“I’m hanging up now, Logan.”

And she did.

I tried going back to sleep but I couldn’t. The fog had dissipated, giving way to a dinner plate moon that bathed Mrs. Schmulowitz’s small, perfectly tended backyard in a creamy luminance no mini-blinds could filter out. The coyotes were yipping up in the hills above town. Sometimes, they ventured down to prowl Rancho Bonita in search of four-legged midnight snacks. I debated going out and trying to convince Kiddiot to come inside, but I knew he’d only blow me off.

We’d first met one morning when I went outside to get the newspaper and found him curled asleep on the hood of my truck. When I tried to pick him up to put him on the ground, he growled softly without bothering to open his eyes. So I left him there. He was doing no harm, I figured. I came back out a half-hour later to head up to the airport and he was gone.

That evening, I was reading — Bertrand Russell, if I remember correctly — when something banged loudly against the wall of my converted garage apartment. I put down my book, grabbed my revolver, flung open the door, and found Kiddiot sitting there in all of his oversized orange glory. He trotted in as if he owned the place. I poured a little milk into a mug and offered him part of a leftover chicken burrito. He approached, sniffing them like they were both radioactive, then hopped up on my bed, stretched out, and went to sleep on my pillow with his tongue hanging out. He wouldn’t leave after that.

I posted “cat found” notices around the neighborhood, but no one ever called. Where he came from, I couldn’t say. I dubbed him Kiddiot because he seemed unwilling to comprehend anything, including his new name, even though I am certain he understood everything I ever said to him. Mark Twain once said that a man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. I learned that Kiddiot didn’t give a damn what anybody thought. He led life on his own terms, wholly and unapologetically. You’ve got to admire that.

He’d be fine, I told myself.

I punched my pillow and flopped from my left side to my right, trying to find a comfortable position, but sleep eluded me. My insomniac thoughts swirled around Savannah, as they always did. Maybe on neutral turf, we could work toward something approaching what we once had. I thought about the temporary employment Hub Walker had offered me. Getting paid to roam around San Diego for a few days while getting reacquainted with Savannah? The idea grew on me.

I called her back.

“Forget it, Logan. I’m not going to Costco with you.”

“OK, forget Costco. What about San Diego? I’ve been offered a gig down there. Should take less than a week. We could hang out.”

“Could we go to SeaWorld? I’ve never been there.”

“If that’s how you want to spend your time.”

“What’s wrong with SeaWorld?”

“Who said anything’s wrong with SeaWorld? SeaWorld’s fine.”

“It’s just that you don’t sound too excited about the idea of going.”

“Did you not just hear what I said?”

“If you don’t want to go to SeaWorld, Logan, tell me. It’s not like you’re going to hurt my feelings. I just thought it would be something fun to do together, that’s all. See Shamu. Pet the dolphins.”

As evenly as I could, I said, “I’m in.”

“When are you planning to go? I’d probably need to reschedule a few clients.”

“As soon as I find out, I’ll let you know.”

“Fine.”

“Good.”

Awkward silence.

“Sweet dreams, Logan.”

“You, too, Savannah.”

The line went dead.

I lay back, my hands behind my head, feeling pretty special about the aspiring Zen me. There are three fundamental rules in Buddhism. The first is that nothing is fixed or permanent. The second is that change is possible. I’d exercised the first rule by my willingness to shelve whatever lingering resentments I harbored toward my divorce, and the second by proposing to Savannah an alternative path toward reconciliation: we would go to SeaWorld. But as I closed my eyes, trying to get my brain to call it a night, I forgot all about the Buddha’s third tenet: Actions inevitably have consequences.

Three

The fog and low clouds had returned by the time I rolled out of bed that morning. Kiddiot had not.

Nothing to be worried about, I assured myself as I did my requisite ten minutes of push-ups and abdominal crunches. Cats go missing all the time and Kiddiot was definitely a cat. He would often vanish for the day, venturing who knows where, returning that night as stealthily as he’d disappeared. I would come home to find him dozing on his favorite branch of Mrs. Schmulowitz’s oak tree, the one overhanging my hammock, or atop the purple-colored refrigerator in our garage abode. In fact, all of the fixtures in our apartment were purple and secondhand. They’d once been owned by a fading rock star, one among many who reside in and around Rancho Bonita. His career had gotten a big bump after appearing on one of those celebrity rehab shows, allowing him to remodel his McMansion. Mrs. Schmulowitz snapped up his funkadelic hardware for next to nothing at a yard sale.

“You don’t see colors like that in nature,” Mrs. Schmulowitz marveled as we watched the movers she’d hired unload the toilet and kitchen sink in the alley that day. “They were practically giving them away. Can you imagine?”

I could. Easily. Anyone could have, with the possible exception of Mrs. Schmulowitz, who was recovering from cataract surgery at the time.

I finished my exercises, threw on a clean white polo shirt emblazoned with my flight school logo, laced up my Merrells, and went looking for my cat. There was no sign of him anywhere in the neighborhood.

Mrs. Schmulowitz emerged from her back door as I returned through a side gate. She was wearing lime green Nikes, pink satin running shorts, and an oversized T-shirt illustrated with a drawing of Muhammad Ali flattening Joe Frazier. With her birdlike legs and profusion of spiked, thinning hair (this week’s color: harvest gold), she could’ve easily been mistaken for Woodstock from the cartoon strip Peanuts, had Woodstock been an octogenarian great-grandmother from Brooklyn.

“You’re up early, kiddo.”

“I can’t find Kiddiot. You haven’t seen him around lately, have you, Mrs. Schmulowitz?”

“Can’t say that I have. And lemme tell ya something, a cat that fat is hard not to see. He’s a porker, that cat.”

“The only reason Kiddiot is overweight is because you insist on feeding him like he’s training to be a sumo wrestler.”

“So he doesn’t care for the slop you serve him,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said dismissively. “What am I supposed to do, tell him no when he stares at me with those sad little eyes and that cute little nose of his? What, you want him to die from malnutrition? The cat has to eat already! Trust me, Bubeleh, I’d do the same for you.”

I told her I would be going to San Diego for a few days. Would she mind keeping an eye out for Kiddiot and feeding him until I got back?

“Would I mind? What, you have to ask?” Mrs. Schmulowitz patted my cheek. “Don’t give it another thought. Go. Have a marvelous time.”

She crossed her feet and slowly reached down to touch her toes, stretching for her morning run. “I’ll tell you one thing, he likes what he likes, that cat of yours. Reminds me of my second husband. Oy, that man could eat. Loved frankfurters like they were going out of style. Tells me one day he’s entering the big hotdog-eating contest on Coney Island. I tell him he’s meshuga. Does he listen to me? Mr. Leave Me Alone I Know What I’m Doing? Never! So, of course, he ends up in the emergency room at Bellevue, getting his stomach pumped.”

“Was he OK?”

“Oh, he was fine. But they had to cancel the contest. By the time he got done stuffing three hundred hotdogs down that big mouth of his, they had none left. Completely out. It was a new world record.”