Chapter 14 #2
General Tso, who had been on the refrigerator, dropped to the floor with the heavy thud of a cat whose patience had been tested to its structural limits. He stalked to address a performance issue.
“General Tso’s going in,” I said.
Benji looked up from his phone. “He’s fine. He tolerates them now.”
“He tolerates Beyoncé. The other four are still on his list.”
“What list?”
“He has a list. You can see it in his face. There are animals he tolerates, animals he ignores, and animals he’s planning something for. The last category gets a specific look. It’s the narrowed eyes with the slow tail movement.”
“You’re telling me my cat has a hit list.” Benji’s lips curled as his brows rose.
“He’s not your cat. And yes, he has a list. Don’t make me repeat myself or write it down.”
“On a Post-it?” Benji’s grin grew.
“Obviously.”
“Obvi,” he corrected, his grin turning positively devious.
From the living room, there came a sound.
It was General Tso’s low, authoritative rumble, followed by the scattering of five sets of tiny paws fleeing in five different directions, followed by a single triumphant yowl that communicated, in the universal language of cats, that order had been restored and the insurgents had been wholly and completely routed.
Beyoncé, who feared nothing, came trotting back into the kitchen thirty seconds later with her tail high. She sat directly in front of General Tso’s food bowl, which was a provocation so brazen that even General Tso seemed momentarily uncertain how to respond.
“She’s going to get herself killed,” I said.
“She’s going to become his protégé. Mark my words. By the end of the month, she’ll be on the refrigerator.”
“Nobody gets on the refrigerator. The refrigerator is sovereign territory. It’s sacred ground. There would be war.”
“The refrigerator is the current sovereign’s territory. Empires change, Peter. Beyoncé is playing the long game.”
I watched Beyoncé sit in front of General Tso’s bowl with the quiet, unblinking confidence of a being who had decided that this particular piece of floor was hers and that the twenty-pound orange cat glaring at her from three feet away was a problem that would resolve itself in time.
General Tso watched her with the expression of a ruler who has encountered a rebel too small to crush but too bold to ignore. He turned and walked away, slowly, with dignity, the way a general retreats from a position that has become strategically untenable rather than militarily lost.
“Did General Tso just blink first?” Benji said, his brows reaching his hairline, almost as high as the sudden pitch of his voice.
“He made a tactical withdrawal.”
“He blinked! General Tso blinked. This is unprecedented. This is a regime change. This is—”
“It’s a cat walking away from a kitten.”
“It’s a power shift, Peter. The old guard is yielding to the new generation. This is how dynasties fall. I need to film this.”
He grabbed his phone and went after Beyoncé, who was now eating from General Tso’s bowl with the casual entitlement of a renegade who had conquered a kingdom and was sampling the spoils.
I sat at the island with my tea and watched them, the man and the kitten and the affronted orange monarch and the chaos of the living room behind them.
I felt the corner of my mouth doing something that I did not authorize . . .
And did not stop.
The incident happened on a Saturday.
I wasn’t there for it.
I was at the clinic doing weekend rounds, checking on the parking lot kitten, who had graduated from a splint to a soft wrap.
She had been named Gremlin by the staff because she still hissed at everyone who came near her.
I respected this as a boundary-setting strategy that reminded me of someone I lived with, though the someone in question used glitter and volume instead of hissing.
The effect was roughly the same.
Benji called me at 11 p.m., which was unusual because Benji never called.
He texted. He sent voice memos that were four minutes long and contained no usable information.
Benji communicated through every available medium except the actual telephony part of the telephone, because phone calls, he’d once explained, “required you to process language in real time without the safety net of editing, and that’s a psychological vulnerability I’m not willing to accept.”
So when my phone rang and his name was on the screen, I picked up immediately.
“What happened?” I asked without saying, “Hello.”
“I’m fine. Everyone’s fine. I need to preface this by saying that everyone is fine and the situation has been resolved and nobody was hurt.”
“What happened, Benji?”
“A guy got aggressive at the bar. It’s not a big deal.
” He paused. “He’d been cut off and he didn’t take it well.
He grabbed Jacks by the shirt when Jacks tried to walk him out.
I stepped in to help, and it escalated for about thirty seconds before Rod came out of the kitchen.
The guy finally decided he had somewhere else to be. ”
I was already standing.
I’d been at my desk, not writing, and now I was on my feet with my keys in my hand.
“Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine. He shoved me, but I’ve been shoved harder by bachelorette parties. Jacks has a torn collar and his ego is bruised. Rod is in the kitchen stress-chopping onions, which is his version of therapy. Mark and Finn are on the phone with somebody about security options.”
“You should have a bouncer.”
