The next night, the kitten was waiting when Glenn arrived. When he held out his hand, the cat walked over and rubbed against it. “Good to see you again, Rusty,” Glenn said. Rusty looked at him with his head cocked, then meowed. “All right, all right,” Glenn said. “I hear you.” When Glenn slid under the dash, Rusty once again jumped on his chest and curled up for a nap. The next night, he was there again. After a week, Glenn realized the kitten was sleeping in the Commander, waiting for him to arrive. He started offering him sandwich meat or bites of his snacks. Rusty sniffed everything avidly; he ate most things aggressively.
“Want to come to my house, Rusty?” Glenn asked one night. He had taken to talking to Rusty like an old friend while he was tinkering. Rusty had gone from staring with that curious head tilt to talking back. The cat always seemed to have something to say.
“Not interested?” Glenn asked when Rusty didn’t follow him out the door at the end of the night. “That’s fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Glenn had a way with animals. As a child, he tried to bring home every stray that crossed his path. Jumper, an energetic Labrador, lasted only a few days before Glenn’s father took her to a friend’s farm. Glenn found a terrier bleeding on the side of the road and carried it to his basement. He gave it water and bandages, and when it survived the night, he named the dog Rocky. A year later, his old owners spotted Rocky playing with Glenn and reclaimed their dog. Soon after, Spook followed Glenn home. When Glenn’s parents moved twice without telling him—once to an apartment in the same building, once to a house down the block—it was Spook’s barking that told Glenn where to go. In Texas, he even befriended the lion owned by his friend (the lion later went to a zoo, but it was the 1970s; I guess lions lived in suburban Dallas houses back then), and the two of them would ride around together in Glenn’s Pontiac Grand Prix, the lion’s head hanging out the window on one side, his tail hanging out the other side.
So Glenn wasn’t surprised when, a few nights after his first invitation, Rusty followed him home. Unfortunately, Glenn’s mother already owned a cat. A mean, ornery, standoffish cat. The year before, Glenn had found and rescued it after five weeks trapped in an abandoned cistern—it must have licked moisture from the walls and eaten bugs to survive, which is a great story for another time—but still, that cat wouldn’t do him any favors. There was no way, just from pure territorial cussedness, it was letting Rusty into the house. Rusty was a good-size kitten, and he was the only one of the two cats with claws, but he wasn’t a fighter. Not from fear or submission, he just . . . he didn’t have an aggressive personality. He was a “live and let live” kind of cat.
Glenn apologized to Rusty, told him he could go back to the garage with the Commander, but Rusty decided to settle on the porch. He was always there when Glenn went to work, and he was always there when he came home in the evening. After dinner, they would walk together to the garage to work on the Studebaker; Glenn even considered, once or twice, bringing him to a divorced-dads meeting. That summer, the city started major repairs on Court Street, the large road beside Glenn’s mother’s house, so Rusty and Glenn got in the habit of walking nine blocks through the construction zone to Bill’s beer bar. Rusty waited outside while Glenn grabbed a drink. Half the time, when Glenn came out, Rusty had made a friend.
“This your cat?” the woman would ask—and it was almost always a woman.
“Sure is.”
“He is so cute. And friendly.”
“Yep,” Glenn said. “That’s Rusty. He’s a cool cat.”
Eventually, autumn arrived, and the days got shorter. Court Street reopened to traffic, making it too dangerous for Rusty’s walks. Glenn joined a band, just a few old friends jamming out the blues, and started spending a few nights away every week. Rusty took to jumping on the porch railing of the house, then onto the kitchen window frame to stare at the warm rooms inside. Every night, as he prepared for bed, Glenn saw Rusty watching him. When they made eye contact, the big orange cat always started meowing and scraping his paw on the glass.
“We’ve got to let him in, Mom,” Glenn said. “It’s cold out there.”
