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I don’t know the first thing about cats. And I don’t need the added responsibility. Except I stupidly want it? If only because Betty’s body is giving out on her, and I know what that feels like. I know what it feels like to need tenderness. I don’t know anything about cats, but maybe for Betty, I’d be willing to learn.
Betty stares at me with heavy-lidded eyes. Her purr seems to shake the whole room. Slowly, I move my hand closer and when she doesn’t shy away, I rub my knuckles over the top of her head. Betty’s purr jacks up louder, like she kicked on the kitty subwoofer. Her eyes fall fully closed and she turns her head into my hand. We do this for a while. I pet her and she enjoys it until she eventually stands on all four legs, her belly sagging low to the ground.
“If you adopt Betty, you’ll need to make sure she has good nutrition. I can give you a list of the best brands to buy. And your vet will likely recommend something, too,” she says, as if I have a vet on retainer. “FIV decreases her immune system’s ability to fight infections. So, you’ve got to keep her healthy and reduce her risk of coming in contact with other diseases or spreading the disease. She’ll have to be an indoor cat.” Sonia says this last part with a wince, so perhaps this is a fraught topic in the cat community.
Betty leans, resting her forehead on my chest. Her purr moves through me, the vibrations like little earthquakes breaking up the tension in my chest until my heart can beat freely again. “I, uh, work a lot of nights. Shift work.”
“Cats aren’t on the same schedules as dogs. They’re good companions for shift workers, especially if you provide environmental enrichment like scratching posts and food puzzles.”
I look over my shoulder at Lulu. She stands with her arm wrapped around her middle, her hand pressed against her lips. She smiles behind her fingers, closed lipped and genuine.
“I’ll take her.” I say it to Sonia but look at Lulu. I don’t know how to identify the surge in my chest when she nods. For now, I’ll call it the rush of new cat ownership.
Betty yowls when we coax her into her new pet carrier, a near-constant low-frequency growl that sounds both royally pissed and terrified. Other study participants pass us as we step back into the lobby where Sonia is readying the adoption papers.
“We were going to all meet up later tonight,” Trey says as he passes, peering into the growling pet carrier. “At Little Ts.”
I didn’t adopt a cat to get out of attending more social situations but honestly, I should have thought of this earlier. “I just got this cat.” I hold her up as proof.
“Cats are like, easy though, right? You could leave her home for a few hours,” Trey cajoles. He’s well-meaning, he just doesn’t understand that this was about all the socialization I can take today.
“Maybe,” I say to get him to drop it. “Put it in the group chat.” The one created by the psych department for us to organize spontaneous, external events exactly like this.
I sign where Sonia tells me. She sends me home with a list of the best brands of cat food for Betty as well as enough samples to hold me over for a few days, but I’ll have to go shopping for more. She provides me with a list of vets I can choose from when I tell her I don’t have one. I turn to Lulu. “I can drop you off at home before I go to the store to pick up cat litter.”
Lulu looks between me and the quietly growling pet carrier. “I don’t mind hanging for a bit.” She shrugs. “I don’t really feel like going out to some...” She waves her hand in the direction of the group that has already left. “We could get Betty settled and watch a movie or something?” She shrugs again, nervous. “If you wanted. No pressure.”
So, I open the passenger-side door of the Bronco for her. “I want.” And when she beams at me as she climbs in, I can’t blame that on Betty.
Chapter Ten
Lulu
This all feels so domestic. I stayed in the car with the cat while Jesse ran into the store to get cat litter. He came back fifteen minutes later with cat food, a litter box and litter, a cat bed and two kinds of brushes, special cat shampoo and “healthy treats”—his words, not mine—a mouse that squeaks, another mouse that jingles, a feather teaser shaped like a flamingo, a replica fish that flops when the cat touches it, a baggy full of catnip that looks suspiciously illegal, and a cat tower hanging over his shoulder like a bindle.
He opens the hatchback trunk of the Bronco to neatly arrange everything inside.
“It’s OK,” he murmurs from the open trunk to the back seat. “We’re almost home.”
And it’s the sound of his voice that finally silences Betty. The rest of the ride home is quiet except for the hush of the tires on the road. She won’t leave the carrier once we get back to his house, a mid-twentieth-century one-story home with white clapboard and green planters on the windows and early blooming flowers in the garden. I blatantly snoop at the pictures in frames on the wall, of Jesse and his people, probably his grandparents, maybe his father—for the way he looks exactly like Jesse just with more hair. The urge to ask about his family, why there aren’t any photos of his mom, to know these people, is an itch I won’t scratch. It’s too intimate, too prying, despite wanting to know more about him, everything.
Jesse putters around the house trying to find the best place for the cat litter, while I lounge on his couch and periodically make “pspspsps” sounds at Betty, which she resolutely ignores. He frowns when I suggest he put the cat litter in the hallway bathroom, and to be fair, the half bathisa bit small.
“I can’t put her in the closet,” he whispers, aghast, when I next suggest the small hall closet beside the bathroom, and I guess I can see the optics of asking a queer man to force anyone into—or out of—a closet.
After staring into a room filled with workout equipment for at least five minutes, he settles on the mudroom off the kitchen. But states, to no one in particular, that he’ll reassess when winter comes since “it gets cold in there.”
At no point do I let any of this affect me—emotionally or physically—Jesse is my friend.
We’re friends.
New friends. And it would be inappropriate to think about pushing the large, worried new cat owner who is alsomy friendagainst a wall to punish and reward him with my mouth for the wrinkle forming between his eyebrows.
Jesse bends over the pet carrier, trying to coax Betty out with a treat, and I have to turn away, back to the photos on the wall. I can’t decide what’s more distracting, the muscular curve of his ass in those jeans or the leg hair coming out of the bottom of the cuffed hems, his bare feet untanned, also hairy, the toenails painted a shimmering black. It occurs to me that in my whole life I’ve never met a man who painted his toenails. And on the heels of that thought, what kind of men have I been spending my time with?
The wrong kind.
“Lu?”
