Do I sound defensive?

I was about to explain it all to her but it bored even me by then so all I said was, “I do criminal law. I don’t get involved in…”

“What’s that?” she shouted as she leaped to kneeling on her seat. “What is it? What?”

I stared for a moment into her anxious face, filled with a true terror, before I looked under the table at where her legs had been only an instant before. A cat, brown and ruffled, was rubbing its back on the legs of her chair. It looked quite contented as it rubbed.

“It’s just a cat,” I said.

“Get rid of it.”

“It’s just a cat,” I repeated.

“I hate them, miserable ungrateful little manipulators, with their claws and their teeth and their fur-licking tongues. They eat human flesh, do you know that? It’s one of their favorite things. Faint near a cat and it’ll chew your face off.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Get rid of it, please please please.”

I reached under the table and the cat scurried away from my grasp. I stood up and went after it, herding it to the back of the coffee shop where, behind the bookshelves, was an open bathroom door. When the cat slipped into the bathroom I closed the door behind it.

“What was that all about?” I asked Caroline when I returned to the table.

“I don’t like cats,” she said as she fiddled with her cigarette.

“I don’t especially like cats either, but I don’t jump on my seat and go ballistic when I see one.”

“I have a little problem with them, that’s all.”

“With cats?”

“I’m afraid of cats. I’m not the only one. It has a name. Ailurophobia. So what? We’re all afraid of something.”

I thought on that a bit. She was right of course, we were all afraid of something, and in the scheme of things being afraid of cats was not the worst of fears. My great fear in this life didn’t have a name that I knew of. I was afraid of remaining exactly who I was, and that phobia instilled a shiver of fear into every one of my days. Something as simple as a fear of cats would have been a blessing.