Page 36 of Roadrunner

He stretched his arms out wide, like a soaring eagle. “Playing with my cat.”

I’d have believed almost anything else. Sharpening knives, hitting a heavy bag until his knuckles bled, staying up half the night cleaning a gun. A cat had not occurred to me, and it took a second for my face to catch up with the thought.

“You have a cat?”

He gave me a look. “Something funny about that?”

“A little.”

“What’s funny about having a cat?”

“You look like a dog person,” I said, still fighting a smile. “Rottweiler. Pit bull.”

“Dogs need too much attention,” he said. “Cats take care of themselves.”

“If he takes care of himself, why were you up all night playing with him?”

“I was entertaining myself. He could care less if I lived or died.” He said it like a point of pride. “Long as the little fucker’s fed and has clean ice water, he doesn’t need a thing from me.”

“Ice water. For a cat.”

“If it hits room temperature, the little prick just looks at his dish, then looks at me like I’m an idiot. Ice fixes it. Goes through four, five dishes a day. Drinks more than I do.”

It sounded less like a cat and more like a very specific kind of houseguest. “What breed?”

“Bengal.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Domesticized version of the Asian leopard cat.” He said it the way other men talked about their trucks. “Looks like a baby leopard.”

I could picture that, on him, more easily than I could picture a Siamese curled in his lap. “I bet he’s beautiful.”

He dug his phone out of his pocket, flipped it open, and squinted at the screen like it owed him money, before he found what he wanted and handed it over.

The cat was, in fact, beautiful. Rosetted like something out of a nature documentary, mid-leap after a napkin someone had left on the kitchen island.

“He looks three feet long.”

“They’re not usually that big. He’s been putting on about a pound a month.”

“You weigh him?”

“Every Friday.”

“Every single Friday?”

“Look, Squirt.” He put his hands on his hips like he was about to explain something important. “You and Panzer are gonna have kids one day. You’ll toss ‘em on the scale every week and call everyone you know to tell them how big they are—bigger than any kid you’ve ever seen. Then you’ll prop ‘em against the wall every month after that and call everyone again. I don’t have kids. Don’t plan on having any. This is my kid. He gets weighed on Fridays, and he’s smarter and bigger than any other cat on the planet.”

It was, in its way, kind of sweet. It also wasn’t the conversation I wanted.

“How many kids are Panzer and I going to have?” I asked.

“According to him? Two.”

I hadn’t known Riley had put a number on it, let alone said so out loud to someone else. We’d talked about kids before, but never like it was settled.

“A boy and a girl?”