Glenn’s mom wouldn’t hear of it, not with the way that cat of hers was behaving. So when a house came up for rent two blocks away, Glenn moved out. The new house was another version of his monk’s cell, a small, unfurnished place, but at least Glenn had a roommate this time. He left a window open for Rusty, which the big cat used only when Glenn was gone. When Glenn was home, the cat always hung around. And he was especially partial to people food. Everything Glenn prepared, Rusty sniffed. If he liked the smell, he had to try it. If he liked the taste, he whined until Glenn gave him a plateful. After the dishes were washed, Glenn usually lay down on the sofa so that Rusty could climb up and knead his back with his claws. It was the world’s best massage after a hard day of work.
At his mother’s house, Glenn had played his guitar every night in bed. Half the time, he’d wake up in the morning and find the guitar cradled in his arms. “That guitar became my best friend,” Glenn told me once.
Maybe, if you want to get psychological, that’s why Rusty hated the guitar. At first, as soon as Glenn picked it up to practice a few songs, Rusty was out the window.
“It’s only rock and roll,” Glenn would call after him, laughing as he hit the first chord.
Eventually, Rusty stuck around. Whenever Glenn pulled the guitar out of its case, he sauntered over and stepped inside. Then he’d bat at the lid until it slammed shut. Glenn wasn’t sure what the cat did in there, but as long as he played guitar, Rusty stayed in the case. As soon as Glenn opened the case to put his guitar away, Rusty jumped out. When Glenn went to bed, Rusty always climbed in beside him.
Even when Rusty got lazy and stopped accompanying him to the garage, Glenn kept working, painting the Studebaker matte black, not flashy but definitely cool. He still didn’t trust all the systems, which had a tendency to misfire, but he no longer worked obsessively on the car either. Instead, Glenn spent more evenings in the backyard with Rusty. The rental was a shotgun close to the street, but the backyard was full of trees, flower beds, and Rusty’s favorite: butterflies. At two years old, Rusty was pushing twenty pounds, and he was a gentle giant, too. He might hurt a fly, but not butterflies. On the rare occasions he snatched one out of the air, he always let it go. When a tree limb broke during a storm, Glenn secured it at an angle so burly Rusty could climb for a better view. He loved to sit in the branches and watch the birds, then stare over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. Rusty knew every blade of grass in the lawn, but he never stepped off the property. Not one foot.
“I’ve watched him. That cat never leaves,” the neighbor told Glenn in amazement.
Glenn shrugged. “That’s Rusty,” he said.
He was a loyal companion. Whenever Glenn talked—about his problems and triumphs, his gripes and rewards, the funny jokes he’d heard that day—Rusty listened. And responded. Rusty could talk through a whole meal and the dishes, too, if he was in the mood. Meow-meow-meow-meow-meow. When Glenn was down, Rusty knew it. He jumped on his lap and stared at him the way he had that first day in the Studebaker Commander: with his head cocked and those deep, intelligent eyes. Then he pushed his scent whiskers into Glenn’s beard. That’s a cat question. You okay, buddy? Glenn would respond by rubbing his beard against Rusty’s face, telling him he was fine.
Rusty also helped Glenn with his daughter Jenny. Glenn had never been able to stay close to his other children; Jenny was his last chance to be the father he always wanted. On court order, she spent every other weekend with him, and he gave her everything he could. Jenny adored her father, Glenn knew, but he worried about her drifting away like his other children had. Not with Rusty around, though. Jenny loved Rusty. Every time Glenn picked her up from her mother’s house, she asked about him. When they saw each other, they started running. Jenny would hold out her arms, and Rusty would leap into them like a puppy.
Rusty was always, um, big-bon
ed. At five, Glenn figured, the cat weighed twenty-five pounds easy, although Rusty refused to sit on a scale. Glenn thought it was all muscle, since Rusty was a forager and inveterate climber of trees, but even he had to admit that Rusty looked like a fat Buddha when he sat on his hind legs. Eight-year-old Jenny thought Rusty was flabby, and she took it upon herself to thin him down. She held his arms out in front of him, pushing them back and forth as if he were doing the cha-cha. Then she put him on his back, grabbed his legs, and pedaled them in circles as if he were riding a bicycle. She called them Rusty’s Butterball Exercises.
