Ollie in the AM

   The cats and I are gradually creating our new routine. But the house is full of Michael’s scents. I know they are waiting to find him.
   They were with him when he died. Nobody else was. When I hurried home from Marie’s to make sure he’d eaten supper, and I found his corpse, they were huddled apart from one another on the carpet near his chair. 
   Thinking back to that moment of my protest, my disbelief and pleading, I see their tense bodies. I feel their uncertain eyes on me. They didn’t know what to do anymore than I did.
   
   These mornings I wake about 4:30, as I have for years, stirred by Michael’s super careful attempts to get ready for work in the dark, holding a tiny flashlight in his teeth, going onto the washing machine landing to dry his hair with the blow dryer, all his clothing set out the night before in the living room, so he wouldn’t bother my sleep. And yet always I woke up. Always I sensed his going.
   I go on waking up. We must have cemented a habit, he trying to keep me from waking, me sensing his tiptoe movements and waking.
   These days I stagger to the bedroom door and crack it open, knowing that Ollie will soon join me. He’ll thud upon the foot of the bed and then pad quickly across the landscape of my body up to my face.  
   There he will either settle into the angle my head makes with the pillow and commence sandpapering my nose and purring like a 23-year-old Honda Passport OR he’ll purr like a Passport while settling his suffocatingly furry weight on top of my head.
   We drift off to sleep again together. It is bliss.