Page 4 of Learn Your Lesson

And something about her satisfied smile as she took Ava’s hand and led her through the tunnel told me she knew it, too.

The Furthest Thing From Cool

Chloe

“Your house is like the circus Daddy took me to,” Ava said, standing just inside the front door of my small home with her Tampa Bay Ospreys backpack still strapped to her shoulders.

She didn’t seem particularly excited about the observation.

Then again, this kid was rarely excited aboutanything.

Her curly hair — which was almost as long as her father’s — had completely fallen out of her hair tie at this point, and she swept it out of her eyes as she looked around at the organized clutter.

I couldn’t fault her for her assessment. Between my current knitting project, my half-sewn skirt I was working on, the paint-by-numbers craft I’d started and then abandoned after three glasses of wine, and the array of colorful cat toys strewn throughout the house — it kind ofdidlook like a circus.

“A circus, huh?” I asked, taking her backpack and hanging it by my door. “Well, we better be on the lookout for acrobats and tigers.”

“There’s one!”

Ava pointed at Nacho just as he came scampering over from somewhere in the back hallway, his fluffy orange tail flicking back and forth. The cat wasn’t scared of anything, not even a kindergartner, and he trotted right up to Ava and arched against her leg.

“This is Nacho,” I told her as she bent to pet him. She didn’t smile like most kids would when having their fingers running through silky fur. She didn’t sayawwwor giggle, either. No, she wore the same look of indifference I was used to her showing in class.

Now that I’d been around her father a few times, it was easy to see the apple didn’t fall far from the tall, thick, muscular tree.

Still, even this was an improvement over where she’d been at the beginning of the school year. Will had hired me to work with her after school in the first semester, as she had lost her confidence to speak once she was in a class with twenty other students.

I learned quickly that Ava just needed a little patience, and, honestly? Indifference. She didn’t want the baby talk and the nonstop attention. She didn’t need cookies for a job well done or an over-the-top celebration.

“He’s soft, isn’t he?” I asked.

Ava nodded, and it wasn’t long before my other two fur children joined us.

“This one is Pepper, and that one is Coconut,” I told her, signaling to each of them.

Pepper was a gray striped tabby and the skinniestof the three, no doubt the runt of his litter. He had more energy than any five-year-old I’d ever taught.

Coconut, on the other hand, was standoffish and untrusting of everyone — even me. She curled her tail underneath her as she sat beneath my sewing table, a full ten feet away from us, her bright blue eyes narrowed and assessing Ava.

I didn’t mean to become the stray cat mom. It just sort of…happened.

Pepper was the first. I saw him on the side of the road on my way home from work one day, and when I’d taken him to the local animal shelter, they’d told me that if I left him, he’d be put down.

The memory of that still made me angry and upset today, but then again, I understood. They were overrun. They didn’t have space.

And so, he became my first baby.

Nacho showed up at my back porch a few months later, meowing for food with his fur matted and gunk in his eyes.

I’d no sooner taken him in before Coconut appeared in my backyard, although she’d stayed distant for weeks before she’d graced us with her presence inside. I’d left food for her on the porch and made sure she had water, too.

It took two weeks for her to let me close enough to pet her.

Then, when the temperature dipped below sixty one night — a rarity in Tampa — she’d croaked a meow at me when I opened the door and sauntered inside like she already owned the place.

Now, I was a certified cat lady at the ripe old age of twenty-six.

“Do you have any pets?” I asked Ava.