Last Updated on May 30, 2026 by admin
Wendell Ashby has been a kitchen-and-bath remodeling contractor in Frederick County, Maryland for thirty-one years.
Every Saturday morning, on his way to whichever job he is on at the time, he stops at the IGA on Route 194 in Walkersville, buys a Diet Mountain Dew and a sausage biscuit, and reads the cork-board by the front door while he waits for the line at the register to move.
The cork-board has been the same for twenty-six months. Lawn-care flyers. A yard-sale ad. A 4-H fundraiser. And — taped to the upper-left corner, with the corners curling — a missing-cat flyer for a gray-and-white tuxedo named Sage.
Sage had walked out of a sliding back door in Frederick on March 14, 2024. The photograph on the flyer was a slightly out-of-focus phone picture of a cat on a kitchen island, with a chipped-out triangle missing from the top of his left ear and one white whisker over his right eye that curved the wrong way.
Wendell did not know the owner. He read the flyer every Saturday because he is a person who reads what is put in front of him.
On the third Saturday of his current job — a complete kitchen tear-out in a Walkersville rental two miles north of the IGA — Wendell stepped outside the back door of the rental to drink his coffee and saw, on the rusted hood of an abandoned 1996 Ford Ranger in the gravel lot behind the property, a gray-and-white tuxedo cat with a chipped-out triangle missing from the top of his left ear and one curling-the-wrong-way white whisker over his right eye.
Wendell put the coffee down on the back step.
He did not approach the cat. He went back inside, took a photograph of the IGA flyer that he had been carrying around in his memory for twenty-six months, sat down on the back step with the coffee, and waited.
The cat came down off the truck in about eleven minutes.
The cat sat about six feet from Wendell for another nine.
The cat ate a piece of Wendell’s sausage biscuit in the eleventh minute after that.
Wendell drove home with the cat in the passenger seat of his work van — no carrier, just a beach towel from the toolbox and a co-worker’s lunch cooler turned upside down as a sort of half-tunnel — and called the number on the flyer from his driveway.
The woman who picked up was named Aurora Hancock. She had moved twice since March 2024, both times within Frederick County, both times leaving a forwarding note with her old neighbors in case Sage came home. She had been keeping the original flyer up at the IGA because — she told Wendell, sitting on the curb outside her townhouse, holding a cat she had not held in two years and one month and twelve days — she could not bring herself to take it down.
Sage weighed eleven pounds when he went missing. He weighed seven pounds and four ounces in Wendell’s lap. He had no other injuries. He had survived two winters by some combination of luck and a feral colony out behind a Walkersville feed store that someone has been quietly feeding since 2017.
Aurora cried for forty minutes on the curb. Sage, in her lap, purred so loudly that Wendell could hear him from twelve feet away in the work van.
The IGA flyer is still on the cork-board this morning.
Wendell does not have the heart to take it down. 🐾