Page 58 of Carter

“You ever have pets?” I ask.

“Not really.”

“What does that mean?”

“I kept a kitten in my room once. Found the thing outside, cold and dirty and skin and bones. I was just a kid. Six, maybe. I don’t think Hollis was born yet. Anyway, I knew if my father found him he’d make me get rid of him, so I put him in a box under my bed.”

I already know where this is going, and my heart hurts.

“Learned real quick how easy it was to end a life,” he adds.

“I’m sorry, Nash. That’s terrible, but… you were just a kid.”

“Yeah, I know. I didn’t know any better. Thought I was doing a good thing. It was a hard lesson to learn, but something I always keep in the back of my head. Even when you have good intentions, things don’t always turn out right.”

I pour the clean litter into the cat box and return it to the cage, giving Skittles a scratch behind the ears. Nash and I move to the next cage to clean up Tuna and Fish’s litter box. They’re adorable calicos that came in together and wouldn’t stop meowing and pawing at each other through their cages, so we put them together. They’ve been much happier since, and we listed them as a pair. They can only be adopted together. Sometimes we just need our person with us.

“I never really wanted a pet growing up,” I say.

“Seems odd coming from you.”

I huff a laugh. “My parents told me that if I got a pet, I’d have to take care of it, and I didn’t want to do that. I always was thekid that would not do something if they didn’t absolutely have to.”

“Makes sense. What kid wants to do that?”

“Exactly. I had no siblings, and all my parents’ attention. They spoiled the hell out of me. I didn’t want any responsibility.”

“Are they still alive?”

“Oh, yeah. Alive and well, living in Scarsdale.”

“That’s not too far, right?”

“Nope, not at all.”

“Do you visit with them?”

I bark out a rough laugh. “No, I do not.”

“How come?”

I put the clean litter box back into Tuna and Fish’s cage, then close and lock the door. Nash is watching me carefully, and I finally look him in the eye.

“Once I was old enough to have my own emotions and realize other’s, I saw through their facade. All that attention and spoiling they did was for show—nothing more. They never outright told me they didn’t approve of me being gay, but there were signs. So many signs. And after Ryan? Well, it only took a week for them to tell me it was time to get over it and get back on my feet. Maybe ‘go to school now that you don’t have anyone weighing you down.’”

“Fuck,” he mutters.

“Yeah…”

“Seems like we both hit the lottery with life, huh?” he says, a smirk on his face.

One thing I’ve learned about Nash is he tries to keep his sadness in check with humor. A lot of us do it. I’m guilty of it too, but he does it all the time. I wonder if he realizes. It’s not something I want to call him out on, though. I don’t want to dig into open wounds. Especially not now, when everything feels so normal.

“Yeah, looks like it.”

We finish up with the cats, all of them with clean litter boxes, and we move on to filling all the food bins so we can come back and feed them.

“All right, this one is all you,” I say as I step back and cross my arms.