Free The Tao of Martha by Jen Lancaster Page B

mix with slightly crossed eyes of cobalt blue and the pink nose of a bunny. “What’s their story?” I asked.
    “Someone adopted them from us and had them for a year. Then they had to move, so they brought them back here. They’ve been with us for…” She checked their file. “Oh, dear. They’ve been here for two and a half years.”
    Oh, my God. These poor little babies had a home and then were forced to live in a cage again? That’s awful!
    “But why hasn’t anyone taken them? They’re beautiful!” I exclaimed, hugging the little one to my chest. The cat gazed up at me with huge liquid eyes straight out of a horrible velvet painting. She leaned into me and purred.
    She shrugged. “I’m not sure. But it’s really hard to adopt out a pair. We’re about to break them up to see if that helps.”
    Um, not on my watch.
    “We’ll take them!” I exclaimed.
    The volunteer said, “We have other pairs. Maybe you should meet some of them before you make a decision.”
    “Have any of them been here longer?”
    “No.”
    “Then, SOLD!”
    “Whoa, hold on. We need to see how they are with dogs,” Fletch reasoned.
    We waited and held the girls while the shelter workers brought a variety of dogs through to test the cats’ temperaments. Fletch’s cat stretched out on his lap, content as could be, and mine snuggled up into my neck.
    I melted.
    “They’re totally fine and they’re totally ours!” And with that, we paid the adoption fee, bundled the cats into their carrying cases, and brought them home to their new family, at no point realizing these sweet, docile cats had pulled a con on us worthy of Wall Street.
    Because of their coloring, I named them after my all-time favorite characters: Patsy and Edina from Absolutely Fabulous . In the past, I found that cat naming is really prophetic. Our first cat, Maggie, had the most twee moniker I could think of back in the day, and she turned out to be just as dainty and delicate as her name dictated. Tucker was thus christened for a really fun, friendly college bartender (who’s still our buddy today), and Jordan for the crabby ice princess in the movie Cocktail . Point is, I firmly believe that your name goes a long way in determining your personality.
    So I should have known better than to saddle the girls with the names of the two most cantankerous, pugnacious, backbitingly vicious vodka-soaked assholes on the planet.
    Should have, anyway.
    Not long after bringing the new girls home, we discovered that they had an adorable little party trick.

    “Jesus!” Fletch shouted.
    “What happened?”
    “The little one took a chunk out of me!” Fletch barked, looking up at me over the side of the bed and clutching the meaty part of his hand. We’d been trying to coax the cats into their carrier for a vet appointment for a solid ten minutes at that point.
    “Her name is Eddy, and she was just saying hello,” I argued unconvincingly. “You know, like those T-shirts that say, ‘Sharks hug with their mouths.’ She was hugging you with her teeth, being friendly.”
    He shot me a dark look. “My friends don’t bite me.”
    “Oh, stop being so melodramatic. She weighs four pounds. How hard could she bite?”
    “ This hard.” He waved his bloody hand at me before getting up to the bathroom for heavy washing and disinfecting.
    As it turned out, Fletch wasn’t the only one who wasn’t in love with the new girls.
    Aside from me, no one likes Patsy and Edina to this day, which is exactly why Fletch is afraid to be alone with them. The dogs are okay around them, but they aren’t buddies like they are with the Thundercats. Libby and Gus chase each other all day, and Odin and Chuck are perpetually using Maisy and Loki as their big canine mattresses.
    Anytime a dog comes too close, Eddy does her best Mike Tyson impersonation, smacking the dogs’ muzzles with eight hundred lightning-fast uppercutsbefore scampering up the bookcase to hiss, while a shell-shocked Libby or