The Cat Came Back?

Here’s the thing, the thing that makes it abundantly clear that I am unsuited, to put it mildly, to take care of cats. This has nothing to do with my allergy to cats, which varies from cat to cat in intensity from none to asthma like I’m going to die, even taking Benadryl. No, the reason I am unsuited to taking care of cats is that I—all you feline aficionados take note—evidently do not know for sure how to tell one from another. You see, there’s a cat here. She was here last night, and she was here just 20 minutes ago when I went to the loft to check. She was even lying in the milk crate—documented behavior of Doucely, Miss Missing. The problem is that this cat doesn’t have a collar, and the first cat did. Now, the same things that cause farm cats to go missing can cause (much less dramatically) collars to go missing, so the fact that the first cat had a collar and this one doesn’t is really neither here nor there. The other problem, though, is that there are varying opinions on how the first cat looked. The cat that Laura and Sonja talked with was gray and stripy. The cat that Ian talked with was gray and stripy, too. When I mentioned I thought the cat had been black, Ian said no, but maybe dark gray. Now, two nights ago I did briefly see a flash of gray and stripy cat leaving the loft when I went up to check for Doucely . . . but that cat skittishly behaved very much like a stray. The little black cat that’s here now doesn’t, however. She was quite happy to be held and petted, and purred intensely all the while. So . . . I think the cat that’s established herself in the loft is actually Doucely, albeit naked, re-establishing herself. But it embarrasses me that I can’t be sure, and that I’m going to have to ask A, next time she calls, what, in fact, her cat looks like.