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  “I think he’s hungry,” the girl said, stamping her feet to warm them. Her worn jeans fell short of her ankles.

  He rummaged through his bags and found a box of butter cookies. As he handed it to her, her mouth fell open and he noticed how thin she was, moon shadows falling on the inward curve of her cheeks. While she tore open the box, he set his other bags next to her and continued home.

  Back at his apartment with the kitten, he switched on the menorah. He sang holiday songs from his childhood—“Oh Hanukkah” and “I Have a Little Dreidel”—and danced with the animal pressed to his chest. They shared a dust-covered can of sardines. The oily fish had never tasted so good. He named the cat Judah Maccabee, after the warrior-priest who led the Jews to victory over the Hellenists, and called him Mac for short.

  Why had he not always had a cat? His father had thought animals were dirty, to be kept outside if at all. But Barry found in Mac a companion superior in many respects to his human associates. Irritations and slights—the disappearance of Insurance Science History and Practice from his office, not being invited when other actuaries went to lunch—faded when he stroked Mac’s velvet coat. He forgot he was the only one of four siblings still unmarried, that his best friend, Gregory, had stopped returning his calls after taking up with a pale, plump woman named Basha. The cat required little in the way of entertainment. A string of dental floss drawn across the couch could occupy him for hours. He batted a plush mouse across the floor and talked—how he talked! A machinelike purr, a high cry of hunger, a sharp protest when Barry accidentally stepped on him.

  As Barry rode the subway home from Gristedes to Anette and Mac, he pictured his electric menorah glowing in the third-story window. Maybe next year he would light an oil menorah. He had always been afraid of the mess, and he knew the actuarial risk of lighting any kind of fire at home. The whole place could burn down if you weren’t careful. The Gristedes bag jounced on his lap with the motion of the train, releasing the smell of fried potato pancakes into the subway car, forecasting an evening during which his small family would celebrate Hanukkah.

  In the hall outside his apartment, he reached for his key and heard “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” He imagined it playing in the apartment of a neighbor, perhaps Cindy Johnson, who clomped about in wedge heels, a silver cross nestled in her cleavage—not that he looked.

  Barry had tried to forget the tree, but when he opened the door there it was, crowding his dining room. As it turned out, the music was coming from the radio in his kitchen. Anette sang along as she slid a tray of pastel-colored Christmas cookies into the oven. She had placed the mixing bowl on the floor, and Mac was licking the pink batter. On a rack, a second tray of cookies cooled. Her holiday was taking over every room in the house.

  “Do you have to do that now? It’s the first night of Hanukkah,” he shouted over the chorus. Stainless-steel cookie cutters littered the kitchen table.

  “I’ll just set the timer on these and we’ll turn on the menorah.” She removed her apron, which had reindeer flying across it.

  He snapped off the radio, but it was too late. His evening was spoiled. Why couldn’t his home be Jewish for one night? His future would consist of baked hams and presents wrapped in mistletoe paper. Next she would want to celebrate Easter.

  The kitchen smelled like someone else’s childhood. Barry’s mouth watered, and he wondered if that was how assimilation began, with baked goods. He worried he was betraying the memories of his father and grandfather. When he offered Mac a dreidel treat, the cat sniffed it and went back to the bowl of batter.

  * * *

  Four thirty the next morning, Mac failed to bat Barry on the nose. Barry had always complained about Mac waking him so early to be fed, but it was a loving complaint. He would set a plate of kibble in the corner of the bedroom and close his eyes, the sound of the cat crunching like a white noise machine lulling him back to sleep.

  When he woke to his alarm at six, his first thought was something terrible had happened to Mac. He toed the gray lump asleep at his feet and elicited a bitter cry that reassured him. Perhaps, he reasoned, Mac simply had not been hungry. Out of curiosity, he checked Mac’s bowl and found it had been filled with kibble in the night, half of which had been consumed.

  “Honey,” he said, shaking Anette. “Did you feed Mac?”

  She was snoring, sucking long strands of delicate blond hair into her mouth and then exhaling them. He shook her again.

  “Barry, I’m sleeping,” she groaned, her eyes still closed.

  “Did you feed Mac?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” It was less a question than a protest.

  “Because he was hungry.”

  “How did you know?”

  “He tapped my nose.”

  * * *

  The remains of Barry’s lunch—wax paper dotted with mustard and an empty Sprite can—lay on his desk. Slumped in his chair, Barry imagined Mac tapping Anette’s nose and Anette smiling coquettishly before opening her eyes. The relish he had eaten was giving him heartburn. He tried to tell himself it didn’t matter who fed the cat, to reassure himself his bond with Mac was indestructible, but then he pictured Mac reaching for Anette.

  He phoned his older sister Gladys, who had four children and a way of analyzing his problems that soothed him. When she talked, he could almost hear his mother explaining why he was better off being excluded when neighborhood boys flipped baseball cards or played pickup basketball. “They probably have lice—or worse, worms.” He missed his mother.

  “It’s nothing,” Gladys said. “The cat didn’t want to bother you. He knows you need your sleep to be sharp for work.”

  “He likes her because she’s blond and her fingers always smell like fish,” Barry said. He was looking up Anette’s life expectancy.

  “Whose side of the bed does he sleep on?”

