My next-door neighbor rang the bell last night and asked if I had a shovel.

Then we looked at each other.

“It’s been quite a day,” she said.

Actually, we agreed, it had been quite a week.

We stood there for a few minutes comparing notes before I remembered something important.

“But I digress. You need a shovel.”

Then I remembered something else.

She has a cat.

He is orange, and so, I call him Orange Cat.

“Oh, no.”

I went to get the shovel.

When I met her at the fence, she told me what had happened.

Earlier that day, while she was at work, another neighbor called her. An orange cat had been hit by a car, and they thought it was Orange Cat.

She left work and came home.

The family had carefully placed the animal in a box for her. She didn’t want to look inside. If it was him, she said she didn’t want that to be her last memory of him.

But something didn’t feel right.

The box was too light.

Eventually, she looked.

There was an orange cat inside. One that could easily have been a littermate.

But it wasn’t him.

When she returned home, Orange Cat was sitting on the back porch, perfectly alive and apparently unconcerned about the emotional catastrophe unfolding in his name.

Relief arrived.

So did the realization that she now had someone else’s cat in a box.

She tried to find out whose.

She posted on social media that an orange cat had been found and waited to see whether someone would answer.

No one did.

By evening, the cat still needed somewhere to go.

Which is how my neighbor ended up at my door asking for a shovel.

She found a place in the woods and buried the little cat.

Later that night, the shovel appeared back in my yard.

I keep thinking about how many hands were involved in a story about an animal none of us knew.

Someone stopped.

Someone moved the cat from the road.

Someone found a box and placed the body inside carefully.

Someone called the person they believed would want to know.

My neighbor came home.

She looked.

She searched for the cat’s people.

And when no one came, she dug a grave.

None of those things changed what had happened.

They weren’t even required.

But each person seems to have encountered the same quiet thought:

Somebody has to take care of you.

So somebody did.