“If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you switched him with a double. Eight months of trying, and he wanted none of my attention. You’re here a few days, and he’s following you around like a lost puppy.”
Kurt brushed a few pieces of pretzel salt off his thigh, then swooped the cat onto his lap. “I opened an old can of sardines for him last night. He was definitely a fan.”
“Did he sleep with you again?”
“Either that, or someone was trying to suffocate me with a fur pillow around two or three in the morning.”
Kelsey giggled. “Some things you have to see to believe.” The Maine coon was a giant cat and took up all of Kurt’s lap, but that didn’t stop him from getting comfortable. He plopped down and started kneading Kurt’s knees. Kelsey could hear the cat’s sharp claws getting stuck in Kurt’s cargo pants. She pulled out her phone. “Do you care if I take a picture? Megan will never believe me.”
“Knock yourself out.” A second later, he winced as Mr. Longtail’s sharp claws dug into his skin. Kurt extracted the claws carefully from his pants, then began to pump one foot softly, causing his leg to jiggle and Mr. Longtail’s head to bobble like her Chihuahua bobblehead. The movement stopped the cat from kneading but didn’t seem to disturb him otherwise. He curled into a ball, exposing part of his stomach, and began to purr. Kelsey snapped a picture as Kurt’s free hand disappeared into the cat’s mass of thick, gray belly fur.
She inspected her work, promising herself that even though Kurt looked incredibly sexy with his broad shoulders, strong jawline, and shadow of stubble, she wouldn’t pull out her phone later just to stare at the picture.
“Sorry about earlier,” he said after swallowing a bite of pretzel. “My mother’s a bit much, if you didn’t notice.”
“For a second there, I thought you were talking about not naming the dogs.”
“I’m a pretty good judge of when a battle has been lost.”
“So you’re consenting? You’re okay with me naming them?”
“I’m consenting. Let’s leave it at that. And I named one while you were gone. I’ll leave the rest up to you.”
“Who?”
“I’ll let you figure that out later. I wrote it on his crate.”
Kelsey cocked an eyebrow. “I know what I’m doing as soon as I finish this pretzel.”
He smiled and ate a bite of pretzel.
“Your mom was nice. Does she live in Fort Leonard Wood too? I know you said your grandfather teaches there.”
“She’s not too far outside the post. She lives in a trailer park a few miles away actually.” Kurt swigged his root beer, then added, “She left my grandparents’ house when she turned eighteen. I was a little over a year old. To hear her talk, you wouldn’t know it, but my grandparents were the ones to raise me. Back then, she pretty much came and went as she pleased. At least that’s how I remember it.”
Kelsey wasn’t sure how to respond. He didn’t say it like he wanted sympathy, but she’d put the pieces together about the cell phone having been his grandmother’s. If his grandmother had been more involved in raising him than his own mom, her passing had to be especially hard. “I’m really sorry about your grandmother.”
“Me too,” he said, looking at the house across the road. Two carpenters were there today, and somewhere inside the house, a table saw kept going off. “Nobody was expecting it. She was in her late sixties but healthy as can be. She was in the grocery store when it happened. She fell and hit her head, but it was a stroke that caused it.”
If they were closer, Kelsey would’ve put her hand on his shoulder. Instead, she busied herself by breaking off a piece of her pretzel stick.
“She was an amazing woman,” Kurt continued, keeping his focus on the house across the street. “Small in size, lots smaller than my mom even, but she was big in spirit. She was born in Mexico and came from money—loads of it, to hear her tell it. Her father was very proud and traditional and wanted to keep all the money and property in his family line. When she was eighteen, she found out he wanted to marry her off to her third cousin. While the relationship was distant enough not to have any genetic risk associated with it, they’d been raised in the same extended family and she wanted absolutely nothing to do with him.
“She and her father were having big rows about it, so he sent her on vacation with her mother and aunt to a beach in Baja, California, in hopes she’d cool down. That was when she met my grandfather. He was a few years older and stationed down in Texas back then. He was on leave and vacationing with his buddies. They eloped after meeting each other three times. She never went home.”
As this last part settled in, Kurt stroked Mr. Longtail, who clearly loved having his belly rubbed. Kelsey could practically feel the cat’s deep, thrumming purr reverberating in her chest.
“Not even for vacation?” she asked. The idea of never seeing her own mom, dad, or brothers again was almost unfathomable.
Kurt raised an eyebrow. “She reached out to them after my mother was born, but her father made it clear she’d been excommunicated. To hear her tell it, my very stubborn and set-in-his-ways grandfather was a pussycat compared to her dad. However, a year or so before I enlisted, she got a letter from her hometown in Mexico. I don’t think she ever opened it. At least if she did, it was something she never shared. She said sometimes too much water can pass under a bridge.”
“Wow. I can’t imagine having my family turning against me because of who I wanted to marry, but I don’t have that kind of heritage either. At least she handled it okay. She sounds like an amazing person.”
“She was the best.” Kurt rolled the
