# The $2,400 Apartment Deposit and Two Black Cats
I was already in the truck with the engine running when I saw Rae veer off toward the dumpster behind the Greyhound station in Flagstaff.
Not again.
She'd spotted them from across the parking lot. Two black kittens. Maybe eight weeks old. They were wrestling each other next to a tipped-over trash can, pausing every few seconds to stare at anyone who walked past. Like they were waiting for someone to pick them.
I leaned on the horn. She didn't even look back.
I'd met Rae two years ago at a friend's barbecue in Mesa. She was a vet tech then, still is. I sold auto parts. We weren't married, but we'd been talking about it. This trip was supposed to be the test run. Three days in a cabin up in Greer. First real vacation together. No roommates, no night shifts, no phone calls from her sister about their mom.
I had $2,400 saved for the deposit on a rental house in Tempe. A guy from work knew the landlord. If we got back Sunday and paid by Monday, the place was ours. I'd counted out the cash twice that morning. A hundred and twenty $20 bills. It was in an envelope in my backpack, next to the cabin reservation and our bus tickets.
Rae was already holding one of the kittens by the time I got out of the truck.
"Babe. We have a bus in twenty minutes."
She ignored me. Picked up the second one. Held both against her chest.
"Rae."
"They're starving."
"They're strays. Half the animals in Arizona are strays."
She looked at me the way she does. I knew I'd lost before I said anything else.
"They're coming with us."
"They can't come with us to a rental cabin."
She was already walking back toward the truck. "Get the bag."
—
The bus left at 6:40 a.m. from the Flagstaff station, headed down through Phoenix and then east toward the mountains. I'd bought both tickets online two weeks earlier. Printed them out. Put them in my backpack.
I remember doing it. I remember putting the envelope with the cash in the same front pocket and zipping it shut. That's what I kept telling myself.
We made it to the station with nine minutes to spare. The driver checked our tickets at the door. Or started to.
"Tickets?"
I swung the backpack off, unzipped the front pocket. My hand landed right on the cash envelope, thick and familiar, and I figured the tickets were folded behind it same as always. They weren't. I dug past the envelope, felt the seam of the pocket, nothing else. I moved on to the main compartment. Pulled out my hoodie, a bag of trail mix, a phone charger.
Nothing.
"Everything all right there?"
"Yeah. Yeah, hold on."
I went back to the front pocket a second time, ran my fingers along the bottom seam where the fabric had gone soft from being stuffed too full for two weeks straight. Nothing felt torn. It just felt like an empty pocket. I had no reason yet to think about the lining underneath it.
Rae was standing behind me with the two kittens inside her jacket. Only their heads were poking out. The driver was looking at his watch.
"You got two minutes, folks. Bus has to roll."
I dumped the whole backpack out on the pavement. Right there on the curb, in front of maybe thirty people waiting to board. A man in a cowboy hat stepped over my stuff without looking down.
"I must've left them at my apartment," I said.
Rae didn't blink. "You printed them. I watched you."
"Then they're here somewhere."
The driver crossed his arms. "No ticket, no ride."
—
We ended up standing outside the station as the bus pulled away without us. The sun was coming up over the mountains. The kittens had fallen asleep inside Rae's jacket.
This felt like proof. Exactly what my grandmother used to tell me when I was a kid. She was from San Antonio and she had a rule about black cats. Not just that they were bad luck. Worse. She said they carried messages from people who meant you harm. That if one followed you, someone close to you would turn on you within the month.
I knew it was nonsense. I'd known it for years. But standing there watching our bus disappear down the highway, I could hear her voice like she was standing behind me.
Rae sat down on the curb and started petting the kittens.
"We'll take the next one."
"There is no next one. Not until eight tonight."
"We'll wait."
"I was going to pay the deposit tomorrow."
She kept petting them.
I sat down next to her. The sidewalk was already warm. A woman walked past with a stroller and a coffee, and she turned her head to look at the kittens. She stopped, said something about how sweet they were. Rae lifted one of them up so the woman could see. For a second, I felt like I was the only person in Arizona who didn't get it.
"You want to leave them here, don't you," Rae said. Not a question.
"I want to catch the eight o'clock and not lose that house."
