Chapter 3
Let me see how short I can make this story: Ella begged for a year, Dee gave in a month ago, and we got an (older, shelter) cat.
Dee sneezed like she was training for the sneezing Olympics, Mom tried the usual homeopathy and burning herbs and smearing oils, Dee got incredibly stressed/guilty, Ella got incredibly sad, I posted on Nextdoor to see if we could find Mr. Button (that’s what Ella named the cat, after a character in a book she hadn’t even liked since she was five) a new and extremely loving home, and Dr. Joel Tav said yes, he’s looking for a cat.
Now Ella and I are pulling up in front of his house—mere blocks from us, has he been here all along?
—with the cat crying in the carrier and Ella crying next to the cat.
I am trying to use a calming, authoritative voice as I run around in frantic circles in my head.
This isn’t a coincidence, by the way. Not entirely.
I was going to give Mr. Button to my client Kristen, who runs an animal rescue. And then I searched online for Adam’s mesmerizing brother and saw he’d responded recently to a cat adoption post. I put up my own and messaged him. It fell so easily into place, like it wanted to happen.
But now that it’s happening, it feels reckless, kamikaze, a gun fired into a dark room.
His house is tidily square, pale gray with white trim, a mossy brick path up to the stoop, and a sinuous Japanese maple by the short driveway. He isn’t going to recognize me, I reassure myself.
I’m wrestling the cat carrier out of the back seat when I feel him behind me. No, I probably heard the door or his footsteps or something normal. I turn, knocking the carrier against the side of the car. I wince. “Sorry, sorry,” I say to Mr. Button.
Ella gasps. “Is he okay, Titi?”
“Yes! He’s totally fine!” I’m defensive.
He recognizes me. I can tell. Without his white coat, I am seeing too much at once: thick freckled arms, more muscled than expected, the sun catching in curling golden hairs, a hint of sturdy collarbone where the neck of his old T-shirt wilts obligingly, the implication through thin fabric of a chest someone could fall on without making a dent.
Did he just get back from a run? He seems glowy, energized.
I’m having some sort of severe physiological reaction— like an allergy, except the opposite. I need to get closer, I need to get it into my system.
This is unbelievably, offensively stupid. I can withstand the presence of an attractive man. I am in my thirties. I have looked, unflinching, into dozens of wide-open birthing vaginas.
“Are you Tempest?” He says my name like it isn’t a joke.
I mean to say, “My mom has bad taste—call me T.” But instead I default to a nerdy, self-serious “Yes.”
“I’m Joel,” he says, and redirects to Ella, asking her name, too.
Joel, I whisper in my head. And then, softer, like a pervert, Doctor Tav. His glasses are a beautiful tortoiseshell with gold flecks that call up the gold flecks in his eyes, which I can now tell are hazel.
Ella clamps her mouth closed, determined to dislike this potential purloiner of brief, beloved pets. But now Joel is crouching down in front of the carrier to peer in at Mr. Button, saying, “Hey, buddy.” And to Ella: “Would you say he’s a snuggler?”
A grudging nod. He’s still talking: “I had a snuggly cat once. She was gray with a white spot. You know what she liked to do?”
Ella wants to know but she doesn’t want to answer.
“She liked to knock things off the counter! Especially fragile glass things.”
“Why?” Ella is forgetting herself already. This damn seductive man.
“She wanted to see them break. Can you believe that? Glass everywhere. I always had to wear shoes inside.”
“We’re supposed to take off shoes in our house.”
“Exactly,” he agrees ruefully. “Can I get this?” He removes the carrier from my grasp, and I wish with savage futility that our skin had brushed. “Maybe we should bring him inside so we can see if he’s okay with the place.”
“He might not be,” warns Ella. “He’s gotten acclimated to our house already.” She heard us using that word a lot in the beginning.
“True,” agrees Joel as I say, “I think Mr. Button is very adaptable, sweetie.”
He says, “Maybe we can all hang out for a minute and see how Mr. Button feels. Let him decide.”
“Okay,” she says.
“Come on in.” He walks carefully so as not to jostle the carrier. His body has a certain excess—it isn’t strictly necessary for him to be this large or strong seeming—and his shoulders apologize for it in their slight rounding. “I’m really glad you and your mom are looking out for this little guy.”
“I’m not—” I start, glad for the opportunity, but Ella is faster.
“Titi’s my aunt,” she says. “My mom is too busy working to homeschool me.”
He glances back, startled, but doesn’t ask about the homeschooling, so I can’t deliver my usual pitch: Our group meets in a nature preserve!
