Page 77 of We Could Be So Good
Experimentally, he wets a corner of the towel with warm water and uses it to clean the worst of the mess from the animal’s face. He doesn’t think cats are supposed to like water, but this cat doesn’t seem to know what cats are and aren’t supposed to do, because he goes along with the whole procedure, even after Andy adds some soap to the towel. Andy wonders if the cat would put up with a flea bath.
“What the fuck?” says a groggy voice. Nick is rubbing his eyes.
Andy shrugs. The situation is, unfortunately, pretty self-explanatory.
“You do this every night?” Nick asks, and it’s unclear whether the question is being addressed to Andy or to the cat.
“He was stuck in the garbage can,” Andy says. “Or maybe he wasn’t stuck. Maybe he just likes garbage cans.”
Nick is looking at him like he’s crazy, but honestly Nick isthe one who rolled out the red carpet for this poor unfortunate creature. Andy knows for a fact that nobody else in the building, or possibly the world, leaves their windows open so feral cats can wander in.
“I don’t know how he isn’t dead yet,” Nick says.
“Have you thought about keeping him inside?”
“He’s a wild animal.”
“He’s the opposite of that.” The cat tries to swat at a floating soap bubble, missing by a mile.
“If you want to keep him, I’m not going to stop you.”
“Really?”
Nick shrugs.
Andy wonders if they’d have the same conversation if this hadn’t happened in the middle of the night. Nick is barely awake. There’s a red line on his face from where it was pressed against a crease in his pillow, and his eyes aren’t quite focused.
Andy’s never had a pet. As a kid, it would have made no sense, what with his mother never being around. After that, he was away at school. Since then, he guesses he could have gotten a cat, but he doesn’t trust himself to look after another living creature. Although, looking at the animal in the sink, he couldn’t do much worse than this cat has been managing on his own.
But it doesn’t seem right to start bringing animals into what’s really Nick’s apartment. He’s said Andy can stay, but open-ended isn’t the same as permanent. At least Andy doesn’t think so. He feels like there ought to at least be some kind of conversation about it, but he can’t imagine what that conversation would even sound like.
“I probably ought to bring him downstairs,” Andy says, and proceeds to do exactly that.
Chapter Nineteen
On the day Emily and Jeanne are coming for dinner, Nick wakes Andy at seven in the morning.
“It’s Saturday!” Andy protests, grabbing a pillow and holding it over his head to block out the sun. “This is obscene.”
“If we have guests and not enough food, I won’t be responsible for my actions. We need to do the shopping.”
Some barely awake part of Andy’s mind registers that Nick could buy groceries on his own and let Andy sleep in like a normal person, but Nick knows how much Andy hates waking up alone. This is Nick’s idea of a compromise.
“Okay, okay.” Andy lets himself be tugged out of bed. Obviously Nick has lost his mind, because walking to the Christopher Street A&P, getting groceries, and walking back takes no more than an hour. They’ve been doing it every week for two months now. But Andy will humor him.
Nick throws a shirt at him and sticks a cup of coffee in his face.
It isn’t until he stumbles down the steps and out onto the sidewalk, into a shockingly warm and sunny spring morning, that the penny drops: Nick is nervous.
“You know,” Andy says slowly, “you could make lasagna like you did when Linda and her friends came over.”
Nick glares at him as if he suggested putting bowls of cereal out for supper. “Thatis the problem. I made lasagna when Linda came over the last time. And anyway, lasagna is...” He makes a dismissive gesture. “I’ve never had a dinner party.”
Andy doesn’t point out that Linda has scrounged food from Nick a dozen times. Apparently the addition of Emily and Jeanne means something. He considers telling Nick that he’s seen Emily eat caviar with tiny mother-of-pearl spoons and he’s seen Emily eat Chex mix out of her palm, and, with the expansive taste of people who have been raised with everything, she doesn’t seem to really prefer one over the other. But Nick will not be making Chex mix for Emily and Jeanne Warburton and probably would be offended by the idea, so Andy keeps his mouth shut and follows Nick down the street.
“What’s the deal with that cop who’s always across the street now?” Andy asks. It’s the friendly-looking cop straight out of central casting again.
“They probably think junk’s being sold out of that jazz club,” Nick grumbles.
