Chapter 14
Andi
THE KITTEN SLEEPS ON my bed. She arrived three days ago in a towel, crying, and now she curls against my shoulder with her crooked ear pressed into the pillow and her purr so loud it vibrates through the mattress.
I love her immediately, completely, and without reservation, but I resent loving her because Elliot brought her home and I don’t want anything he gives me to work.
Sadie is cautiously tolerant. She sniffed the kitten for a full minute the first night, then retreated to Alex’s room and didn’t come back to the master bedroom for two days.
Now she sleeps at the foot of the bed while the kitten sleeps at the head, and the two of them have arrived at an arrangement built on mutual indifference and occasional territorial disputes over the sunny spot by the window.
The kids named her on the second day. Hope suggested Orangey because of the orange patch on her head in the tabby coat, and Alex wanted to call her Volcano, which I vetoed, so they negotiated until the kitten became Clementine.
Alex calls her Clem, and Hope calls her by her full name, which is very Hope.
Clementine has taken over the house with the full entitlement of a cat who spent time under a dumpster and has decided she’s never going back.
She sleeps on my pillow, eats from a bowl outside the bedroom door, and attacks Sadie’s tail with the focus of a military operation.
She sits on the kitchen counter and knocks pens onto the floor, and Alex laughs every time while Hope pretends to be annoyed but scratches Clem’s chin when she thinks nobody is watching.
I haven’t had a cat in thirteen years. The last one was Harold, old and black and arthritic, the cat who slept on my bed from age seven to age twenty-one and who I buried in the backyard of our first apartment with Elliot holding the shovel.
I gave up cats when I married Elliot because he’s allergic and because I loved him more than I loved the thing I was giving up, and I made that trade without discussion, without complaint, and without anyone asking me to reconsider.
Now there’s a kitten on my pillow, a dog at my feet, and a husband in the guest room. The cat I couldn’t have for fourteen years was delivered by the man who broke my marriage. That would be funny if it didn’t make me want to throw something.
WEDNESDAY DINNER, THE four of us are at the table. Clementine is on the counter behind Elliot, licking a paw, and she’s been within three feet of him for twenty minutes.
I watch him while he talks to Alex about the science fair results.
He’s eating and talking but not sneezing.
He isn’t rubbing his eyes. He isn’t doing what he used to do in the first apartment with Harold, the constant nose-wiping, the red eyes, and the fifteen-minute retreat to the porch with a Benadryl until the medication kicked in.
That was Elliot with a cat, miserable and medicated but enduring it for my sake.
This Elliot is sitting three feet from a tabby who’s shedding orange hair onto the counter behind his plate, and he’s fine.
I say nothing, but I notice it. Clementine jumps off the counter and lands on the chair next to him, and he reaches over to scratch her crooked ear without interrupting his conversation with Alex.
His fingers are in her fur, and there’s no reaction at all, no sneeze or watery eyes, and a cold thread of confusion works its way up my back.
That isn’t how allergies function. Cat allergies don’t disappear because you decide you’re comfortable with cats.
They’re immune responses, and they require intervention, whether that’s medication or avoidance or immunotherapy.
The man who couldn’t share a room with Harold for fifteen minutes is petting Clementine and talking about volcanoes.
I eat my dinner, help with the dishes, and don’t ask.
THURSDAY EVENING, LAUREL calls, and I take it in the bedroom with Clem on my lap and the door closed.
“Hope texted me a picture of the cat,” Laurel says. “She’s cute. Crooked ear.”
“She showed up three days ago.”
“Hope said Elliot found her.”
“At the hospital. Under a dumpster.”
“And he brought her home.”
“He brought her home with kitten food and a litter box and a receipt from the university vet clinic.”
Laurel is quiet for a moment. “The man who’s allergic to cats brought home a cat.”
“Yes.”
“The same man whose allergies are why you haven’t had a cat in fourteen years.”
“I’m aware of the situation, Laurel.”
“Is he performing a grand gesture, or did he actually find a stray?”
“I don’t know. He says he found her, he took her to the vet, and he brought her home.
” I scratch Clementine’s crooked ear, and she presses into my hand and purrs harder.
“I told him a cat doesn’t fix what he broke.
He said he wasn’t trying to fix anything, that he found her and didn’t know what else to do. ”
“Do you believe him?”
“I believe he found a kitten. I don’t know if I believe the impulse was as uncomplicated as he says.”
“And you kept her.”
“I kept her because she’s a living animal who needed a home. I didn’t keep her as a thank-you card.”
“I know.” She pauses. “Is he sneezing?”