"Same thing."
—
We spent the day at a diner across the street from the station. Denny's. We had a booth by the window. The kittens slept in a cardboard box the waitress brought over. She had a daughter who fostered cats. She charged us for two coffees and didn't say anything when Rae fed the kittens bits of scrambled egg off her plate.
I called my buddy about the rental house. The landlord had another couple coming at noon. If we didn't pay the deposit by tomorrow, the place was gone.
Rae slid her hand across the table. "We'll figure it out."
"I don't want to figure it out. I want to be on the bus. And I want you to admit that if we'd left them by that dumpster, none of this happens."
"You want me to say it's their fault."
"I want you to say maybe we should've just kept driving."
Rae didn't say anything for a second. Then she pulled the box a little closer to her side of the booth. "You'd have left them there. I know you would've."
She wasn't wrong, and that was the part that stuck with me the rest of the afternoon. I'd been ready to write off two eight-week-old kittens over a bus schedule. Meanwhile I was the one who'd spent all morning insisting somebody else — the tickets, the wind, bad luck — had done something to us.
Around five in the afternoon, I went to the bathroom and then came back to the booth. When I sat down, I saw the kittens. They were awake now. One was chewing on the corner of my backpack.
I froze.
The backpack had been under the table. Rae must've moved it when she kicked off her sandals, setting it upright against the booth leg instead of flat on the floor.
I reached down. The kitten was tugging on the fabric with its teeth. Playing. The other one came over. And that's when I saw it, low along the bottom edge of the front pocket — the same pocket I'd dug through twice at the station. A tear, maybe three inches, right where the outer fabric met the lining. New. The threads were still curling.
I understood then why I hadn't found anything that morning. The pocket had been intact when I checked it — I'd have felt a gap that size. Whatever had torn it open had happened later, probably in the truck or when Rae threw the bag over her shoulder running for the kittens. The tickets must have slipped down through a small existing weak spot in the seam sometime after I zipped the pocket shut, working their way behind the lining bit by bit, and it took a cat's claw catching that same spot to finally rip it wide enough for me to notice.
I opened the pack and shoved my hand in. All the way to the bottom, between the lining and the outer fabric.
My fingers touched paper.
I pulled it out. A thick folded sheet. And then another. The tickets. Both of them.
I stared at them for a good ten seconds. Then I stared at the kittens.
Rae sipped her coffee. "The black ones always get blamed."
I didn't have a comeback for that.
—
We made the eight o'clock bus. The driver was a woman with a gray braid and a voice like she'd been doing this route for thirty years. She saw the kittens and asked if we had a carrier.
"Might have something in the back," she said. And she came out with an old plastic crate someone had left behind. She lined it with a folded blanket and set it on the seat next to us.
"No extra charge," she said. "They'd be in a shelter otherwise."
The bus pulled out of Flagstaff as the sun went down. The kittens fell asleep in the crate. Rae leaned against my shoulder. I watched the lights of the city fade through the window.
The next morning, I called the landlord from a gas station in Springerville. He told me the other couple had backed out that afternoon — they'd found something closer to Chandler — and the house was still available if I could wire the deposit by noon.
We got off the bus in Greer at 10:47 a.m. I found a bank branch two blocks from the cabin and wired the $2,400 before we even checked in. I don't know why I keep telling people the exact amount. Maybe because I counted it three times that first morning, sure I was about to lose it to a dumpster full of kittens.
We signed the lease on the Tempe house two weeks later. Rae hung a little cat door in the laundry room before we'd even moved the couch in.
The kittens are full-grown now. We named them Mesa and Ponderosa. We got married in a courthouse in Sedona two summers after that. The cats were there, in a carrier by the door, because Rae wouldn't leave them with a sitter for the drive up.
She still reminds me about that morning at the dumpster. How I said they'd ruin everything.
The smaller one, Ponderosa, sits on my chest every morning before work. This morning the alarm went off at 5:50, and he didn't move, just kept purring loud enough that I felt it in my sternum before I heard it. I lay there another few minutes before I finally eased him off onto the pillow.
Rae was already up, filling their bowls in the kitchen. "You're going to be late," she said, not turning around.
"I know," I said, and got up anyway.
