“It’s kitten photos.”
“It’s kitten photos that will determine whether five living creatures find permanent homes or continue to languish in a system that is already over capacity. We’re talking ‘Please, sir, may I have some more’ territory, Peter. The stakes are high. This isnota drill.”
He uncrossed his arms, reached for his coffee, and took a sip.
“Fine.”
On Saturday morning at 9:45, I turned Peter’s living room into a photography studio. Peter watched from the kitchen island, a man observing a naturaldisaster that he had technically authorized.
I’d borrowed two ring lights from Mia. She had delivered them personally, along with a bag of props she’d assembled from what she described as “my content emergency kit.” Said kit contained feather toys, miniature hats, tiny bow ties, a square of faux fur, several swatches of colored fabric, and a small stuffed mouse that looked like it had been purchased specifically for this purpose within the last twenty-four hours.
“You told Mia,” Peter said.
“Mia is my creative director. She is essential to this operation.”
“Mia brought tiny bow ties.”
“Mia is a visionary. Respect the art, Peter. Respect the art.”
Mia, who was setting up a fabric backdrop over the couch, looked over her shoulder and said, “The bow ties are optional but strongly recommended. A bow tie increases adoption click-through by thirty-seven percent.”
“You just made that up. It’s not a real statistic,” Peter said.
“All statistics are real if you say them with enough confidence and have a chart. I can show you my Excel spreadsheet. I learned that from the internet.”
Peter opened his mouth to respond to this,appeared to calculate the futility of arguing with two people who were already arranging ring lights around his couch, and closed his mouth again. He poured a second cup of coffee, clearly fortifying himself for an ordeal.
“I’m going to need your help. You’re the kitten wrangler or kitten whisperer, whatever you want to call yourself. We’ll get it right in the credits, I promise,” I told him. “I can’t shoot and wrangle at the same time, and Mia’s on the camera because her phone takes better photos than mine, and she’ll fight me if I don’t let her shoot.”
“You want me to wrangle kittens?”
“You wrangle kittens every day. This is just wrangling with a purpose. Wrangling with intent. The deliberocity of the wrangle.”
“Deliberocity isn’t a word.”
“Peter! Don’t argue with my muse. It’s impolite and alters my aura. The quints need our auras strong in this moment of direness . . . dire . . . necessity . . . in this moment.”
He sighed.
It was the sigh I’d come to think of as the Peter Capitulation Sigh. It was a long, slow exhale that communicated, in the nonverbal language of a man who had been gradually eroded by proximity, that he was going to do the thing I wanted, and thathe wanted me to know it was under protest even though we both understood the protest was ceremonial at best.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll get the kittens.”
LaTavia went first because LaTavia was the easy one.
I placed her on the faux fur square that Mia had positioned in the center of the golden light patch. She sat there with the placid, agreeable expression of a kitten who was genuinely happy to be wherever you put her as long as the surface was soft and no one asked her to move quickly. She was the only kitten in the litter who seemed to have been born without the gene for chaos, and I loved her for it the way one loves a harbor in a storm.
Mia got thirty perfect shots in four minutes. LaTavia in profile, LaTavia head-on, LaTavia mid-yawn (which Mia captured at exactly the right millisecond to make it look like a tiny roar), and LaTavia with a bow tie that she accepted without complaint and wore with the dignified tolerance of a cat who understood that fashion was a collaborative process.
“She’s a natural,” Mia said. “If I could shoot every animal the way I shoot LaTavia, I’d have a calendar by now.”
“She’s a good girl,” Peter said, scratching behindher ears with one finger. “Always has been. She’s going to make someone very happy.”
Something in his voice snagged, a micro-hesitation that I caught because I’d been calibrating my ears to Peter’s voice for months and could detect emotional weather changes at barometric pressures most people missed.
He was thinking about the kittens leaving.
He’d told me he didn’t name fosters because naming creates attachment.