“Time for your Butterball Exercises,” she called to Rusty every Saturday morning after pancakes and syrup. He’d sort of sigh, hang his head, and trudge over, because no matter what Jenny wanted, Rusty obliged. And even after all those exercises, he curled up beside Jenny every night. He loved her; it was that simple. Loved her in a way Glenn understood, because he loved her that way, too. They were both disappointed every time her mother picked her up on Sunday night.
The years passed, with days at his mechanic jobs and evenings at his mother’s house for dinner or chores. Nights he spent with Rusty or at divorced-dads meetings, where he felt more like a counselor than a survivor. He still worked on his Studebaker Commander, slowly but steadily. Fixed the steering, aligned the gear box, painted red flames on the side. He didn’t have a final plan or destination. The Commander was a lifelong project, and he looked forward to always tinkering, always working, making it better. If a band he liked was playing, he drove down on Wednesday night to the Eagles dance hall. He had a lot of friends in the music scene, and often they’d call him up on stage to play a song or two. But he never danced. Women asked, but he shrugged them off. He didn’t want to be rude; he just didn’t have the energy. He was there for the music.
When an old friend, Norman Schwartz, decided to start a dance hall in the small town of Waterbury, Nebraska—“We’re going back to the fun days,” Norm told him. “Nothing but old rock and roll and live bands”—Glenn figured he’d volunteer as muscle, helping Norm clear debris and install the wooden floor he’d bought out of the old gym at St. Michael’s Church just before they tore it down.
“I thought you were allergic to manual labor,” Norm said, clearly joking.
“I am,” Glenn assured him, “but I’ll suffer for a friend.” They cracked a beer or three and drank to old times. He was pushing sixty, and the only women he’d ever have in his life now, Glenn figured, were his mother and daughter. His best friend, other than Norm, was a cat. A man could do worse. Much worse. So Glenn decided to retire. He figured he would head home to his Studebaker Commander, his support groups, and his nightly guitar. He’d fish when he wanted, help Norm at his dance hall, hang out with Rusty and his mom. But on his last day at work at the auto repair shop, a regular customer walked in and told him point-blank: “You’re not retiring. You’re coming to work for me.”
The woman ran a job program for special-needs adults called New Perspectives. Glenn told her, “I appreciate the offer, but I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about that line of work.”
“You’ll like it,” she said. “Just come for a look.”
New Perspectives was a series of low, concrete block buildings above a commercial strip in east Sioux City. It wasn’t much, inside or out, but the people made it special. Bobby collected bottles for redemption with enthusiasm, calling out to everyone across the room. A young woman had lost most of her brain function when she was hit by a car, but she could remember everybody’s birthday and tell them what day of the week it was going to fall on in any given year. They needed a strong man to hold Ross, a three-hundred-pound diabetic with Down syndrome, when he went into a seizure. As he walked the facility, as he met the special adults in the work program, Glenn felt a rising sense of joy and relief. He had been working all those years on his car, figuring out the systems. He’d spent all those years with Rusty, learning to live like a cat, without resentment or disappointment. He hadn’t just been killing time. He’d been working on himself. He’d been working toward something. And this was it.
“You got me,” Glenn said. “I’ll start tomorrow.”
Within a month, Glenn didn’t need to hold Ross during his seizures; he knew the man so well, he could sense when they were coming and always had a candy in his pocket to raise his blood sugar. He introduced everybody to the young woman with brain damage, because he could tell she loved showing off her birthday skills. He came in one Monday morning and told Bobby the bottle collector, “I’ve got a present for you, buddy, but you gotta do me a favor.”
“What’s that, Glenn?”
“I gotta have your hat.”
Bobby backed off. He wore the same filthy hat every day, and he wasn’t going to give it up.
“I got a brand-new hat for you, Bobby, and it’s got the tag still on it.”
Glenn showed him a bright orange hunting hat that said GRAHAM TIRE across the front. Bobby grabbed it and immediately put the brim to his nose; he had a habit of smelling everything. Then he turned away, slowly took off his filthy hat, and handed it to Glenn. When he turned back, he had the orange hat on his head and a huge smile on his face.
“We’ve been trying to get him to change that hat for two years,” the woman who had hired him said. “He wouldn’t take it off for anybody.”
