It’s been about a week since anyone’s seen Suki. It was bound to happen sooner or later. She was a fat epileptic cat who skulked around doorways and corners, waiting for an exit route somewhere to be left unwatched. The main problem is not Suki, though. The main problem is mom mom, who coddled that cat for too many years for anyone to really remember when it started.

Mom mom and pop pop are up here for the summer. They live in Florida, but treat the Smith’s house like their own personal hotel for four months out of twelve, like clockwork. They’re cartoon characters, like I suspect most people’s grandparents are, and without apologies or consolations for their ignorance (or just plain distaste for anything but their own convention). I love them for it. Mom mom in particular. She came to America from Norway when she was 14. You’d never guess it though. I mean that she’s been in this country for more than half a century and her accent is in tact and beautifully so. After all this time it has never fallen victim to the perversions of colloquial English. She’s sort of invented her own way of everything, again, as I suspect most people past 60 have. They’re experts in cultivating their own sort of opposite teenage rebellion. Instead of spitfire and reckless stupidity, their defiance involves quietly sitting, waiting for everyone else to do all the superfluous things we scream and panic about endlessly.

Mom mom is a wreck over Suki. To pretend you aren’t deeply upset and indignant about her absconding is not cruel, but stupid. Why would you get Mom mom mad? This isn’t the first time the cat's managed to squeeze itself out of some door though. Really, that's a feat within itself. This cat is so fat that its stomach swings like a hula skirt when it walks; a pendulum, back and forth. Suki ran away last summer too. The Rybacks, who live up the street, called the house and turned her in. Mom mom carried her around like a new toy for a week, acting saintly, fulfilled.

Mom mom isn’t related to me really, I’m just over the Smith house all the time, and have been, since I was young enough to believe Ann when she played dead. We were both four and it was a habit of hers then to drop to the ground and stay supine and noiseless. I figured out a way to win the game, or at least end it, after a while. I’d go get Mrs. Smith and tell her Ann was dead. Ann did the same sort of thing now, but in less dramatic gestures.

I knew Mom mom well from all the summers she had been at their house. It was my house too, in the summer. My real house, across the street, was always generaled by a babysitter, whose habits and behaviors seemed to me a mystery not worth solving, at least in the wake of mom mom’s commanding presence. She was a slot machine who shelled out pearls of wisdom when the right circumstances aligned. Once she told Ann and me how she cross-country skied to school in Norway every day, and about her brother Aner who fell asleep in the snow and never woke up. Her voice is always muffled, like her tongue is too scared of the light to venture anywhere near her teeth. As a result she always whistles her ‘s’s and speaks in a way that is the opposite of rushed. It gives her a constant seriousness and infallibility.

Suki, not pop pop, is Mom mom’s rock. All of us were in a car once and found ourselves at a red light next to a man, naked, or at least from the waist up, singing along to James Taylor at full force with all the windows down. Ann pointed, and I laughed, so Mom mom looked. The potbellied and seemingly carefree man turned to look at Mom mom and winked. She turned to me and Ann, giggling helplessly in the backseat like two girls or something, and said, “You see? Sixty nine years and I still got it.” “What do you think of that pop pop?” Ann asked. “I don’t give a shit,” he said. The light turned green, we drove on.

In the week since Suki’s desertion, Ann has knocked on all the neighbor’s doors and asked incessantly about her last known appearance. I haven’t make any phone calls or anything but felt compelled to go with Ann when she walked around the neighborhood screaming “SUKI!!” There were countless variations and inflections she tried, along with whistles, handclaps, and helpful phrases like “come here girl!” I never had a pet, but figure if Suki wants to, she’ll come home. I offered that as consolation to Ann. “The cat has epilepsy!” she reminded me. I don’t really know what exactly epilepsy entails, or how you'd diagnose it in a person, let alone a cat. My knowledge of epilepsy is limited to the fact that Julius Caesar probably had it. She could be in worse company, I guess.

“It’s like punching someone in the face. If a girl punches a guy in the balls, she has to get hit in the face. It’s like, equal. That’s how fucking painful it is.”
How many conversations come back to this?
We are sitting in an empty parking lot. A steady line of cars goes by like seconds.
Four in a half circle, we are sitting, like a poker game without a table.
Squatting, looking at knees, then cars, knees then cars.

I think of the English paper I finished. I think of the points I brought up; weak, academic, no fear of being proven right or wrong. They are just emblems. I think of an essay I used
on Sylvia Plath’s poetry. ”it is like waking to discover one's adult self, grown to full height, crouched in some long-forgotten childhood hiding place, all the old rejected transparent beasts and monsters crawling out of the wallpaper.” I think of Sylvia Plath on movie posters and television screens, on t-shirts.

Everybody wants passion. We, instead, smoke cigarettes and talk about the police.
How many conversations come back to this?

She says she has four points on her license.
He says he’d kill for that, he has fourteen.
I see his tattoo, black, long lines like metal on his arm. There is a cross in the middle.
He smiles, never off, never on. I think of school pictures.
School pictures and report cards, and the refrigerators they sit on.

She says I’d like him. I look at his white undershirt, low jean shorts and sneakers. He talks about his motorcycle.

She drove me here, brought another one here, like knives and forks in a row.