IF YOU BELIEVE NOTHING ELSE I tell you, believe this: A boxful of kittens baking in the August sun is enough to make a grown man cry. Well, I didn't actually cry, but the thought certainly crossed my mind. So I did the only thing I could think to do, the only thing any decent and charitable person would do. I took the worst looking kitten—the one huddled in the back corner, too far gone even to mew, tiny pink tongue hanging from its mouth like a strip of stretched balloon—and I tucked him into my backpack. Then I pedaled away and called the Humane Society. What can I say? I've always been a sucker for the underdog—even when it's a cat.

Some folks will tell you that there are two types of people in this world. There are dog people. And there are cat people. This may or may not be true, I don't really know and I don't really care. But I do know this: If there really are two types of people in the world, then my wife, Maggie, is most definitely a dog person. She's the woman almost run over by a car because she "simply has to pet" some two-ton Rottweiler on the opposite sidewalk. So Maggie wasn't exactly thrilled to come home from a long day in the ER and find a mostly-dead kitten curled up in her favorite spot on the sofa. Thrilled or not, she didn't say a word.

Me and Maggie started having problems about four months ago, I guess, but it might have been even before that. It's tough to tell. All I know is that somewhere along the way the better times stopped and the rest of our lives slowly began. I think it was when we quit fighting. It was like we just woke up one day with this unspoken agreement not to disagree anymore.

"You want to catch a movie tonight?"

"Sure," she'd say. "How about ____." (Insert the nauseating chick flick of your choice.)

"Sure, great," and twenty-five bucks later we'd be sitting in the third row, one chair between us, both of us staring at the screen like the couple of zombies we'd become, washing down greasy popcorn with watery soda and wishing that we were somewhere, anywhere else. That's how it goes, I guess. One day you just wake up and realize that you don't like the person you love anymore.

It's not that Maggie's a hard woman. Far from it. It's just that Maggie spends most of her life putting broken things (mostly people) back together again. She's a doctor and a genius and a god-gifted decision maker—the most competent person I've ever met—and I think it nearly broke her heart to see something as tattered and ragged as that kitten sitting on our couch. She's the kind of person who compartmentalizes, you see. She has her home life, her work life, her lady's soccer life, and nary the three shall meet. Until, that is, I brought Fuzz home (that's what I'd taken to calling him). Fuzz somehow blurred that line Maggie drew, the one between the chaos of her work life and the tranquility she tried so hard to foster at home. She started venting again, but not on me. Sometimes, when she thought I wasn't around, I'd catch her turning mean on Fuzz. I'd overhear her say things like:

"I bet you think my whole damn purpose in life is just to pour your cream, don't you, Cat."

Cat: That's what she called him. For some reason, "Fuzz" never stuck with Maggie. And that seemed to suit Fuzz just fine. He liked Maggie better anyway. That's the thing about cats. They end up living with cat people, but they only truly respect dog people. They're just like that.

Anyway, as soon as Maggie would finish chastising Fuzz for some small moment of ingratitude, she'd pour him a fresh bowl of cream and set it near the pantry. Fuzz, for his part, would wait until I came downstairs to drink it. It was a small but significant gesture on his part. He could never respect me, but he knew he owed me that much. That's another thing about cats. Unlike dogs, they can't be bought, just rented.

It was about a month after Fuzz joined the family that I came home late from work one day because I had stopped on the way to pick up sushi. That's the thing about Reno—there's only one place to get good sushi and even that place is a real gamble most nights. Maggie grew up near the ocean and sushi is her favorite and just that day while eating a burger at lunch I had decided to turn over a new leaf and start trying harder at things. Sushi seemed like a good start. But when I came in the door I saw that dinner was already on the table. Lasagna and garlic bread—my favorite. In the other room, I heard Maggie talking in her very serious voice.

"Damn it, Cat. You think I want to spend my whole life stuffing peoples' guts back in their bodies just to rush home and pour your cream and clean your shitty little litter box and scratch your mangy little ears?"

And she went on like that for a minute or more, so I peeked in the room. What I saw made me want to laugh, but I didn't. What I saw was a thirty-two year old woman in spearmint-green hospital scrubs wagging her finger at a mottled-gray tabby, who, for his part, just sat there on the couch staring back at her—implacable, amber eyes glowing eerily, motor running low, ears tracking my every move. Cool as a cucumber. That was Fuzz, all right. Cool as a cucumber. As far as he was concerned, Maggie could go on all night. He'd survived worse.

So I snuck back to the kitchen and grabbed the sushi off the counter. Then I got a beer from the fridge and made my way out to the garage. The sushi I dumped in the trash, careful to hide it under last Sunday's paper. The beer I drank sitting on the hood of Maggie's car, waiting for her to finish up with Fuzz.

"Mags," I called as I came back in the door. "What's for dinner, babe? I'm starving."

But when I got to the kitchen the lasagna was gone. And so was Maggie. On the counter sat a box of Cheerios and a pint of milk. The lasagna I found in the trash beneath the sink. The bread she had broken up and tossed out back to the birds. Maggie was in bed, already asleep, Fuzz curled up at her feet. We never talked about it.

A week or so later she moved out while I was at work—rented a small two-bedroom on the west side of town, closer to the hospital. She took the cat. She left the big screen. That very night she called to apologize, said that Fuzz just followed her right out the door and jumped in the car.

"Cats are like that," I said.

And we get along pretty well these days, all things considered. We talk on the phone twice a week, sometimes more if it's a holiday weekend and she's having a tough go down at the ER. I cat-sit every now and then, and just last week I noticed a shiny metal tag on his collar that said FUZZ. We haven't gotten around to the divorce yet, though we both agreed to see other people—if we want to. And last night we even talked about getting out of Reno, just like the old days.

"Let's get out of here, Mags," I said before thinking about what I was saying. "Let's get out of here just like we always talked about."

Then there was this long silence from the other end, and in the background I could hear Fuzz's little motor running on idle.

"Well damn it, that's just like him, isn't it, Fuzz," she said at last. "Waking me up in the middle of the night, a day late and a dollar short."

And she was right. And maybe it was because she was right that I got so mad. No denying it—I am the kind of guy who's a day late and a dollar short most of the time. But silly me, I thought that's what marriage was all about. I thought it was about knowing certain things about another person and accounting for those things. I thought it was about helping another person fix the stuff that he can't fix himself. I thought it was about the sum being bigger than the parts. And I told her this in no uncertain terms. By the time I was done, I was yelling, which is something I don't often do. So she hung up on me. Just like that, hung up on me. And I sat there with the phone held to my ear for a while, the silence so deep that it hurt my brains. Then I lay back and went to sleep, thinking, well, that's that. But you know what, it wasn't. The next morning when I went outside to get the paper, I found something unusual on the welcome matt—a pair of chopsticks. They were from her favorite sushi place, the one that's a real gamble most nights, and they were still in that thin, paper wrapper they always come in, still joined at the hip.


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