7. Chapter Six #2
He trailed off and glanced over at Gayle for a cue, his face screwed up as he tried to work out how to finish that.
“Thank you,” Joe saved Gayle from that. He squeezed his eyes shut as he hugged Jessie back, his damp sniff hidden against her shoulder.
After a moment, he pulled himself together and let her go, sitting back on his haunches.
He reached out and gave Benjy’s hair a quick scrub before the kid ducked away from him. “But I still shouldn’t have yelled.”
Jessie wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Does that mean we can keep him?” she asked.
Oh, he should have expected that. “No,” he said.
The ‘I hate you’ trembled visibly on Jessie’s lips. She bit it back as she glared at him with swimming eyes.
“ Dad would have let me keep me,” she said accusingly.
OK, that was worse. It was true too, but then they could if Alan had still been here…and he’d always had a flexible approach to ‘should.’ Before Joe could think of something to say—because that definitely wouldn’t help—Jessie turned on her heel and stormed out of the kitchen.
Benjy watched her go and then gave Joe a brave look. “It’s OK,” he said, with see-through nonchalance. “Mom couldn’t have taken care of him anyhow. So it’s best he go now, before Cody gets attached.”
And Joe had thought the jab about ‘Dad’ had been as low as he could feel. He started to say something, but Benjy just shrugged it off and headed in the opposite direction to Jessie, past Gayle, who still hovered in the doorway. Nat followed him.
Gayle dropped her hand on his shoulder as he squeezed by her. “We have to go soon, get your coat.”
While he left to do as he was told, Gayle looked at Joe and shook her head.
“That was painful to watch.”
He steepled his fingers on the ground and pushed himself to his feet. “Really? Should have been on this side, it was awesome.”
Gayle grimaced an apology and held up her phone.
“I called my cat friends,” she said. “No one’s lost a Maine Coon, but they’re going to ask around ‘the community’ to see if anyone has.”
“Thanks,” Joe said.
He looked over at the playpen just as Cody, sweating as he hauled himself up on bowed legs, reached over to the side and swatted the cat with his stuffie. Joe flinched, but the cat, to its credit, just blinked, looked offended, and lay down.
“OK, no hitting the cat,” he said as he went over to grab the lion/dog/at this stage hairless wet thing from his son. Cody looked at him with an expression of complete betrayal, fell back onto his well-padded bottom, and started to grizzle miserably. “I’m sorry. Sorry.”
While Joe tried to push the lion-dog-thing back into Cody’s grip, Gayle cleared her throat.
“Not to teach my grandmother how to suck eggs,” she said and pointed. “He seems to have a tag.”
****
The tin of Campbell’s wouldn’t heat itself, so Gayle and Nat had gone. Since Cody had grizzled himself into a nap, that meant that no one in the house, except maybe the cat, was talking to Joe.
Not that it was adding much to the conversation, but at least it was listening.
“Maybe I should have fought it,” Joe muttered as he picked at the thick, gray knots of fluff that had matted around the cat’s collar.
He was sitting on the ground with it sprawled over his lap.
Only about half its weight was on him, but that was enough that he could feel pins and needles in his feet.
“It’s just…it was easier not to, and nothing was easy then. ”
He tugged at a knot of cottony, cloud-gray hair. The cat lay its ears flat and made a disgruntled sound. It wasn’t exactly a hiss, more of a groan, but it flexed its claws into his leg at the same time and…the message was clear.
“Sorry.”
He kept working on the knots until he finally had the collar free, and a bloody finger from a thorny strip of briar that had been tangled in all that ruff.
Enough chunks of fur, the ends scabbed with old blood, had come free along with it that Joe was pretty sure the cat had a few injuries from it, too.
Not something he was going to poke at, though. His tackle might not be getting the sort of use Gayle thought he needed, but he was still attached to it. The idea of losing it to a cat the size of a child’s trike didn’t appeal.
