Peter set Beyoncé on his shoulder. She draped herself across his collarbone and purred with the satisfied rumble of a creature who had conquered every territory available to her and was resting on the summit.
He looked at me, and for a moment, his face did the thing it had done during the photo shoot. It was a softening, a lowering of something he usually kept raised, a brief visibility of a person who felt things deeply and had gotten very good at pretending he didn’t.
“They all are,” he said.
The adopters came between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., staggered at intervals that Peter had scheduled with the precision of a military duty roster. Each family arrived, completed their paperwork with Peter at the kitchen island, received a folder containing medicalrecords and care instructions (Peter had prepared individual folders, because of course he had), and left with a kitten in a carrier and the slightly dazed expression of people whose lives had just changed in a way they were only beginning to understand.
I handled LaTavia well, kissing her tiny head and telling the retired couple that she liked to be held on her back like a baby, which they received with the delighted seriousness of new grandparents absorbing critical intelligence.
I handled Kelly well, placing her in the carrier while telling the family’s daughter that Kelly’s favorite spot was the crook of a neck, and that if she sat very still at bedtime, Kelly would climb up and fall asleep against her ear and purr her to sleep. The little girl nodded with the grave commitment of a child accepting a sacred responsibility.
I handled Solange well, shaking the veterinary student’s hand and telling her that Solange didn’t show affection in obvious ways, but that she showed it by watching, by choosing to be in the same room as you, by the slow blink that meant trust in cat language. I told her that, if she was patient enough to wait for Solange to come to her, the reward would be a loyalty so quiet and so absolute that she’d wonder how she’d ever lived without it.
I handled LeToya well, handing her to the catcafé woman while LeToya bit the carrier strap. The woman laughed and said, “Oh, she’s perfect,” and I’d said, “She really is,” and meant it.
Then Beyoncé’s family arrived.
I did not handle it well.
They were a lovely couple in their thirties with kind faces and a minivan and two cat carriers already in the back seat for their existing cats. They were named Bowie and Freddie, which I respected as a naming convention, and which Beyoncé would either honor or overthrow, depending on whether she recognized the authority of cats who had arrived before her.
Peter handled the paperwork.
I was supposed to be handling the handoff, which involved placing Beyoncé in their carrier and providing the same kind of personalized care briefing I’d given the other families.
I’d prepared notes.
I’d practiced the speech in the shower that morning, running through Beyoncé’s traits and preferences and quirks with the professional detachment of a foster parent who understood that this was the goal and that the goal was good.
I picked Beyoncé up from the floor, where she’d been sitting on Peter’s shoe, and held her against my chest. She was warm and small andvibrating with her usual low-frequency purr. She looked up at me with those green eyes that had been the first thing I’d seen on more mornings than I could count, peering at me from impossible locations, the top of the door, the inside of my shoe, the crook of Peter’s neck, and every surface in this apartment that could be climbed, conquered, or escaped from.
“So,” I said to the couple.
That’s when my voice was did a thing.
A specific thing.
A thing that I recognized from the few times in my life when my body had decided to feel something that my brain hadnotauthorized and that my voice was going to betray whether I liked it or not.
“So, this is Beyoncé, and she’s, um . . .”
I stopped.
Regrouped.
Tried again.
“She’s incredible. She’s the smartest cat I’ve ever met. She can open latches, climb anything, and she’s not afraid of anything, including a twenty-pound orange cat who once made a golden retriever cry. She needs a lot of stimulation because if she gets bored, she’ll engineer an escape from whatever room you put her in. I’m not being hyperbolic. She has tradecraft. She stands on things and uses her paw as a lever andshe—”
My voice cracked again.
It just cracked.
Mid-sentence, mid-word, like a floorboard giving way under a weight it had been holding for too long. I pressed my lips together and breathed through my nose and held Beyoncé against my chest and felt her purr vibrate through my sternum and absolutely, categorically refused to cry in front of strangers over a kitten.
A hand settled on my shoulder.
It was Peter’s hand.
