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“Not a dog person?” The woman from the front desk leans against the wall next to me. I like dogs. Dogs are fine. I don’t have much experience with them. With two elderly grandparents who did shift work, a family dog just wasn’t in the cards for me.
“Not enough to adopt one,” I say truthfully.
Her gaze lingers for a few unblinking moments. “Come with me.” She holds open the swinging doors, waiting for me to follow her. “Before the dogs get out,” she says, a touch impatient. I slip out, closing the door tightly behind me, and follow her back down the hall, past her desk, down another hall, past another room where dogs bark and howl. Her keys jangle where she’s clipped them to her hip. “You allergic to cats?”
“No.” George has cats, Margie and Milford. They’ve never bothered me.
She opens another door, and the scent of cat pee sizzles off my nose hairs. “Sorry,” she says at the face I make. “It won’t smell like this if you only have one of them.”
“Am I supposed to adopt one of these?”
She shrugs. “Just take a look around.”
“What are you guys doing?” Lulu asks behind me, breathless. Her cheeks are pink, still invigorated by Spot’s cuddles or because she ran after us, I can’t tell.
“He’s adopting a cat. I’m Sonia, by the way.”
“Lulu.”
“I’m...not adopting a cat.”
Both women make this face at me like,sure. Sonia gestures at the wall of smaller kennels before us. It’s quieter in here. Some of the cats meow and paw at their caged doors or blink at me lazily from where they were sleeping. After a moment of her stare down, I walk along the row, trying to breathe through my mouth.
“We don’t have a lot of kittens,” Sonia says.
“OK.”
“It’s just that a lot of people want kittens.”
“OK.”
“Would you like a kitten?”
“I...” I don’t even want a cat. “Don’t know.”
I feel like, somehow, I am adopting a cat wrong. A cat I didn’t want. But am now adopting.
There are a lot of black cats. And like she said, no kittens. As I get to the end of the row, I stop in front of a calico cat. The animal sits in the back of the cage. But when I lift my hand toward it, its ears perk forward. “Can I see this one?”
I’m not going to adopt it. I just want to see it.
Sonia opens the cage for me but doesn’t take the cat out. “Her name is Betty.”
Betty stays in the back of her kennel. She watches me with golden eyes. One of her ears has a chunk out of it. I wonder what kind of life she’s had to live to lose a piece of her ear. I lift my hand again, holding it at the threshold of her cage.
I clear my throat before I speak, hoping it comes out a bit softer than normal. “Hi, Betty.”
A card in a plastic insert beside her cage tells me that Betty is estimated to be around nine years old and has had at least two litters. UnderSpecial Notesare the letters FIV.
“What’s that?” I point to the card. “I’m Jesse, by the way.”
“It means she has feline immunodeficiency virus. Hi, Jesse.”
Lulu makes a tender sound behind us.
“What’s that?” I ask over my shoulder.
Sonia launches into an explanation of how it’s spread through bites from infected cats. How she’s probably spent a lot of her life outside and that’s how she would have contracted it. How there’s no cure but cats can live long lives if it’s well managed.
