The kitty, of course, did not care. It slept in the sunbeam on his "no cats on the furniture" couch. It knocked his carefully alphabetized DVD collection off the shelf. And at 6:17 every evening, without fail, it sat by the front door and let out a tiny, rusty mew .
So he maintained the fiction. "It's not a pet," he told his neighbor, Mrs. Gable, who watched him through her lace curtains. "It's a pest control solution."
And so, John Persons, the man of gray suits and navy ties, became John Persons, the man with the cat. He still didn't know what to do with love. But he was learning. One tiny, rusty mew at a time. john persons kitty
He looked at her, now curled in a perfect orange circle on his lap, and said, "You are a disaster."
John Persons knelt in the damp soil, ruining the knees of his two-hundred-dollar trousers. He did not hesitate. With trembling hands, he gently pried the plastic free. The kitty didn't run. She licked his thumb, her tiny tongue like a grain of sandpaper. The kitty, of course, did not care
That night, he wrote a check to the local animal shelter for five hundred dollars. He ordered a plush cat bed from an online store (it was lavender, a color he had never before allowed into his home). And he finally gave the kitty a name.
She purred in agreement.
One Tuesday, after a brutal day of budget cuts, he came home to find the kitty absent. No mew. No muddy paw prints. No orange fur on the armchair. The silence was heavier than the usual silence. He checked the kitchen, the basement, the backyard. He walked the block, calling out a sound he’d never made before: "Here, kitty. Here, kitty."