“I’ll tell your owner to get you to the vet,” he promised as he pushed the visitor off his lap. “They’ll get you fixed up.”
The cat didn’t cooperate with the ‘pushing’ part of Joe’s plan. It just went limp, all fur and uncooperative dead weight. He tried to wedge his hands under it and roll it off his thigh, but it just stretched and yawned, like he was massaging it.
That was fine. Joe had been a parent long enough to know that compromise was not weakness.
“Fine,” he said. “Stay there then.”
He leaned back against the couch and strained his arm, tongue caught between his teeth, until he managed to nudge his phone off the edge.
It clattered to the floor, and he grabbed it.
A swipe of his thumb opened his call log, and, after a quick, winced glance at a missed call from work, he quickly tapped in the number on the tag.
“Hi,” a woman’s light, distracted voice sing-songed in his ear. “This is Hannah. How can I help you?”
“Um…” Joe was flat-footed for some reason. Maybe it was that he’d been all braced to be a hero, and Hannah didn’t sound all that upset. “I found a cat, and the tag–”
There was silence on the other end of the line. Maybe, Joe thought irritably, he should have let the kids keep the cat after all. They at least were enthusiastic.
The woman exhaled, audibly shaky. “Shit,” she muttered. “Is he…did something—”
Joe’s brain caught up with his sour mood.
“He’s fine,” he blurted out before the woman had to ask. “I mean, I think he is. He’s a bit grubby, and I think he’s got a few scrapes, but he seems happy enough.”
“Oh my god,” the woman said all on one exhale. “He’s alive? It’s been two weeks. We thought…He’s an indoor cat. And this is Alaska, you know?”
He did.
Bobcats. Moose. Assholes.
“I should have led with him being OK,” he said. “Sorry.”
“No,” Hannah said. “You found Angus. I don’t care what else you do, all is forgiven. Oh my god. OK, umm, where are you? I’ll text my brother, and he can come pick him up?”
Joe hesitated as he glanced up at the ceiling. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea to make the kids watch ‘their’ cat being taken away. The two of them had said goodbye enough.
“I could maybe meet him somewhere,” he offered, his voice faltering a little as he eyeballed the cat—Angus—and tried to work out the logistics.
He didn’t have a carrier, and it wasn’t like he could fit Angus in his backpack.
Or carry his backpack if he did. Still, he’d already made the offer, so he was stuck with it now. “Halfway maybe?”
Hannah made a pleased sound. He could hear her typing furiously in the background of the call.
“That’s so kind,” she said. “But either way, he’s been frantic. Where are you?”
“Um, Gateway,” Joe admitted. He didn’t know why he sounded guilty. “Just on the outskirts.”
…there, now the guilt made sense. He’d lied. Not deliberately—when they’d moved in, the sprawling development had been on the outskirts. The only problem was that then someone built new outskirts.
“Just before the outskirts,” he corrected himself.
He wasn’t sure that Hannah had heard him as she talked excitedly over the top of him.
“Are you kidding?” she said. “That’s perfect. He’s actually in the area today with his toy planes. He can come and get Angus anytime that’s good for you?”
Joe glanced down at the cat. Something had made him start to absently pet the animal when he talked, and his fingers were buried knuckle deep in the cotton-fluff gray-white coat. He’d still not call himself a cat person, but he’d admit that this was a pretty cool cat.
And that meant, he told himself firmly as he disengaged his fingers, it was a good idea to get it out of the house before he got any more attached.
“That would be great,” he said and quickly rhymed off his address for her. “I have no idea what a cat like this eats.”
Hannah snorted. “Better than me,” she said. “Don’t get me started. OK, yeah, he just has to lock up, and he’ll be on his way. Thank you so much . I can’t believe you found him. We’d thought a bear had gotten him or something.”
Push come to shove, Joe thought as he rubbed Angus’ head and felt the purr vibrate up his arm like an industrial engine, he wasn’t sure who’d have come out ahead in that fight.
