Cleo

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A cat chooses its owner, not the other way around.

“We’re not getting a kitten,” I said, negotiating our station wagon around a bend the shape of a pretzel. “We’re just going to look at them.”

The road to Lena’s house was complicated by its undulations, not to mention the steepness. It snaked over what would qualify as mountains in most parts of the world. There wasn’t much beyond Lena’s house except a few sheep farms and a stony beach.

“You said we could get a kitten,” Sam whined from the backseat before turning to his younger brother for support. “Didn’t she?”

The backseat was usually the boys’ battleground. Between two brothers aged nearly nine and six the dynamic was predictable. Sam would set Rob up with a surreptitious jab that would be rewarded with a kick, demanding retaliation with a thump, escalating into recriminations and tears—“He punched me!” “That’s ’cos he pinched me first.” But this time they were on the same side, and my usual role of judge and relationship counselor had been supplanted by a simpler one—the Enemy.

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