Tortoiseshell. Sixteen years, and never once came when called.
She was named Sunday because that was the day she turned up, thin and furious, under the hydrangea by the back step. We put out a saucer expecting nothing. She stayed sixteen years and never entirely admitted she lived here.
You could not pick her up. Everyone learned this differently and most learned it the hard way. What she would do, on her own terms and usually when you were reading, was arrive on the arm of the chair, sit facing away from you, and lean until she was against your shoulder. That was the whole of it. If you moved your arm she left.
She hunted badly and often, and brought things to the door as though we had asked. She sat on the warm bonnet of the car in the mornings. She had a particular sound, not a meow, more of a question, that she used only in the hallway and only at night.
The last year she slept in the sun on the good chair, which she had never been allowed on and which nobody mentioned. She got thinner in the way old cats do. She was on the chair at the end, in the afternoon, with the window open.
Sixteen years of a cat who did not need us and stayed anyway.