“That’s literally what Rod said forty-five minutes ago. Verbatim. He said, ‘You need someone on the door,’ and Finn agreed, and Mark is apparently already looking into it.”
“Good.”
“Peter.”
“What?”
“You don’t have to come here. I heard you picking up your keys.”
I looked down. My keys were in my hand. My shoes were by the door.
I’d been moving toward the exit without making a conscious decision to do so, operating on the same instinct that moved me when an animal was in distress. It was the automatic, physical response to a problem that needed solving.
“I’m not coming there,” I said, putting the keys on the counter with a deliberateness that I hoped communicated, to myself if no one else, that I was a rational person who did not drive to bars at 11 p.m. because his temporary roommate had been shoved.
“Good. Because I’m already on my way home. I’m in the car. Jacks is closing up. I’ll be there in fifteen.”
“Drive safe.”
“I always drive safe.”
“You drive with one hand on the wheel and the other holding a phone. That’s not safe.”
“I’m on speaker, you telephonic Nazi. It’s hands-free, legal and everything.”
“Hang up and drive.”
“Okay. I’m hanging up.”
He didn’t hang up.
“Benji.” I threaded a warning note in with his name.
“I’m hanging up. I just wanted to say that it was actually kind of nice that you answered on the first ring.” He hesitated, something Benji never did when speaking. His next words were smaller than any of the kittens. “Most people don’t do that.”
He hung up before I could respond.
I had several responses, all of which involved admitting things I wasn’t prepared to admit to him or myself or the universe .
. . or anyone, damn it . . . starting with the fact that I hadn’t answered on the first ring because I was alert or responsible.
I’d answered on the first ring because his name on my phone screen at 11 p.m. had produced a spike of fear so immediate and so visceral—and so unexpected—that my hand had moved before my brain caught up.
No longer able to properly focus for reasons my rational brain could not comprehend, I drove home. When I walked in the door, I put my keys back on the hook.
Then I made tea.
Then I sat at the island and didn’t go to bed, because going to bed would require leaving the kitchen, and leaving the kitchen would mean not being in the room where I’d hear the front door open.
He came home twenty minutes later.
The door opened with its usual careful sequence (slow key, controlled turn, gentle close).
Then he was in the kitchen doorway in his work clothes, smelling like the bar, with a red mark on his forearm where someone had grabbed him.
On his face was a smile that was trying to sell me on the idea that everything was fine.
“See?” he said. “All in one piece.”
I stared at the red mark with the diligence of a doctor examining a patient.
It was superficial, already fading, the kind of thing that would be gone by morning. I knew this because I assessed injuries for a living, and the clinical part of my brain registered the mark as minor and unremarkable.
The non-clinical part of my brain wanted to ask who had done it, and where that person was now, and whether Rod’s stress-chopping had been therapeutic enough or whether additional measures were warranted.
“Put ice on that,” I said.
“It’s nothing.”
“Ice. Now. Ten minutes. Don’t argue with a doctor.”
He looked at me.
I looked at him.
He went to the freezer, got the ice pack I kept for Hiro’s bad days, and pressed it against his forearm.
“Thank you for answering the phone,” he said.
“You called. I answered.”
“On the first ring.”
“I’m a light sleeper.”
“You weren’t sleeping. You’re fully dressed, and there’s tea on the counter.”
He had me there.
I picked up my tea and took a sip that was mostly a stalling tactic while I assembled a response that didn’t reveal more than I intended.
“The animals needed their evening check,” I said. “I was up.”
Benji smiled. It wasn’t the big one or the one he used at the bar. It was the small one, the one that was just for rooms where no one was watching, the one that involved his eyes more than his mouth.
“The animals,” he said. “Right.”
He took the ice pack and went down the hall to the foster room. I heard his door close, heard the soft sound of Princess Consuela acknowledging his return with a chirp, and heard the creak of the bed as he settled in.
I washed my mug, checked on Hiro, who was asleep at the foot of my bed, his breathing steady, checked on General Tso, who was on the refrigerator, one eye open, maintaining his eternal vigil, then checked on Potato, who was on the couch, who was always on the couch, who would be on the couch when the sun went dark and the seas boiled and the last star burned out.
I went to bed.
I did not write a Post-it.
Some things were better left without a written record, especially the things you weren’t ready to read back to yourself in the morning.
But I lay there in the dark for a while, listening to the apartment settle.
I noticed the quality of the silence had changed again.
It was the same quiet, the same nighttime hush of a building at rest, but it registered differently now that I knew everyone was home and safe and accounted for.
The animals nested in their places.
The man down the hall lay on his bed, in his room, with his cat.
I stared into the darkness where the ceiling fan spun.
Everyone was accounted for.
Everyone was home.