Nancy

Nancy is a bodega cat in Park Slope. She is named after someone's grandmother. The owner will not say whose.

She judges people with gentle disapproval. Not the mean kind. The kind where you already know what you did. Customers walk in, get the slow blink, and adjust themselves a little. There is something familiar about it, like being examined across a kitchen table.

One regular told us Nancy is why she keeps coming back. Not the prices. Not the location. The cat, and the specific way the cat looks at her, like she is somehow disappointing and also loved.

We asked the owner about the grandmother. He shrugged and smiled. "Someone named her." He would not go further. The name was inherited the way a lot of things around a bodega are inherited. At some point someone said it out loud and it stuck.

Nancy has a preferred spot near the coolers. She does not move much. Regulars greet her first, owner second. Delivery drivers address her by name. New customers figure out who she is within a minute of walking in.

She is not the boss. She is older than the boss. There is a difference.

Nancy's story appears in Bodega Cats of New York, out this fall.