sunny

When we left Iowa

they were nine inside our gray van:

us kids,

Dad and Mom,

the baby in Mom’s tummy,

and two cats:  Twinkle and Sunflower.

The pop-up rode behind.

That night we slept in Lincoln, Nebraska.

We could hear trucks speeding down I-80 from inside the pop-up.

Twink and Sunny slept in the new pet taxi from Wal-Mart,

and in the middle of the night Mom got up and put them in the new litter box.

Even though they were farm cats and had never seen a litter box before,

Twink and Sunny knew just what to do with it.

When we came to Colorado,

we thought that Twink and Sunny might run away.

We didn’t know where anything was,

and they didn’t, either.

So we made them wear collars and tied two leashes to the fence:

one pink, and one blue.

Our cousins laughed about this.

But they didn’t run away, Twink, with his white paws,

and Sunny, gray and quiet as a mouse.

By late summer we let Twink and Sunny play free in the yard,

and they never ran away.

We would watch them tackling each other while we ate lunch and laugh.

Sometimes they climbed the fence to play with the neighbor kids

kitty-corner from us,

but we didn’t mind.

Two days before Mom’s birthday we made Christmas cookies.

Before supper we walked down the street,

under our white lights

and past the neighbor’s blinking colored ones

with a plate of sugar-cookie men

for Paula and her husband Joe.

It was while we were at Paula’s house,

smelling sour Thai food and sick old people,

that Dad came home from school and saw Sunny lying still in the road.

Mom buried her the next morning,

a gray morning.

Gray like Sunny.

We didn’t know this, because we were still in bed.

We didn’t know that night,

when we sang at the Christmas program

with little candles lining the aisle

and my hair in a curly bun.

We didn’t know the next day – Mom’s birthday – either.

Mom said we were too busy to do the cats, she would.

So we didn’t have to think about Sunny being dead

while we ate cupcakes downtown

and shopped for Christmas gifts at Bomgaars.

­

The next day they told us.

They told us when our tummies were full of Sunday dinner

and banana cream pie.

And we all cried, except for Nathan,

and played with Twink all afternoon.

When I came home from school on Monday,

I was outside until dark.

I drug a cement block around the garage

and made a gravestone.

For Sunny.

Mom didn’t say anything about not practicing my piano

or about ruining her permanent marker on the cement block.

She just helped me lug it behind the garden shed

and told me that maybe someday

we’ll go back to Iowa

and look for a little garden of stones in Grandpa’s grove

where she buried her pet birds

when she was a girl

like me.

So long, Sunny.