The bodega cat was the only employee that never got fired. The bodega cat sat on the counter next to the register and watched every transaction with the indifference of a god who had already decided your fate. The cat did not care about your sandwich. The cat did not care about your lottery ticket. The cat cared about the mice in the basement and the mice in the basement cared about the cat and the arrangement was older than the lease.

The bodega cat had no name. The owner called it gato. The customers called it cat. The health inspector called it a violation. The cat called itself nothing because the cat did not require a name to do its job. The cat's job was to exist on the counter and to be touched by strangers and to not bite the strangers and to kill the mice. The cat performed three of these four duties consistently.

The bodega cat was the sound of the purr between the beep of the register and the crack of the beer can. You put your dollar on the counter and the cat purred and the transaction had a soundtrack. The purr was the bodega's background music. Not the radio behind the counter playing bachata. Not the television mounted to the ceiling playing a soccer game in a country you had never heard of. The purr. The purr was the frequency of a small building that was open twenty-four hours a day and never closed for any reason including holidays, snowstorms, blackouts, and the owner's mother's funeral.

Every bodega had a cat and every cat was different and every cat was the same. They were all orange or they were all gray or they were all black and white and they all sat on the counter and they all watched you with eyes that had seen every person on the block buy the same coffee at the same time every morning for years. The cat knew your order before you said it. The cat knew your schedule before you did. The cat was the most observant resident of the Lower East Side and the cat shared its observations with nobody.

I bought coffee from the same bodega for thirty years and the cat changed three times. The first cat was orange and fat. The second cat was gray and thin. The third cat was black and indifferent. I do not know what happened to the first two cats. The owner said they retired. Cats do not retire. But on the Lower East Side you did not ask follow-up questions about cats. You accepted the new cat the way you accepted the new rent. It was here now. It was on the counter. It was watching you. That was enough.