We believe that learning happens all the time, not just during school hours!
Full disclosure: Learning didn’t seem to be happening much this morning, when Ella flung herself under the table, yelling that she’d rather die than count by nines.
Pretty sure that doesn’t happen at school.
Or if it does, the kid is probably wearing more than just their underwear and a headband with sequined mouse ears.
We are inside and it smells like sun on wood with a hint of some understated spice, maybe nutmeg or black tea.
I like his spare, comfortable style. The leather sofa is worn and buttery.
There’s a pilled wool chair, a faded Oriental rug that used to be more orange, a wooden coffee table, a black-andwhite photograph on the wall of a farm fallen into disuse.
“You’re a cellist.” I gesture at my favorite instrument where it rests next to a music stand. This room is practically begging for a woman to give birth in it.
“Just on the side.” He studies me for a second, then sets the carrier down by the coffee table and unfastens the clasp. “You’re okay, buddy. You can come out whenever you’re ready.”
He straightens, remembering something. “I got him some treats.” He goes to find them, and Ella kneels down to talk to Mr. Button, and I’m standing there at the margin of the living room on my cement feet, telling myself to stop it, just stop it right now.
Joel comes back. “You’re a doula,” he informs me.
“You’re a doctor,” I admit.
He smiles. “I saw you at the hospital the other day. The preeclampsia patient.”
“Izzy. Yeah.”
“Izzy,” he repeats, turning the rainbow-colored bag of treats in his hands. “How’s she doing?”
“Good! Um. Thank you.”
He shakes his head, uncomfortable. “No, no.”
“Yes,” I say, making it worse. We look at one another for a long moment. He blinks.
Oh my God.
I’m hauling his shirt over his head, and his glasses come off with it, and I’m shoving him back onto the couch, and—
“Are you going to give him a treat?” asks Ella.
“Right away!” Joel says, quick and distracted. His eyes flick up to mine again, and he pushes the alluring glasses, turns away, goes over to Ella.
It’s not as though men are always attracted to me.
Thank God. Really. Because imagine if they were.
In case you’re wondering (you are): I’m just below average height, blotchy of (pale) skin, thin in a way that might be boyish except for my thighs.
My brown hair—a wispy, unmotivated kind of straight—has long since given up; I keep it in a sloppy low knot.
I’m a woman who can go invisibly through the world.
I look a little older than I am, a bit more tired than I should.
The danger of me is all hidden, all private.
But I like the quiet of my face, which has never struck me as unattractive so much as unassuming.
People often feel comfortable with me, want to tell me about themselves.
Other women aren’t threatened; men can interact with me without the shimmer of flirtatious tension that constantly hangs around Dee in a sticky web, irritating her.
This is all to say that I don’t expect Joel Tav to react to me. I certainly don’t expect him to imagine tearing off my PARK PICKUP! CLEANING UP MOTHER NATURE’S BACKYARD T-shirt as we fall together into the couch’s waiting arms.
Still, there is something here—a shiver, a beat. Out of all the men, somehow this catastrophically beguiling one is interested in me. Or faintly interested. Or maybe just lonely.
Why would a man this lovely ever have cause to be lonely?
Then again, he is adopting a cat.
Mr. Button has ventured the slightest bit forth; Joel is petting him.
A minute later, he’s in his lap, and I’m watching the cat push his triangular little head up into Joel’s wide palm as Joel talks to Ella, and I try not to study his competent fingers, to compulsively imagine them on my skin, petting me instead.
Grub didn’t have any more to tell me about the angel theory (or at least, any more that didn’t sound copy-pasted from a Buffy the Vampire Slayer wiki), but “angelic” seems like a decent description of Joel, if there’s room in the definition for rampaging sexual magnetism.
He looks up. “Not a cat person?”
“No.” I cross my arms. “I am. So, yes. Yes, a cat person.” Smooth, T. With those conversational skills you might have ended up celibate either way. “I actually love cats,” I hear myself mutter.
Now his hand rests on Mr. Button’s raised rump, that slightly inappropriate spot cats are always sluttily trying to get you to pet. My legs bring me forward to the edge of the rug—a border to another country.
“We should head out in a few minutes, Els,” I say, my voice brittle. “Mr. Button seems good.”
She shoots an accusatory, alarmed look my way. “What if he misses me?”
“Come check on him!” says Joel. And then, at Ella’s urging, we’re setting that up. We’ll visit the cat next Monday. Joel enters my number into his phone, and I’m pleased with myself for remembering it. My head is a beehive with a thousand happy, lethal bees buzzing.