Free Cat Nap by Claire Donally Page A

interesting smells. He rolled around in it, keeping warm as cold air came into the box Sunny carried. Then they were inside her car, driving along.
    After a quick trip through cold air, they were inside again. Since he was inside the box, Shadow couldn’t see where they were going, but he recognized their destination, even in the dark. This was the place where Gentle Hands lived!
    Shadow lay down peacefully while Sunny talked with another two-leg. They sat for a little while, with her looking through the barred front of the box, talking quietly to him.
    Then they were on the move, going down a long hallway to the bright room where Gentle Hands took care of him. He wasn’t sure why they were here. They’d just visited, and his paw felt fine now. Were they going to play a trick on him and stick him with something? Sometimes Gentle Hands did that, but she always tried to make sure that the hurt was as little as possible.
    It hadn’t been the same when the other one was here, the human male that Shadow always thought of as Hard Hands. He’d never seemed to mind hurting Shadow or any other animal that came here. Even when he seemed gentle, his hands were just too tight. Shadow always wished he could have bitten him. But Hard Hands always wore heavy gloves.
    Sunny opened the door on the box, and Shadow came out onto the metal table. Gentle Hands immediately began to pet him, taking his paw in her fingers. But over his head, Sunny and the other human were talking. It wasn’t happy talk. What was making them so upset? He looked around, and suddenly his nostrils caught a whiff of Hard Hands.
    Shadow took his paw back and prowled around on the table, looking around the room. Is Hard Hands back? A little snarl came from the back of his throat.
I thought he had gone away!

7
    “Wow, he doesn’t look happy.” Sunny felt a stab of guilt as she watched Shadow pace around the perimeter of Jane Rigsdale’s examination table, his tail swishing in annoyance. Should she have been massaging more oil, or doing it more often?
    “Is that his paw acting up?” she asked as the cat stopped on the opposite side of the table from her.
    “Not from the way he’s moving around on it,” Jane replied. “And he didn’t mind when I started examining his pads.” She shot a sharp look at Sunny. “So if his foot isn’t the problem, what are you doing here?”
    “All right, I confess. I came to see how you were doing.” Sunny tried to put as much sincerity as she could into her answer. “Listening to you last night, it sounded to me as if you were pretty deep into denial. So I figured I’d check whether or not this had all caught up with you.”
    That took some of the starch out of Jane. Her shoulders sagged a little. “I guess it did,” she confessed. “At least enough to make me dig out a box of Martin’s old stuff.” She nodded at a cardboard carton lying open on one of the counter tops, but then broke off, staring at Shadow.
    He stood poised on the edge of the exam table closest to the box, making hostile noises.
    “I guess he’s catching a whiff of Martin’s cologne.” Jane sounded a little embarrassed.
    “Well, it was kind of on the strong side,” Sunny said.
    But that wasn’t what bothered Jane. “Shadow never liked Martin. And looking back on our partnership, I have to wonder. After all, this is a medical practice where the patients can never talk. I don’t know what Martin did with them when I wasn’t around. It’s obvious he made a pretty bad impression with Shadow.” She scowled. “Another suggestion that I picked a real winner. When we started out, he had me so that I didn’t know up from down.”
    “I know that feeling.” Sunny sighed. “And then comes the letdown.”
    Jane nodded, her expression not so much “How did this happen?” as “How did I get myself into this mess?” She cleared her throat. “It’s things like this that make me wonder—was I intentionally blind to his shortcomings?”
    “He