Last Updated on May 23, 2026 by admin
Mona is seventeen. She is a torbie — tortoiseshell and tabby together, in patches — with one yellow eye and one green eye.
She came into Memphis Animal Services in late September of 2025. Her owner, a retired schoolteacher named Mrs. Caldwell, had moved into a facility that did not accept pets.
Mona sat in cage 17 for nine months.
She did not, in those nine months, fight. She did not chirp at potential adopters. She did not climb the bars. She sat in the back left corner of cage 17 with her tail wrapped around her front paws and watched whatever was happening in the aisle.
The other cats came and went.
In the second week of May, a woman named Patrice came into Memphis Animal Services. Her own cat — a torbie named Lavender — had died three weeks earlier, at sixteen, of normal old-cat reasons. The two cats had lived together for twelve years.
Patrice was looking, she told the front desk, for a senior cat. She specified that she was not looking for a young cat. She specified that she was, in particular, looking for an old female cat with quiet eyes.
The volunteer who walked her down the aisle stopped at cage 17.
Mona looked up.
Patrice sat down on the concrete floor.
The thing that happened next is, in cat shelters everywhere, a thing that has happened before — it took eleven minutes and there was no particular drama and the volunteer left them alone for the last six of those.
Mona is in a kitchen in Cordova, Tennessee, now. She has gained four ounces since the move. She sleeps in a small bed on top of the refrigerator, which is, by every account, also where Lavender slept.
Patrice has not told her this.
She thinks Mona knows.