He gulped a little.“But she likes me, right?”
The chief wiggled his head.“Eh. I guess she does. The thing you need to know about Odelia is that she’s been through a lot, son. She’s been with plenty of fellas in her time and none of them turned out the way she hoped. She’s taking a mighty big leap letting you sleep over. As far as I know that’s a first for her.” And there was that finger again, poking his chest. Alec was leaning in now, too, his face inches from Chase’s. “So don’t you go and break that girl’s heart now, you hear?”
“You know I won’t.”
“Cause if you break my favorite niece’s heart, I’ll break your neck, understand?”
“I thought Odelia was your only niece?” he quipped.
But Alec didn’t crack a smile. The man was serious. “Promise me.”
“I promise, I promise. I will not break your favorite niece’s heart.”
“Fine.” He relaxed a little. “Now that we’ve got that out of the way, I don’t think it’s too much to say that you’re by far my favorite of Odelia’s many boyfriends so far.”
“That’s… great to hear. I guess.”
Alec slung a hand around his shoulder and gave him a fatherly squeeze.“Keep this up and you might even marry into the family.” Just then, Grandma Muffin came stalking through the lobby, shouting a few carefully chosen obscenities at Scarlett Canyon, who was teetering on high heels in front of her and shouting right back. “Not sure that’s such a good idea, though, considering this family of mine is batshit crazy,” Chief Alec added with a sigh.
Chapter 10
Vena’s was bustling like never before. In fact I don’t think I’d ever seen so many cats squeezed into the tiny waiting room before. All of them were glancing around morosely, and all of them were in a plaintive mood, the topic of fleas dominating every conversation. Even Shanille was there, the leader of cat choir and Father Reilly’s cat. Father Reilly himself was looking glum, possibly not used to taking time out of his busy schedule to take his cat to the vet.
Since it was standing-room only, Odelia leaned against the wall, the four of us nicely bundled at her feet.
“Your cats are so well-behaved!” a woman remarked, referring to the way we were the only cats not cooped up in those plastic cage contraptions. “Howdo you manage?”
Odelia shrugged.“I tan their hides if they step out of line. Nice crack of the whip.”
The woman pressed her lips together and shook her head. No sense of humor.
Odelia didn’t need to ‘tan our hides’ to make us behave. We were so terrified to visit Vena’s that we didn’t stir an inch from the spot where Odelia had plunked us down. And so were the other cats. You may think that cats love going to the vet. Think again. We hate the vet. We hate to be prodded andpricked and having our gums checked and our tummies measured. It’s degrading. It’s humiliating. It’s very anti-cat. Sure, it’s supposed to be good for us. I don’t care. I still hate it. Now, though, with the notion that Vena would rid us of our flea infection, I was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt.
Not the other cats, though. They were all plaintively meowing up a storm.
Dooley, meanwhile, seemed to have other interests. He’d been brooding a lot on the drive over, and now it became clear about what. “So you said that the fact that Chase has moved in has something to do with babies, right?” he asked Harriet.
“Oh, Dooley,” she said, exasperated. “Are you still going on about that?”
“What did you mean when you said that?” he insisted stubbornly.
“Isn’t it obvious? When a human male and a human female move in together it’s because they want to make human babies.”
Dooley uttered a shocked gasp.“Odelia is having babies?”
“Of course she is. She’s a human female and human females need to have babies before a certain age. Something really old, though. Probably like twenty or something.”
Dooley turned to me.“How old is Odelia now?”
“No idea. Ten? Fifteen maybe?”
“That sounds about right,” Brutus agreed. “Chase is probably the same age as Odelia and I’m six and I know Chase is a lot older than me so he’s probably ten years old by now. Fifteen at the outside,” he allowed.
“That means Odelia still has oodles of time to have human babies,” said Dooley. “Years and years and years. So why have them now?!”
“It’s an urge,” Harriet knew. “Humans get this inexplicable urge to make babies. I think it’s very strange but there you are. Urges. They get them and Odelia is no exception.”
Odelia would have commented but the other humans in the room would have looked at her strangely if suddenly she broke out into meows. So she kept her mouth shut. It was hard for her, though, judging from the scarlet blush that had crept up her cheeks. Her lips were trembling, too, and if I hadn’t known any better I would have thought she was trying to keep from bursting out laughing. Which was impossible, of course, as we were having this very serious, very adult conversation right under her nose.
“She needs to control this urge,” Dooley said. “She needs to know that we’re her babies and she doesn’t need human babies so she needs to control this urge and she needs to control this urge now, before Chase does…” He turned to Harriet again, whom he seemed to consider the expert on all things human all of a sudden. “What part does Chase play in this whole baby making thing?”
Harriet frowned.“Well, he’s the one who needs to put the baby in her, obviously, so at some point he’ll probably…” She flicked her eyes to Dooley and then to me. “Has Dooley ever had The Talk?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I never gave him The Talk.”
“What talk?” asked Dooley.
“The Talk,” Harriet clarified.
“I don’t get it,” said Dooley.
Harriet sighed exaggeratedly.“Brutus. Please give Dooley The Talk.”
“Why do I have to give him The Talk? Why can’t you give him The Talk?”
“Because you’re a male and Dooley is a male and only males should give other males The Talk. It’s a rule.”
“It’s not a rule.”
“It’s a rule. I didn’t invent it.”
“There’s no rule about that. There’s no rule that says only males can give other males The Talk,” Brutus protested. “In fact I think it’s much better coming from you.”
“Guys!” Dooley cried. “What is The Talk?!”
“Look,” I said, deciding to get this over with. Like a band-aid, you just had to rip it off. “You know how a male cat and a female cat get together and a couple of months later lots of kittens come out?”
“Uh-huh.”
“With humans it’s the exact same thing. The male of the species and the female of the species, um, lie together, as they do, and then a couple of months later babies pop out.”
“How many babies?” he asked, darting curious glances at Odelia, as if expecting a litter of babies to suddenly emerge from our human.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said vaguely. “A few, probably.”
“One,” said Brutus. “Usually humans have the one baby.”
“That’s it?” I asked, frowning. “That can’t be true.”
“It’s true. Humans are stingy. They just have the one baby.”
“Sometimes they have two,” Harriet said. “Or three or four. But it’s rare. So rare that when humans have, like, eight babies in a single litter, they get their own TV show. It’s true.”
“Humans are weird,” Brutus agreed.
“So… how long before these babies arrive?” asked Dooley, still staring at Odelia, who was still having trouble keeping a straight face.
“Oh, maybe like three months?” I said. “Two?”
“You guys!” Dooley said. “Odelia and Chase have been lying together for weeks now, so these babies might pop out any moment now!” He buried his face in his hands. “Oh, no.”
“Relax, Dooley,” I said. “Humans don’t always have babies when they lie together. They have to… do stuff.”