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“How many babies?” he asked, darting curious glances at Odelia, as if expecting a litter of babies to suddenly emerge from our human.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said vaguely. “A few, probably.”

“One,” said Brutus. “Usually humans have the one baby.”

“That’s it?” I asked, frowning. “That can’t be true.”

“It’s true. Humans are stingy. They just have the one baby.”

“Sometimes they have two,” Harriet said. “Or three or four. But it’s rare. So rare that when humans have, like, eight babies in a single litter, they get their own TV show. It’s true.”

“Humans are weird,” Brutus agreed.

“So… how long before these babies arrive?” asked Dooley, still staring at Odelia, who was still having trouble keeping a straight face.

“Oh, maybe like three months?” I said. “Two?”

“You guys!” Dooley said. “Odelia and Chase have been lying together for weeks now, so these babies might pop out any moment now!” He buried his face in his hands. “Oh, no.”

“Relax, Dooley,” I said. “Humans don’t always have babies when they lie together. They have to… do stuff.”

“Yeah, and then sometimes they take a pill and then they don’t have the babies,” Harriet explained. She seemed to know an awful lot about this stuff. Then again, at her house they watched the Discovery Channel all the time, which was probably where she got her information.

“They take a pill?” asked Dooley, looking up. “What pill?”

“Yeah, what pill?” I asked. This was news to me, too.

Harriet shrugged, studying her fingernails.“I dunno. Some pill.”

Dooley turned to me, and I could see the question in his eyes before he formulated it.“Does Odelia have this magic anti-baby pill, Max?”

Ugh.“How should I know?”

His face took on a determined look.“We need to find out. This is life or death, Max.”

I was afraid to ask.“Why is this life or death, Dooley?”

“Because the moment Odelia has her babies she’ll get rid of us!”

And there it was. The crux of the matter. I had to admit I’d given the matter some thought myself. Our mailwoman Bambi Wiggins recently had a baby, and her cat Ellen had told us that there are three rules for cats when in the presence of a human baby: don’t scratch the baby. Don’t sit on the baby. Don’t bite the baby. But I could tell Ellen wasn’t entirely sanguine about her position in the Wiggins household herself now that this baby was born. She tried to put on a brave face, but there’s a long-held rumor amongst cats that the moment humans have babies those same humans’ cats get offered a one-way ride to the pound. And if there’s one place us cats fear even more than the vet, it’s the pound.

“We have to stop her,” Dooley whispered, loud enough for the entire waiting room to hear. “Odelia can never have babies, Max. We need to stall her until she’s too old! Which is only…” He made a few quick calculations in his head. “Two more years!”

“Ten,” Harriet corrected him. “She’s ten now, which makes her twenty in ten.”

“Fifteen at the outside,” Brutus repeated. “Which gives you a window of five years.”

He cut me an urgent look. I knew what that look meant: have you thought of some remedy or cure for my very delicate issue, Max? I gave him a look back that said: no, Brutus. I haven’t. But I was adamant to bring it up with Vena when I had the chance, whether he liked it or not.

What? I’m not an expert on tomcat anatomy. Vena is. Which is why she gets paid the big bucks.

Chapter 11

Dooley, Brutus and Harriet were still discussing the baby thing, so I pawed Odelia’s leg until she picked me up. I had an important message to deliver and now was the time to do it.

“Brutus has issues, Odelia,” I told her quietly, making sure the other members of our cat menagerie couldn’t overhear us.

“I’ll say,” she said between unmoving lips. “You guys are so funny.”

I had no idea how to respond to that, so I went on,“He’s having pee-pee issues.”

This time a frown appeared on her brow.“Pee-pee issues?”

I cut a quick glance down to the floor, but Brutus was still engrossed in the entire pill discussion so the coast was clear.“You need to ask Vena to take a look at his pee-pee,” I said. “But don’t tell her I told you, cause this is a very sensitive matter for Brutus and he’ll probably kill me if he found out I told you to tell Vena.”

Odelia smiled. Cat drama. She knew all about it.“Fine,” she said, her lips still not moving, her eyes darting about the room to make sure nobody saw she was talking to her cat. I didn’t know how she did it. Each time I meow or mewl my lips have a tendency to part. Hard to keep them pressed together and still hold a well-enunciated conversation.

I made to jump back down but Odelia held onto me.“Wait. Tell me more about this pee-pee thing.”

“What more is there to tell?”

“Does he have pain when he urinates?”

Ugh. I so didn’t want to discuss this topic. “He urinates just fine. It’s the other thing that doesn’t work.”

She frowned, confused.“What other thing?”

I cocked a knowing whisker at her. And then she got it.

“Oh!”

“Yeah.”

“The… Brutus and… Harriet.”

“Yup.”

“You mean his soldier refuses to salute.”