Tom’s Last Summer

Feb 23, 2025

a cat sitting on top of a table next to a plant — Photo by Marco Biondi on Unsplash

Through the grass, Tom trots toward me, silently over the worn path as though to greet me, but when I bend down to touch his head he dekes out of my reach. No way is he going to let me pat him.

As thin and rickety as an ancient old rocker, Tom’s dark coat is rough and rumpled. Obviously, he no longer spends any of his precious energy on grooming. I notice the fur on his stomach is dripping. He's been in the lake. Probably hunting goslings along the shore. The other day behind the cottage, I almost stepped on a decapitated gosling head—downy, a glorious brown and yellow like a tiger, yellow beak sticking out the front like a candy-corn. Only Tom knows what happened to the rest of the gosling’s body.

I remember Tom as a kitten—an adorable striped tabby in a litter of patchy white mongrels. I was allowing my children to choose a kitten from the litter. I held back from pointing out Tom's superior black markings. He was a replica of a cat I’d owned at age nine, Tigger, and a cat I’d owned at twenty-nine, Murray.

Saffron had chosen Tom’s pink padded littermate, Mr. Whiskers, as she called him, mostly white, but with uneven blotches of tabby stripe on his back and face. An overly friendly cat, he was a meticulous groomer who kept his white fur gleaming. He roughhoused with our Jack Russell and when you picked him up—he wrapped both paws around your neck and hugged you.

My cousin Hannah took Tom.

Nearly twenty years later, Tom is making the most of his final days. He's on medication, his thyroid under functioning but that doesn’t stop him from running down to the beach when the setting sun attracts a crowd of watchers, or from hunting small creatures. I saw him running across the lawn the other day with a limp chipmunk dangling from his mouth.

Mr. Whiskers had lived only a short time. My ex-husband had taken him when he’d moved into a small bachelor pad on Kingston Road. He’d allowed the cat to roam, unwilling to stay cooped up in a dingy hot apartment with a frisky young cat. Mr. Whiskers died on a side street, run over by a parking car.

I admire Tom. I admire the way he's throwing his weight around, even if he has no heft to speak of. I look into his ancient old eyes, the irises scaly and reptilian, but only for a moment before he looks away, trotting off into the cedar hedge, through the ferns to the neighboring cottage. No time to chat. No time for petting. He's on a mission. It's his last summer but this deathwatch is no sorry state.

“Tom’s Last Summer” is from my book An Empty Nest. If you want to read more, please scroll down and click for the link to a free copy.

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Historical Fiction

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