Dear Cat,
I know we haven’t spoken in a while, but thanks for not dropping that piano on my head. My human Ben has begged many times to be allowed to come and play with you. I can’t understand why my company isn’t good enough for him, but hey. So how about it, Cat? Can my humans, Ben and Tom, come around to make kootchi-koo noises at you?
Sincerely,
The Dog
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Dear Dog,
I have spoken with my colleague, The Other Cat, and we would be delighted to host your humans on any morning of your choice. Would Tuesday work?
Sincerely,
The Cat
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Dear Cat,
Unfortunately Tuesday is the day Tom takes Ben to the regrettably named toddler group “Moms & Tots”. Wednesdays are better, as those are the days Tom strips off his pantyhose and heels and takes a break from impersonating a mom.
Sincerely,
The Dog
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Dear Dog,
Wednesday would be perfect. Shall we say 10am?
Sincerely,
The Cat
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Dear Cat,
Looking forward to it. See you over the garden fence…
Auf wiedersehen,
Der Hund
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Jamie knew she was fussing, but couldn’t seem to stop.
Tom and Ben were coming in less than an hour. She’d been up since five o’clock trying to fit in a run, her blog updates, and 500 words of the novel. Then she’d cleaned the house from top to bottom. When Faith came in at nine, she had declared, with an unconvincing show of grumpiness, that everything was already done and she might as well go back home.
Jamie had set her to polishing the silver.
Now Jamie was whipping up some snacks. She’d baked a dozen finger biscuits from a recipe she’d found on a mommy blog recommended by one of her Twitter friends. Apparently they were hard enough for a toddler to suck on them without large bits breaking off in his mouth.
Jamie had coated half of them in carob and left the other half plain.
Was Ben a latent chocaholic, or was he more of a straight vanilla man?
She couldn’t wait to find out.
For Tom, she’d made a quiche Lorraine filled with crispy bacon bits. And if he felt like something sweet, there were the mini- doughnuts she’d baked using Delucia’s recipe. She could, of course, simply have helped herself to some straight from the bakery, but that would have felt like cheating.
She changed into a pair of rolled-up boyfriend jeans and a stretchy T-shirt, then rushed back into the kitchen to dip doughnuts into the three types of icing she’d prepared.
Then she rushed back to her room to change into leggings and a loose T-shirt. As she jogged past Faith on her way into the kitchen, the housekeeper stopped her with an explosive click of the tongue.
“What?” Jamie demanded.
“He doesn’t care what you are wearing,” Faith informed her. “All he cares is that you are not going to make his son love you.”
Jamie’s shoulders sagged. “Did Vuyiswa tell you that?”
“Yes, she told me. He is worried, that one, that you want to be a mother for his son.”
“I don’t want to be a mother to him, but if someone is a guest in your home, you have to make an effort. It’s only polite.”
Faith cast an ironic glance at the homemade finger biscuits. “They sell those at Pick ’n Pay. If you buy them in a shop, you are being polite. If you bake your own, it is too much. He will run away from you.”
Jamie gritted her teeth. “I’ll tell him I bought them, okay? But he’s just going to have to live with the rest of it. He knows I’m a baker. If it makes him want to run, tough.”
Faith had already lost interest. A rerun of Kasi Stories was about to start on TV. She turned her attention back to the screen, and the little silver sugar bowl she was polishing.
Jamie stood dithering for a moment. Then the doorbell rang, and she dashed into the kitchen to scoop the finger biscuits off the baking tray and into an anonymous Tupperware. Did they look too homemade? Probably. But he was a man, right? What were the chances he would even notice?
The doorbell rang again.
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Tom led Ben down Jamie’s drive with a sense of trepidation.
He wouldn’t even be here if the kid hadn’t nagged him day and night for weeks. He could swear the bloody cats were in on the conspiracy because whenever Tom took Ben for a walk in his pram, they were lounging around in Jamie’s driveway like a pair of odalisques.
As soon as they heard the pram, they would start rubbing their silky bodies against the palisade fence. But the moment Tom and Ben got closer, they would retreat out of arm’s reach. It was as though they were saying, ‘You can look but you cannot touch. If you want to touch, you’ll have to come inside. Make it happen, dude, or your son’s going to hate you forever.’ It was worse than a goddamn striptease.
Eventually, he’d cracked and set up this meeting. Or this cat-playdate. Whatever the hell you wanted to call it. He would have loved to suggest that they visit the cats some afternoon when Jamie was at work. Faith could have let them in. Wouldn’t that have been brilliant? Rude, yes, but brilliant.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see Jamie. The need to see Jamie had been building in him like hunger. But the combination of Jamie and Ben was one that made his guts churn.