Last Updated on May 29, 2026 by admin
Maple cost a dollar and twenty-five cents. The kittens cost three hundred.
She was a fourteen-year-old orange tabby. Her left ear was clipped from a feral-spay program nobody at Pleasant Hill Humane Society could remember. Her teeth were mostly gone. The card on the front of her cage read, in marker: ADOPT — $1.25.
It had read that for six weeks.
Pleasant Hill, in Pasadena, runs a thing called Surrender Sunday. The fourth Sunday of every month, the price for any cat over twelve drops to one dollar and twenty-five cents. It is meant to be a heartbreak hook. It is meant to make somebody do the math and feel something. It was instituted three years ago by the shelter’s intake coordinator, Renata Wilkes, after she watched a fifteen-year-old shorthair named Toulouse spend nineteen weeks on the cage block before being euthanized for space.
Surrender Sunday works for kittens. It works for adolescents. It almost never works for seniors.
Maple was the eighth Surrender Sunday senior since January. The first seven had aged out and been euthanized. Renata had told the volunteers, that morning, not to put a flower in Maple’s cage. The flowers were for adoption photos. They were not, anymore, for hope.
Lila Ahmadi was twenty-eight. She was an accountant at a midsize firm in Old Pasadena and she had thirty-eight minutes for lunch. She came in to look at kittens. She had told her sister, on the phone the night before, that she was ready — she had a fenced yard, a quiet apartment, a feliway diffuser already plugged into the wall.
She walked past Maple’s cage three times before she stopped.
The fourth time, she stopped because Maple stood up.
Maple is small, even for a senior. She is maybe seven pounds. She lifted her chin and looked at Lila with one milky eye and one yellow eye and pressed the side of her face against the bars of the cage with the kind of full-body commitment that very old cats can muster only when there is nothing else left to spend.
Lila said, out loud, to the empty hallway: oh, no.
She paid the dollar and twenty-five cents in quarters. She did not have a carrier. Renata gave her one of the cardboard ones from the back and refused the suggested ten-dollar donation. Lila bought it anyway.
She taped the receipt to her refrigerator that night. It is still there. It has, in Renata’s handwriting at the bottom: Maple. 14. Adopted 4:12 p.m. Bring her back if you need to. She is small. She is so small.
Maple is now seven months into Lila’s apartment. She has put on a pound and a half. She sleeps on the foot of the bed in a knitted blanket Lila’s grandmother made in 1976. She has, in the corner of the living room, a heated bed she ignores. She likes the bathroom rug. She has decided that the sound of the bathroom fan is a kind of weather she enjoys.
The vet says her kidneys are doing what fourteen-year-old kidneys do. The vet says: maybe a year. Maybe two. Maybe more — she is small, but she is stubborn.
Lila says: that’s fine. She says she is not in the habit of asking the universe for guarantees on a cat that cost a dollar and twenty-five cents.
Pleasant Hill has had seven more Surrender Sunday seniors since Maple. Three have been adopted. Renata says, on the phone — her voice does the thing where it goes flat because she is trying not to cry — that one of the new adopters came in carrying the receipt from Maple’s adoption, printed off Pleasant Hill’s social media account.
She said: I saw what you did. I want to do that.
A dollar and twenty-five cents.
If you are nearby, Pleasant Hill Humane Society’s Surrender Sunday is the fourth Sunday of every month. The next one is June 28. They will have seniors. They almost always have seniors.
And if you can’t drive there, you almost certainly have a Pleasant Hill where you live. The senior in the back cage, the one nobody is looking at, is small. She is so small.
Bring a carrier.