Plan B (Best Laid Plans #2) - Jana Aston Page 0,50
head and yawns at our arrival, then does a dramatic stretch before jumping from the sofa with a loud thump and walking over to wind himself between Kerrigan's legs.
"Did you want to hang out with Tubbs before we go?" I ask, because I'm not sure what the etiquette is when visiting your cat. "I'm kinda hoping you never get your own place and take him with you because we've already become really good buds. He hangs out with me while I work and he's really non-judgmental about naps."
"Why would I take Tubbs with me? He's not my cat."
Not this again. "Who does this cat belong to then?"
"Kyle," Kerrigan responds easily, like it's very obvious. "Did he try to tell you it was my cat?"
"He did."
"Nope, his cat." Kerrigan bends down to scoop all seventeen pounds of Tubbs up, cradling him like a big, fat baby. "Kyle found him in a dumpster by his office and brought him home. He was scrawny and had fleas and Kyle's been insinuating he's my cat ever since but he's really not. Kyle just has a rescue complex or something."
"He was scrawny?" I don't know why, but I'd imagined Tubbs was always this ginormous.
"So scrawny. And his name is McGee. Kyle started calling him Tubbs when he got fat. Because Kyle overfeeds him."
Kyle overfeeds me too. I wonder if I'm also a rescue project.
Wait a minute. He said Tubbs was svelte! "So he's aware that Tubbs is fat?"
Kerrigan looks at me strangely. "I think everyone is aware that Tubbs is fat. Sorry, McGee," she tells him, smooching him right on his little nose. It's got a slash of white running through the orange and it's very kissable.
We leave the condo and I'm relieved at how easy it is to be with Kerrigan. This is our first outing without Kyle and it's not awkward at all. In fact it was her idea, which is so super sweet. She wanted to have afternoon tea, at a hotel just half a block from Kyle's place, so that's where we're headed. A few minutes later we're seated in a lush dining room flooded with light from the oversized glass doors connecting the dining room to an outdoor patio.
"So what other kind of rescue work has Kyle done?" I ask, once we have steaming cups of tea before us. Jasmine for her and a decaffeinated chamomile for me.
"Me for starters," she replies while adding a lump of sugar to her tea. She swirls it in the cup with a spoon, glancing across to me once she's satisfied with the disintegration of her sugar cube.
"You?" I'm surprised by that. "What do you mean?"
"He came back for me when our parents died. I know it seems odd since he's my brother, but we barely knew each other because he's so much older than I am. He was sixteen when I was born, he was off to college by the time I was two. I don't even have a memory of living at home with him with my parents."
"Oh, wow." I never really thought of it like that. I realized there was a huge age discrepancy between them, but I'd not thought about what that meant, practically speaking. "It's just the two of you," I clarify, stopping short of asking for an explanation.
"Yeah, I was an oops baby." She offers one anyway. "But I think our parents were happy about it. My mom said they always wanted more babies, but she had fertility issues following Kyle and they thought he was going to be it for them. Then bam, they're almost done raising him and along I came."
Babies have a way of popping in whenever it suits them, I think. Much like the one I'm carrying.
"So we weren't super close. I saw him maybe a couple times a year when I was little. He was in college then grad school then he was working in the UK and I think Asia at one point. So he was just my mysterious older brother who I saw on the occasional holidays or via video chat, and I was a kid, I wasn't paying much attention to where he was.
“Then our parents died and he came back. It's all kind of a blur, but he could have just as easily stopped in long enough to pack me off to our grandparents or ship me off to boarding school and continued on with his life. But he didn't. He moved back into the house with me, and