After New Perspectives, Glenn cut back on his divorced-dads sessions. He started playing more seriously with the band, spending nights at the Eagles or other music clubs around town. When Storm’n Norman’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Auditorium opened, Glenn not only played guitar with the band, he carried the keg and helped drain it, too. There was no official first dance; no advertising; no sign on the building; no arrows pointing the way through rolling hills of corn to a tiny Nebraska town. But somehow, more than one hundred fifty people showed up. There was no air-conditioning, not enough bathrooms, and the only chairs were borrowed from a funeral home—they even said “funeral home” on the back—but it was a heck of a good time.
I suppose you could say that, after years of work and decades of disappointment, Glenn’s life was full. He had Rusty, his mother, his daughter Jenny, who was already in high school. He had friends and music. He worked an important job with people he loved. On the one night a month when Storm’n Norman’s was open, he did chores: unclogging toilets, tending bar, “feeding the chickens”—a euphemism for sprinkling the dance floor with no-slip wax. After a while, he noticed that a lot of women managed to coax their husbands to Storm’n Norman’s, but couldn’t convince them to dance. So he added another job: one-song dance partner for the frustrated wives of Iowa and Nebraska, the tall good-looking gentleman who swept them away and let them cut loose, at least for a minute or two. Truth be told, though, he barely saw their faces. Dancing was another way to enjoy the music, to help a stranger, and pass the time. He loved dancing—he’d almost forgotten how nice it felt—but for Glenn Albertson the dance hall, despite the bright lights, was nothing more than a sea of gray.
Until one night, sixteen years after his last divorce and ten years after Rusty broke through the scars on his heart, Glenn Albertson saw a face. He was at the bar, mixing drinks, when he looked up and noticed her across the room. She was at a table on the edge of the dance floor, talking with a couple of friends, and it was if a spotlight was shining only on her. It was just a moment, a glancing chance, but it was something Glenn had never experienced before. In the gray sea of his life, this woman seemed to glow. And then their eyes met.
“Take over, Joe,” he told his fellow bartender, “I’m gonna ask that woman to dance.”
He did. She looked up at him, hesitated, then said, “Sure.”
They walked quietly to the dance floor. She was smaller than he expected. The top of her head came only to the middle of his chest, and yet they seemed to fit together as they began to move silently across the floor. She was quiet, focused on something else perhaps, but when she looked into his face, her eyes seemed to take him in,
to linger for a chorus, and then, reluctantly, to look away. When he swept her across the dance floor, she didn’t feel like an obstacle. There was no resistance, no weight. There was only the feel of her warm hand, and the memory of her eyes staring into his own.
“I’m Glenn,” he said.
“I’m Vicki,” she replied.
He swept her around the dance floor a few more times, hardly noticing the sea of gray swirling around them. “Do you live around here?”
“In Spencer,” she said.
When the song ended, he slipped his hand behind her waist. If she wanted to leave, he would let her, but she didn’t. She leaned against his arm, allowing him to hold her. Somewhere beyond them, in another world, the drummer beat time, and when the music started again, Glenn led her easily around the dance floor, holding her close as the band played something he never wanted to end.
“I had a good night,” he told Rusty, when he finally got home. “A real good night.”
The big cat looked at him, his eyes hooded and half awake, and meowed for some food.
Part II
I’ve always loved to dance. When I was a kid, Mom and Dad taught us to dance to the rhythms of the old radio in the family room of our farmhouse outside Moneta, Iowa. When I was nineteen and working in a box factory in Mankato, Minnesota, I danced my toes off every night. Dancing introduced me to my first husband, and it helped me through the dark days after my divorce. As a single mother attending college for the first time at the age of thirty, I didn’t have time for so-called “leisure” pursuits, but dancing was never simple leisure to me. Dancing, to me, was essential. When I heard the music, when I got up to dance, I felt like myself—the good self, not the self that had been through six surgeries from a botched hysterectomy and spent almost a decade married to an alcoholic. Even on the darkest nights, after tucking my daughter into bed and scrubbing down the pots and writing that last class paper, I often went into the kitchen, put on a record, and danced all by myself.