I stop petting Clementine. “What?”
“Is he sneezing? Around the cat. Is he having an allergic reaction?”
I think about the past three days, Elliot in the kitchen with Clem on the counter, Elliot passing through the living room while she chased a toy across the floor, Elliot sitting at the dinner table with cat hair on his scrub pants.
I picture his face and his eyes and his breathing, and I try to remember a single sneeze.
“No,” I say. “He isn’t.”
“Isn’t that strange?”
“He’s allergic to cats, Laurel. He’s been allergic his entire life.”
“I know. That’s why I’m asking.”
“No. He isn’t sneezing. I wondered about that too.”
She says nothing else, because she doesn’t need to.
He isn’t sneezing. He’s been in the same house as a cat for three days, and his eyes aren’t swollen and his nose isn’t running.
The Elliot I married couldn’t sit in a room with cat hair on the furniture without reaching for Benadryl, and this Elliot is eating dinner with Clementine a few feet away and behaving as though she’s always lived here.
“I need to go,” I tell Laurel.
“Okay.” She doesn’t push. “Call me tomorrow.”
I hang up and set Clementine on the bed before going into the hallway.
Elliot’s jacket is on the banister, the navy one he wears over scrubs when the hospital is cold.
He leaves it there every night, and every morning I move it to the coat closet because the banister is not a coat rack, and this is one of the four thousand small tasks I perform without acknowledgment.
I pick up the jacket and check the pockets, not snooping but out of long habit, because I’ve pulled receipts and gum wrappers and loose change out of this jacket for years. The right pocket has his car keys and a receipt from the gas station. The left pocket has a folded appointment card.
I unfold it.
Richmond Allergy Associates. Patient: Elliot Monroe. Immunotherapy, Cat Allergen Protocol. Weekly injections, Wednesdays, 3:00 p.m.
The card lists several dates, and the first one falls several weeks before the kitten arrived.
I read it again, holding the card up to the hallway light and going over every word. Patient, Elliot Monroe. Cat Allergen Protocol. Wednesdays at three. A column of completed appointments checked off in blue ink, and more scheduled below them.
He started allergy shots weeks before the kitten.
Before he ever found Clementine under that dumpster, he was already sitting in an allergist’s waiting room getting injected with cat allergen extract, already enduring the swelling, the soreness, and the weekly drive to an office on West Broad, all so that someday the woman he betrayed could have a cat without him sneezing.
The timeline reshapes everything. The kitten wasn’t a plan, because the shots came first. He must have read my list, I could own a cat again, so he went to an allergist and started a six-month course of immunotherapy but told nobody.
Not me or the kids anyway. He carried it alone, without announcement or asking anyone to notice, exactly as I have carried everything for fourteen years.
My hands are shaking as I fold the card and put it back in the pocket, and the shaking isn’t anger. It’s grief, arriving in the place where the fury used to sit, and it hurts more than the fury ever did.
I hang the jacket in the coat closet and go back to the bedroom, where Clementine is asleep on the pillow with her crooked ear bent against the fabric. I sit down on the edge of the bed and look at her, and my eyes burn.
The kitten wasn’t manipulation. He found a stray and his first thought was me.
The allergy shots weren’t strategy either.
He’s been taking a needle in his arm every Wednesday since before discovering the kitten.
I’m sure the arm swells, so he rolls his sleeve down, goes back to work, and has never once said a word about it.
He never said a word.
I spent three days furious with him for bringing home a cat.
I told him a cat doesn’t fix what he broke, told him he was performing a grand gesture, and he stood in the kitchen and absorbed all of it.
He could have said, I’ve been getting allergy shots since before I found her, and it would have changed the entire conversation, but he didn’t.
He kept it silent because saying it would have turned it into currency, and he chose to let me be angry rather than spend it.
The grief opens further, and it’s rawer than the affair.
It hurts in a different place. The affair wounded my pride and my trust. This wounds the story I’ve been telling myself, the one where everything he does is performance, the grovel is an act, and the new version of him is temporary.
The allergy shots don’t fit that story, because they’re too costly and too quiet and too painful to be fake.
He’s been getting allergy shots so I can have a cat again.
I pick up Clementine and hold her against my chest as she presses her crooked ear into my collarbone and purrs.
I haven’t held a cat in years. That’s what frightens me.
Not the shots or the kitten, but the recognition.
The man I married is still in there, surfacing in the leash hook, helping the kids, and in every Wednesday afternoon he’s spent in an allergist’s office where nobody in our life knows why he’s there.
I don’t know what to do with that.