. He was a great and aggressive hunter who loved mouse heads but always left the haunches in the grass, a ruthless killer of chipmunks and rabbits and anything else that got in his path. He was the kind of cat that couldn’t be contained indoors, and during the winter when the below zero temps kept him inside, he’d lay on the back of the sofa, all four legs hanging down, two on each side of the back, looking out the picture window longingly. I swear I could hear him sighing.
Along with being an accomplished killer, he was perhaps the most affectionate cat God ever created. When Fred built the deck five summers ago, Jack would follow him around like a little boy wanting to help. When I came home from the nursing home four years ago after a visit with my dad, who would die a few short weeks later, I laid down, fetal position, on our bed and cried my eyes out. Jack jumped up on the bed with me, nestled his head into my shoulder and put his front paw on my cheek. He’d come into our bedroom every morning, give us each his version of a kiss, and would then move to the kitchen and his food bowl to chow down before going outside to hunt and to play. The few times he was indoors, he was always with one of us either snuggled up on one of our laps or on the seat next to one of us as we sat on the sofa.
When Jack didn’t come home several years ago after one, two, three, four whole days of being gone, we worried and wondered where he could be. We called the Humane Society and blanketed the neighborhood with flyers, but no one knew where he was. During the first and second days of his absence, we didn't worry too much. In the past, he would disappear every now and then for a couple of days at a time, and I would accuse him of being a bigamist cat with another family somewhere. But an absence of so many days could only mean one thing – he was either hurt or had been picked up by someone somewhere and given a new home. Had his lifeless body been found somewhere or if he had been taken to the Humane Society as a stray, the microchip in his neck would have alerted the authorities that he was ours and we wanted him back. But no call came, and Jack never reappeared at our back door, and when days turned to weeks, and weeks turned to months, and months turned to years, we knew Jack was never coming home.
Fred couldn’t even talk about Jack without tearing up, and I learned to stop talking about how much I missed our cat. And after some time had passed and I’d say that I’d seen a cute kitten online and could we go take a look, for over 2 years, Fred would say, “I’m just not ready.” And then one day last fall, he said, “Okay, I'm ready. Let’s go take a look.”
I knew that I wanted a kitten with totally different coloring, one totally different from Jack – white or orange or a calico. When we saw Kenny with his pure white fur and spots of orange, we knew he was perfect. And why did we call him Kenny? He was a blond with blue eyes who'd race around like crazy and then drop into a nap, just like my dad, Ken. My son Ian suggested that if Kenny liked Scotch and polka music and cheated at gin, the kitten might just be Grampa reincarnated.
But unlike my dear departed, fun-loving, affectionate father, Kenny didn’t care for people all that much. Certainly a different cat from what we had become accustomed. He wasn't affectionate, he didn’t like to snuggle and he didn’t kiss us good morning. In fact, during his first year with us, he would have been perfectly happy to go without interacting with us at all. As long as there was food in the dish and a soft pillow on a chair, he was good to go. No human contact required.
In the spring, when he was a bit older and made noises about leaving the safety of the house, we debated whether to let him explore the outside world. Even with a cat who really acted like a cat, we had come to love the little guy and didn’t want anything to happen to him. But one day, he got out and fell in love with our garden, and there was no turning back. Unlike his predecessor, he was as lazy a hunter as they come. I believe I heard the chipmunks making fun of him one day, and the rabbit population took over and destroyed parts of the garden as he’d lay around the deck just watching the action while getting a tan.
The strange thing is, the more time he spent outside, the more social a being he became. Now, he seeks us out and rubs up against us and wants to sleep with us sometimes. It’s almost like he needs a fix of human to get him through the day now that he’s become a part of the wild.
Late last week, Kenny came home beaten up and limping. A trip to the vet told us he’d bruised one leg badly and broken his hip. Once the shock of his injuries was past and a plan for healing was drawn up, it occured to me that after what I’m sure was a near fight to the death with some savage beast, he nearly dragged himself back home...to us. Fred says it’s because he knows where his food bowl is. I say it’s because he knows where his people are.
I live in a small town.