In the late autumn I was sitting in my den working, on a very cold, crisp afternoon. When I looked up and out of the sliding glass doors at the back of the house, I saw Fred sitting outside.
Now, I panicked immediately, because to the best of my knowledge, my cat Fred was doing what she does almost every day during the nine cold months of Michigan’s weather year—she climbs under the flannel sheets and blankets of my bed at nine in the morning, bakes herself to a toasty finish, and emerges at dinnertime, yawning. I’d gone out earlier in the afternoon, however, so it occurred to me that the little imp could’ve slipped out. Like I said, it was a frigid afternoon, and the thought of Fred out there in the cold, for hours, threw me into a panic.
My heart pounding somewhere in the vicinity of my adam’s apple, I leapt up and opened the door. The cat strolled in quite calmly, tail lifted and flicking the last half-inch, and rubbed against my leg, grateful. Then it walked over to the kitchen and proceeded to start eating the dry food. I cooed and petted its cold fur and told it how sorry I was and how I’d never, ever make the same mistake and let it out by accident ever, ever. . . .
And it was only at that point I realized the cat wasn’t Fred.
Oh, they looked the same. Both are standard-issue tabbies with pretty much the same markings. Both were roughly the same size. Fred’s coloring was a little more brown where this cat’s was gray, however, and the cat making itself home by rolling around on the kitchen carpet and settling down in front of the air duct for a nap didn’t have Fred’s heft, shall we tactfully say. Fred’s a small cat, but she’s surprisingly heavy. Dense, even. She’s like some kind of Time Lord cat, bigger and infinitely heavier on the inside than the out. This cat was a lot lighter. It was obviously fed regularly, though it didn’t seem to be minding the snack it had from my bowls.
Even Sarah couldn’t tell the impostor from the real thing. She took one look at the strange cat, shrugged, and went back to licking herself.
Anyway, I did the only thing that a normal person would do in such a situation. I took a photo of me hugging the strange cat and sent it to the Mont in a text message and told him I was adopting it.
As I expected, he went ballistic. I could practically hear him explode, all the way from Connecticut. WHERE DID YOU GET THAT CAT? YOU CANNOT KEEP THAT CAT!! WE ARE NOT GETTING ANOTHER CAT!!! DID YOU FEED THAT CAT!!!! DON’T FEED THAT CAT!!!!!
I had already long shooed the cat out and told it to return home by the time I sent a text message back. I’ve named him Pepe, I confabulated. You’ll like him when you visit.
When the Mont called (seconds later), I confessed that I was only teasing about adopting Pepe. The fact that I admitted to my prank while giggling wildly, however, only convinced him that I was fibbing about fibbing, and that I really did have a third cat sleeping under the roof with me. It probably didn’t help that I would take photos of Fred doing her usual stuff around the house and message them to him with captions like, Pepe learned where the litter box is pretty quickly, or Look how Pepe likes to drink from the toilet!
I figured that Pepe had to belong to one of the neighbors—he was obviously too well-kept to be a stray. Besides, he visited the house at pretty much the same time in the afternoons. That told me that someone was letting him out on a routine, and that he was simply making the rounds before returning back home for the coldest and darkest hours of the day. Sarah continued to assume that Pepe was Fred; Fred would growl at Pepe through the protection of the glass doors, but if I brought the cat in for a quick cuddle, she’d quickly lose interest and go back to the rough work of snoozing beneath the blankets.
By the time the Mont came home for the holiday, the weather had gotten so cold that I’d not seen Pepe for a couple of weeks. In my way of thinking, that was a good thing. I’m always distressed when I see house cats out in the dead of winter. The scene that followed, though, went a little something like this: The Mont walked into the house and dropped his bags. We embraced. Sarah meowed and demanded to be fed. Fred walked into the room, brushed up against him, and allowed herself to be petted. It was a happy family reunion.
“Where’s Pepe?” the Mont asked, half-joking, half suspicious.
“Honey,” I said, laughing in a way that was meant to imply how silly he was to take seriously any of my pranks.
Then I looked at the back door. A little tabby was peeking in.
It was a gift from God. Who am I to reject such comedy manna? “Well hey, Pepe!” I cooed, walking over to the sliding glass doors and opening them. Once I’d slid back the screen, Pepe trotted in, tail high and whiskers twitching. He rubbed against me, nodded at the other two cats in passing, ignored the Month, and then helped himself to the Friskies.
Well. The scene that followed was pretty much like the first text message exchange. WHERE DID THAT CAT COME FROM? DOES HE LIVE HERE?? HAVE YOU BEEN FEEDING THAT CAT??? DID YOU NOT HEAR ME SAY THAT WE ARE NOT GETTING ANOTHER CAT????
Honestly, there were fewer decibels when Lucy smuggled home a giant cheese in Ricky’s tuba.
Eventually, when I stopped snickering, I picked up Pepe and put him out, assuring The Mont that the cat did not live there, that I hadn’t seen the cat in two weeks, and that it was mere wild coincidence that it should show up thirty seconds after his arrival home and demand to be let in. Honestly. Coincidence. That’s all it was. Jeez, calm down.
Eventually he did. “Come on,” I told him, once his face was no longer the shade of a cherry-flavored Tootsie Pop. “Let’s take your stuff upstairs.”
Once we were upstairs and the bags had been thrown in the spare bedroom, we flopped down on our bed to relax and talk. I asked how his trip had been. He told me about the route he’d taken. We’d barely started talking when we heard a faint thud, followed by a faint meow.
I sat up. “Fred must be trying to attack Pepe through the glass door,” I said. But no, the sound wasn’t quite that. We heard another meow.
Then, like actors in a classic screwball flick, we both turned our heads slowly, simultaneously, to the window behind the bed. There was Pepe, staring at us through the second-story window. Not only staring at us. Pepe was affixed to the screen with all four paws and all his claws, legs sprawled in all four directions, looking all the world like one of those Garfield stuffed animals with suction cups on his feet, affixed to a car window.
Now, I’m not sure how Pepe managed to climb up on the den roof and make his way to that exact window. I’m still uncertain how he even knew we’d be on the other side. What I do know is that the look of utter disbelief on The Mont’s face at that moment is something I’m going to cherish for the rest of my life. “Well hey, Pepe!” I said brightly again, as if he attached himself to the second story window all the time. “Ready to come in again?”
The Mont watched, slack-jawed, as I opened the window and pulled up the screen. Pepe stepped over the sill and through the slats of the headboard as if we did that kind of thing all the time. Then he curled up on the blanket, squinched shut his eyes with affection, and purred.
I’m still slightly deaf in my left ear from the yelling that followed. Jeez. Honestly. It’s not like I paid the darn cat to do that. I don’t have the money for such comedy gold.
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