Her name is Cassie. I met her last week.

Everyone who reads this site knows that we lost three in a few weeks. But God in his wisdom provides solace and reward for loss. We lost the greyhound Molly, the feral Mickey, and the Bengal Izzie, before we could accept even one of our fatalities.

Funny how everything happens in threes. Everything significant that is. Told you about Mickey, my Main Man. Told you about Penny, the lost girl who finally came inside. Both of them big and beautiful. Every once in a while I’ve mentioned our pet skeleton in the closet, or more accurately, our skeleton in the garage, Cassie. She was the third of three ferals Lady Laird got wished on her 14 years ago. The only one who was able to resist the allure of couches, air-conditioning, and stroking. She preferred to live in the attic space above the garage. In all weathers, temperatures, and times. We fed her on the freezer. She’d wait for food to appear and eat in our absence. If you entered the garage when she was “down there,” she set speed records for getting up into the rafters and out of sight.

Ten years of this.

Suddenly, though, since the three died, she’s moved into the house. Shockingly, amazingly, incredibly, impossibly, she’s bonding with me. She lives under the couch in the living room and waits for the dogs to be fed and then if I go downstairs I hear what I hadn’t heard since Penny: “Yap, yap, yap.”

And there she is. The rara avis of the Laird household, Cassie. Yap. She lets me pet her. Yap. She lets me tease her tail, just like Mickey did. Yap. She lets me hold her in my lap for a minute at a time.

Tiny thing. Mickey and Penny were big. Cassie is the oldest of them. She’s fourteen at least. But still lovely. Though tiny.

It’s like getting a cat without getting a cat. Seems kind of angelic, doesn’t it?

She did save a dance for me. Breaks my heart.