Pru stomped her foot and shouted and the cat sprang up and ran away. She picked up the sweater, which she hadn’t worn since the night Rudy broke up with her. The cat had chewed two large holes in the front and the right cuff had been shredded. The delicate rosebuds had all been ripped from the placket.
The cat was destroying her favorite clothes. As if it knew exactly what it was doing, it was taking out its vengeance on her rarest, most treasured things.
AS PREDICTED, MC KAY SAID HE WOULDN’T HELP HER take the cat back to the Humane Society.
“Then I’ll take a bus,” she said.
“No, no,” he said. “Wait. I have a better idea.”
“McKay.”
“Come on, I’ll buy you lunch. Where do you want to meet?”
She thought of the girl and John Owen, alone in the café. “I don’t know,” she said, trying to hide her eagerness. “The Korner?”
An hour after she’d left, she was back at the café again. The girl was still at Pru’s usual spot at the counter, pretending to read a book but watching John slice a cheesecake. McKay sat across from Pru, writing out a name and phone number on a paper napkin in his crisp design-school handwriting. He pushed the napkin across the table to her, obviously pleased with himself.
“Who is this person?” she said, after reading the napkin. She had been trying to make out the title of the paperback the girl held in her lap. The girl looked extremely fit, with defined muscles in her calves and shoulders. John gestured to the cheesecake with the knife, and the smile the girl flashed him was blindingly white.
“Bradley Bond. Our pet therapist?” McKay sounded exasperated. Clearly, she was supposed to have remembered Bradley Bond. “He helped us with Dolly’s end-of-life decisions? He’s fabulous. The Brewster-McCallahans’ cat was acting the same way, spraying everything, and Bradley put him on some kind of kitty Prozac. It’s supposed to work wonders.”
She pushed the napkin back across the table at him. “I’m not getting therapy for a cat,” she said. “Christ, look what it did to Rudy!”
“Not therapy,” said McKay. “Just drugs. You have to have one appointment with the pet therapist to get the drugs. But then you don’t have to go back if you don’t want. It’s not analysis.”
Pru’s attention was brought back to the girl, who was having a huge reaction to John’s cheesecake. She rolled her eyes and moaned and exclaimed and wagged the fork at John accusingly. This was her trademark thing, Pru decided, this cutely accusatory, good-natured contentiousness. It was the kind of attitude you might expect from a sorority girl in college. It meant she was a girl who was willing to wrestle. Those kind of guys, the frat guys, probably loved this routine. But Pru didn’t think John Owen would be so taken with it, and for a moment she was satisfied to see him turn away abruptly from the overexclaiming and pointing, to answer the phone. The girl was left looking rather foolish, uncertain how to shift into some other behavior. She looked around a little self-consciously, wiping her mouth. Pru felt sorry for her then. She had half a mind to rescue the girl by going up to her and asking what she was reading. But just then the girl picked up her book and Pru saw the title: Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. That made her not want to rescue the girl anymore. Why not just carry a sign: “I’m a sexy girl! Reading a sexy book!”
“Pru,” McKay said warningly, “you owe him at least that.”
“The cat? I owe the cat? How did I end up owing the cat?”
“Just by loving him.”
“I don’t love him! I hate him! He ate my sweater! I’m going to the bathroom.”
Just as Pru stood up, the girl too rose to leave. She had one of those yoga bodies Pru envied, pliant and long-torsoed, with a little pooch of a butt. John, who was passing behind the yoga queen, put a hand on her hip, close to the butt pooch. She smiled and said, “Adiós, amigo.”
“So, let me know, okay?” John said.
Let him know what? Pru wondered, pushing open the door to the ladies’ room. She could only think of romantic situations: If you’re free for dinner . . . If we’re still on for some sex later . . . Nothing innocuous suggested itself, with a sentence like that.
To her surprise, when she came back from the restroom, John and McKay were sitting at the table together, chatting away like a couple of old pals.
“You know each other?” Pru said. She looked from one to the other, alarmed. McKay was eating a piece of cheesecake, innocence itself.
“I work out at the gym with Bill,” John said. “Is he going tonight?”
“I think so.”
“Did he tell you he benched two-ten? I was spotting him.”
“Lord, yes. He gloated all night about it.”
“Wow,” said Pru, just to keep herself included. She was still trying to puzzle it out, what it meant that McKay and John Owen knew each other. She hadn’t told anyone about her friendship with John. Not that there was anything to tell. But McKay was tricky. He was always doing stuff like this, staying one step ahead of her, somehow.
John saw the napkin on the table and said, “Bradley Bond, I know him. Oh, for Rudy’s cat. That’s a great idea.”
Pru cut a sliver of cheesecake with the fork and said, “I’m not sure what I’m doing. You know, maybe it’s kinder to just have him put out of his misery. He’s obviously a deeply disturbed cat. Maybe he takes one look at me and sees, you know, Cloris Leachman in Young Frankenstein.”
“Who doesn’t?” said McKay.
She let the cheesecake melt in her mouth, looking at John to see how he’d respond to what McKay had said,
