This is a story that I hadn’t thought about in a long, long time and — but it popped back into my memory a few days ago and I just can’t let it go. When I was a young married person, my husband — now ex-husband, now deceased ex-husband — is — he was in the Army. This is back during the days of Vietnam. He’d been drafted — no. He had enlisted, but he enlisted because he had a high, or a low draft number. Back then they had a draft lottery and he was number four, so he would have been drafted. So anyway, he had signed up for three years in the Army. We were stationed at [name of base]. We lived across the state line in a very, very small town. And, uh, we’d gotten married. Um, I was pregnant. We adopted two kittens, Pumpkin and Pepper. Pumpkin was orange and white. Pepper was black and white. And had them, uh, our daughter was born in July. And then about a month later, so in August, we were gonna take a trip back North to see our parents and so they could see the baby and so on.
So, we’re like, we weren’t sure what to do with the cats. You know, we didn’t have any friends down there. And, so he said that one — he said that one of the guys in his company had a farm nearby and would be willing to take the cats. You know, farms always need cats. So, supposedly, he took these two cats and took them to the farm. And the guy was happy to get them. That whole thing, once you think about it seriously, it was just absolute bull.
First off, none of the guys in the company, you know, they were from all over the United States. There was nobody, nobody who had a farm nearby. So pretty sure what he did was he took those two kittens out and dropped them off in the woods somewhere. And me being very gullible at the time and him obviously being a very good liar, never questioned it. Even when we got back from our visit to our parents and I said, “Let’s go get the kittens.” And he made up, I have no idea what excuse he made up for not going to get the kittens, but no, we didn’t get them.
And, uh, yeah. It — when it occurred to me, like I said, I hadn’t thought about those two little cats in a long time. And when it — ha. When it occurred to me, recently, what he had actually done with them, it just really, really makes me angry. That he would have done that, and he would’ve lied about it just so freely. Ah, yeah.