But I knew it was because, no matter how reckless he was when he played, Homer always felt vulnerable in sleep. It was only when he was sleeping on or next to me that the tension went out of his sleeping posture, that he might lie on his side with his paws still curled beneath him but not hugged defensively around his body.
I had important decisions to make, but there is no logic in some things. Watching Homer sleep with his paws clutched protectively over what should have been his eyes, my heart would break. Too late, too late! I would think, with a degree of pity that seemed unwarranted when he was in one of his more boisterous waking moods. He trusted me, more than he trusted anybody else. Hadn’t I committed, not so long ago, to being strong enough to build my life around Homer’s goodness? Things would have to be far worse than they were for me to decide that either of us would be better off without the other.
So I was once again back to my impossible situation. I needed a place of my own, but I couldn’t afford it. I could afford to live with somebody else, but I couldn’t live with somebody else and also live with Homer. I couldn’t leave Homer because …
Because I simply couldn’t leave him.
And this is where the moment of epiphany did, finally, kick in.
If I couldn’t afford to support myself and Homer given my current career path, then I would simply have to find a more lucrative career. There were skills and interests I’d developed during my nonprofit stint that, surely, would prove valuable in the private sector. I wrote newsletters and press releases and coordinated networking events and volunteer projects and fund-raisers, and I wrangled television and newspaper reporters to cover all of these things. I managed budgets and served as the public face of my organization on many occasions, and I was outgoing and did a pretty good job of interacting with the public in general.
This sounded a lot like the jobs of the friends I had who worked in public relations and event marketing. Even the ones who were still young enough that they earned what was considered an entry-level salary topped my own salary by a good 50 percent.
But I also knew that people hadn’t simply walked into those jobs. They’d had marketing or communications majors in college (my own major had been creative writing), and they’d spent summers interning and months freelancing for the kinds of firms they eventually went to work for.
If starting over was what I needed to do, and if interning and taking freelance jobs was what it would take to make that happen, I was willing to do all those things. I was even willing to pick up side jobs bartending or waiting tables at night so that my days would be available to work cheap-to-free until I gained experience and found something permanent.
But that put me right back where I started—because doing all of that, even if I was willing, would put me no closer to being able to afford my own apartment in the short term. This was a plan that could pay off in a year or two, that could make Homer’s and my life more stable in the long run, but I needed a new home for us now. And that was when I had my second epiphany.
I called my parents.
It cost me something to make that phone call. It cost me a lot, actually. Moving back in with my parents was the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency scenario I hadn’t even wanted to consider. Nothing could have felt more like a regression in life. If there’s anything that says, I’m not really a grown-up and I can’t really take care of myself, it’s moving back in with your parents.
“Of course you can move back in,” my mother said. “And of course you can bring the cats.”
I knew this had cost her something, as well. Not only did my parents dislike cats on general principle, they also had two dogs who’d been with my family since I was in high school. Adjustments would have to be made by everybody to make this situation feasible—and by “everybody,” I didn’t just mean the cats and dogs.
“Are you sure this is okay?” I asked my mother. “I know you guys don’t really like cats.”
“We love you,” my mother replied, “and you love the cats.” Then she laughed and said, “Besides, if you think living with cats is the biggest sacrifice your father and I have made as parents, you don’t know what being a parent means.”
Maybe not. But I was starting to get an inkling.
8 • The Ballad of El Mocho
Bless my heart, how he gets honoured and makes friends whatever city or country he visits.
—HOMER, The Odyssey
EVEN WITHOUT THE CATS, MOVING BACK IN WITH MY PARENTS WOULD have been an enormous adjustment. Would they treat me like I was still in high school, questioning me every time I went out and inquiring about who I was meeting and when I’d be back? Would they attempt to exercise parental authority over things like the tidiness of my bedroom?
Adding the cats to the mix would make things even more complicated. I wanted to figure out practical ways to keep the cats out of my parents’ way, and to keep the cats and dogs separated from each other, while still allowing everybody as much liberty as possible. Throw in all the standard confusion involved in a move—boxes to be unpacked, closets and shelves to be stocked, items to be sorted through and placed in storage—and it was clear that, ideally, there would be a time buffer of a couple of weeks between the day I arrived back on my parents’ doorstep and the day the cats joined me.
So I decided to make my second difficult phone call in as many weeks. I called Jorge.
Jorge still lived in the home we’d shared when Scarlett and Vashti were adopted. The two of them knew the house, and they also knew Jorge. Homer didn’t know either, but Jorge was part of a large extended family that was, collectively, even crazier about animals than I was. He’d grown up with more cats, dogs, birds, gerbils, hamsters, and goldfish than anybody I’d met.
We had communicated a few times since the breakup, in that strained and awkward way you end up talking to your ex during the early weeks after you’re no longer together—when your argument is, Hey, we can still be friends. Such conversations had decreased as the months went by. I never ended one without a strong sense of remembering why it was we’d broken up in the first place. I was positive Jorge felt the same way.
Nevertheless, if somebody had asked me to name the one person I would have trusted with my cats if I were unable to take care of them, I would have named Jorge without hesitation.
Jorge was more than accommodating when I pitched the idea of having the three cats stay with him for two weeks while I got things set up at my parents’ house. “I’d love to see Scarlett and Vashti again,” he said. “And I’ll take good care of Homer.”
I gave Jorge the basic rundown of Homer dos and don’ts (“My advice to you: Don’t keep tuna in your house while he’s there”) and some new issues that had cropped up in the past few months. It turned out that moist cat food gave Homer tremendous gas—it was astounding that one small kitten could produce such huge, horrible smells—but Vashti had been through a recent bout of colitis and was temporarily off dry food, making feedings more complicated than they used to be. I promised to stock Jorge with everything he’d need to care for the cats, as well as some written instructions.