My brother Craig was living in a rented beach house when I needed to move my tiny girl, her crib, one upholstered chair and an armload of my irresponsible ex-husband’s debt away from a marriage I had mistakenly stumbled into 25 months earlier. His two cats, Meanie and Bratty, refugee sisters, watched the parade of people and boxes going up and down the front steps as if they were catty spectators at a painfully slow tennis match.

The only thing they shared besides a mother was their grey-and-black tabby coloring. Meanie was small and sharp, a wiseass of a cat with a short coat that looked like someone had randomly trimmed it with nail scissors. She got more than her share of food (and anything else she wanted) with a pin-you-to-the-wall stare. Bratty was beautiful (thick, fluffy platinum fur, soft paws) and dumb and clumsy. She tripped and fell one time and broke her left elbow, then rubbed the fur off the back of that paw dragging the cast around. “Pick it up, Bwatty,” little Amy would say, lifting her arm, showing her how. Bratty blinked and licked her bare foot.

Not long after we’d settled in, both cats went (we thought prematurely but what did we know) into their first heat, scraping their bodies against doorjambs and my shins and the baby’s head, leaping from one thing to the next and yowling like they were possessed. “Pleeeeeeeeease let me out, pleeeeeeeeease.” Craig had three day shifts and one back-to-back with a night at the restaurant where he worked as a cook, couldn’t take them to the vet until Friday. I was juggling Amy, days at school and nights working at home. We would suffer until Friday.

It was the deep-dark middle of Wednesday night when Craig couldn’t take any more of the two insane sisters galloping between the kitchen and the living room and the baby’s room where a different male cat waited outside each of the three doors, all cats screaming “I want toooooo luuuuuuuuve yoooooou” in Intensely Horny Cat Language. Amy and I watched as he opened the front door. “Go on, you sluts, “ he said as both cats sped out, panting. (I still don’t think Bratty knew why.)

Weeks later, when the nine identical kittens were born (Meanie, five, Tuesday; Bratty, four, a day later), we put one mama box in Craig’s bedroom and one in mine at opposite ends of the hallway and kept the doors closed. A window opened into the garden from each room, and the sisters jumped in and out, studiously avoiding each other. We had this vague idea that maybe one would hurt the other’s babies; separate seemed safer. The babies grew for a couple weeks, and we cooed at them, miniature tabbies, M stripes on their foreheads, their warm bodies remarkably like Amy’s square feet in soft socks.

I came home from school with my tiny girl one afternoon and was setting a bag of groceries down when I heard a noise, turned and saw a lone kitten squeaking under the kitchen table. Meanie was hurrying toward the hallway and gave us a furtive glance as she scuttled away. Bratty passed her, coming from Craig’s bedroom where Meanie’s mama box was, carrying a kitten by its scruff, and hustled around the fireplace wall into the living room. What the hell?

Brilliant detective that I am, it took only a few minutes to figure out that Craig had forgotten to close the bedroom doors after I left and either Meanie or Bratty had started the Great Kitten Exchange and Hideout. Following faint and sometimes muffled mews, I found kittens (still too young to walk) splayed all over the house: under the couch, in Amy’s crib, in my closet tucked in a shoe. I made a sling from the front of my sweater, a cat pouch, and had three of them wriggling in there when I spotted Meanie and Bratty hot-footing it toward each other’s rooms again, their mouths full of kitten. Crap. First things first.

I dumped the babies on my bed, cranked the escape windows shut, chased down both big cats and tossed them, loudly protesting their innocence, outside. Shut the door on their crazy faces.

One by one, the kittens were collected and brought to join their bleating brothers and sisters on my bed where they climbed on each others’ heads and stuck their feet in each others’ eyes, looking for mom and milk. All nine of them, same color, same stripes, exactly alike. I couldn’t put Bratty’s babies in Meanie’s box. Even if I couldn’t tell the difference, I was positive they could. Bad, bad things would happen. Infanticide. Infanticaticide. The kittens cried harder, tiny shrieks rising from the writhing cat ball on the bed.

Right then Craig came home and swung his big self through the door to my bedroom in answer to my hollering “Craaaaaiiig” as loud as I could. I gave him the condensed version without forgetting to mention that he was the one who had skipped the door-shutting and whose fault this whole thing was.

I said, “We can’t put the wrong kittens in the boxes, Boo-Boo*. They’ll know and – I don’t know – E-A-T them or something. Kitty lunch, oh my god, it’ll be awful. And they’re clones, the little mittens, they all look exactly alike, there’s no way we’re going to guess with even 50 percent accuracy. What are we going to do?”

My voice was pitching higher, and Amy started to cry – I hoped not because she was seeing dead kittens in her baby brain – so I patted her back while we stared at the bed.

Craig thought for a second and then pulled his shirttail out, scooped up the four closest kittens, walked over to Bratty’s box and spilled them in. Came back for the remaining five and took them down the hall to Meanie’s. Then he went and opened the front door.

The two cats streaked in, racing neck and neck through the house until they split left and right at the hallway. Each one stopped, sniffing, at her box and then stepped in and lay down, mostly not on the babies, who shoved at each other and squealed until everyone had a pink bit to suck on and a patch of warm fur to knead.

When they were old enough, he sat for hours at the entrance to the grocery store, eventually convincing nine people they needed a kitten, and he took the sisters to the vet to be spayed (further confusing Bratty). He isn’t always right, but he admits to being wrong when that's the truth and eats every last bite of those consequences. He might see this slightly differently than I do, but he’s a lot like our dad.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the many reasons I love my brother more than Swedish pancakes.

This piece was originally published on my website and was there entitled "Meanie and Bratty." This week's posts can be found by clicking on Adobe Soup: the Unzipped Life of Candace Mann and scrolling down the home page. Thanks for reading - either here or there! 

photo licensed from iStockphoto.com