“It’s not fair,” Jessie sulked from under the hood of her bubblegum pink sweater. What Joe could see of her face was tear-stained and blotchy. “Why does he have to leave today?”
“It’s not fair that this guy thought his cat was dead,” Joe pointed out. “Angus is obviously a much-loved member of their family.”
He balanced Cody on his hip as he opened the playpen and tossed in some chicken to lure Angus in.
Angus considered the ‘trap’ for a moment, gave Joe a scathing look, and then sauntered into the pen.
He shook himself, crouched, and then pounced on the chicken with both front feet before settling down to eat it. Joe closed the door behind him.
From the table where Benjy was finishing a coloring page that Cody had abandoned…using the ‘right colors,’ the mutter of “then they shoulda taken better care of him” drifted.
“Yeah,” Jessie said. “That. What if he loses him again, and this time he can’t find us?”
Joe stepped back and eyeballed his make-shift cat prison.
It was a modular, bespoke ‘play yard’—ordered by Alan when they first learned their surrogate was pregnant —and it was currently batting 100 for confining babies.
Now that he looked at Angus, he wasn’t sure it was rated for cats.
Angus, as he stood on his back legs and hung his paws over the top of it like a nosy neighbor, seemed to share his doubts,
It would have to do.
“I am sure they’ll be more careful,” he said. “Look, I know this sucks. But he’s not our cat and we can’t—”
Afford.
“—just take someone else’s pet because we want it. That’s not right.”
Jessie screwed up her face as she tried to think of a rebuttal to that.
“It’s not fair,” was the best she could come up with.
She wasn’t wrong. Joe reached out to pull her into a hug, but she dodged him.
“I hate you,” she blurted out before she stormed out of the room. Not upstairs this time, just into the other room. He heard the familiar soft thud of her throwing herself bodily onto the couch.
Cody stretched his hands after her as he made a distressed hiccup and dropped his lion-dog. Joe jiggled him as a distraction and stooped down awkwardly to grab the toy. He flapped it around in the air until Cody focused on it, his face split with a gummy, delighted smile.
“She doesn’t mean it,” Benjy said, kindly if just a little grudgingly. It was still pretty good for an eleven-year-old. “We know you’re doing your best.”
“It’s OK,” Joe said as he looked over him.
He let Cody get hold of the toy and went over to put a reassuring hand on Benjy’s shoulder.
While he was there, he glanced down at the coloring book on the table.
Benjy had a point, he realized. Cody was not on top of colors from the purple sun glaring over the algae drink blue fields that were currently being corrected.
Did that need intervention or encouragement?
Was it something to do with his ears? The doctors in Portland hadn’t mentioned it.
Joe supposed he could lie awake and worry about it later.
“You guys don’t have to worry about my feelings. ”
Benjy looked up at him.
“Who else have you got?” he asked.
The ‘ I hate you’ was expected. It came and went with how overwhelmed Jessie was in any given situation. Benjy’s matter-of-fact question, on the other hand, knocked the air out of Joe. He swallowed, his throat dry, and tried to hastily workshop some sort of non-traumatic response.
A knock on the door saved him from that.
“Fuck!” Jessie yelled, the word somewhat muffled, based on prior experience, by the cushion she had her face buried in.
Cody said, “Uck!” with some intensity.
“Jesus,” Joe muttered. It made Benjy snort out a laugh, at least. Joe squeezed his shoulder. “OK, just don’t worry about me. I’m the adult. I’m meant to worry, you’re meant to practice being a problem for when adolescence hits.”
He left them to it as he went to answer the door. The vague, shadowy silhouette of someone tall and fidgety was just visible through the glass panel. Joe absently wiped his hands on his thighs as he opened the door.
It was Quentin.
They stared at each other for a moment. Joe felt a burst of relief that one of them had finally made the first move, but then it occurred to him that this was stalking. That was not romantic.
Shit.