  “Mine.”

  “Then you have nothing to worry about.”

  He made a note to give Gladys a discount when she renewed her policies.

  Gray light filtering into his bedroom woke Barry the next morning. The cat had already eaten. He wanted to instruct Anette not to feed Mac, to remind her Mac was his cat, but he despised his own insecurity. Of course there was no talking to the cat.

  He remembered how peaceful their lives had been before Anette. He would stretch out on the couch with a James Patterson thriller, Mac swatting the pages as he turned them. They would eat dinner together, Mac out of his bowl, and Barry straight from a Swanson’s microwavable package. There had been no alien holidays to endure.

  After dinner that night, the cat climbed into Anette’s lap rather than his, purring as loud as a jackhammer when Anette massaged his neck. It was the third night of Hanukkah, and the lights on the menorah jerked and twitched. Mac kneaded her thigh, nipped her hand, and rolled onto his side, inviting Anette to scratch his belly—something he had never allowed Barry to do. They pleasured each other right in front of him, without shame. Barry fled to the bedroom.

  When his jealousy subsided, he remembered he owed his relationship with Anette to Mac. Gladys had sent him a link to an online dating site, but Barry hesitated to click on it. Women, he believed, were not attracted to pale actuaries. Tan investment bankers, yes. Ruddy lawyers, certainly. But not men like him. From Barry’s lap, Mac pawed the computer, bringing up the profile of a blue-eyed accountant—a CPA no less—staring impatiently back at Barry. Like him, Anette had never been married and had spent her life devoted to numbers. Her skin was translucent. A soul mate? Barry had dismissed such unquantifiable notions in the past, but now he let himself imagine a perfect pairing, created in heaven even before he was born. As quickly as he could, he composed a profile and showed it to Mac before posting it.

  On their first date, they chatted about standard deviations and probability distributions. They ate dim sum and joked about the odds of both having scientific calculator keychains. When she laughed, she revealed horsey gap teeth, and he immedia
tely wanted to knock his own teeth against them. On their third date, he made love to her in his apartment, under freshly laundered sheets and a quilt embedded with cat fur. He probed her teeth with his tongue and walked his hands over her knobby frame, learning the motions that pleased her.

  When he attended the symphony with Anette, Barry heard a richness in the sound that was new. Watching a romantic comedy with her, he imagined himself the leading man and Anette the leading woman, her smile as bright as Jennifer Aniston’s. She would pat him lightly on the hand before pointing out something in the Sunday paper they shared, and slip her arm through his as they walked to a diner for brunch, her touch making him feel, at long last, that he was fully participating in life.

  At first Anette and Mac ignored each other. Mac avoided her feet and turned away from dental floss she accidentally dropped. Barry had to correct Anette when she used the pronoun it to refer to Mac. He worried they weren’t getting along. After she moved in and made fish stew—adding butter and onion and chunk after chunk of haddock—Mac warmed to her, rubbing against her ankles, head butting her belly when he found her in bed. Anette began to refer to him fondly as Big Mac.

  * * *

  “Everything all right, Barry?” his boss asked the next day, when he was late turning in an end-of-year report. The woman was his age, pearls dotting her large earlobes, lines on her brow that darkened when she was annoyed.

  “Formatting it right now,” he said evenly. Brooding over holidays and cats, he had been distracted from his work. He wondered: Why is the firm closed on Christmas but open on Hanukkah? I ought to sue.

  “Can I help?” his secretary whispered after his boss was gone.

  “You can stay at your desk until I call you,” he barked, though in the past they had always gotten along. He hadn’t minded when she left early for her daughter’s soccer games, and she had advised him on gifts for Anette.

  A woman in black orthopedic shoes, clutching a maple cane, lurched onto the subway while he was riding home, but he pretended not to see. He had risen for her before, but now he reasoned, her ride was short, and he was not so young himself.

  At home, as Barry put away his briefcase and took off his suit jacket, Mac followed him through the apartment crying. He picked the cat up and regarded him at arm’s length. “This morning you wanted her, but now you’ll settle for me.” He harnessed the cat for a walk.

  “Don’t you want me to come?” Anette asked.

  Wrapping a scarf around his neck, he avoided her eyes. “Maybe better if you didn’t.”

  Mac pulled him through a park, under naked ash trees, the ground alongside the concrete path frozen. Yellow bulbs flickered behind filmy lampposts. The cat sniffed a Chihuahua in a pink sweater and licked the ears of a long-haired dachshund. He rubbed against a woman’s stocking-clad legs, and she bent to pet him. Barry had once delighted in strangers’ enjoyment of Mac, but now he imagined them stealing the cat’s affection, and he headed home.

  Anette had switched on the menorah—it was the fourth night of Hanukkah—and put on the klezmer CD. To his surprise, Barry discovered he didn’t like klezmer, but grateful for the effort Anette was making, he threw up his hands and pretended to conduct the band.

  For dinner Anette served warm, creamy blintzes with sour cream and applesauce. Barry sat back and admired the golden crepes. “Like the kind my mother used to buy,” he said. He filled Anette’s glass with seltzer and refilled it again when it was only half empty.

  After they ate, Anette pulled Barry to her and they danced around the dining room, spinning away from the Christmas tree and back, the sounds of the fiddle and flute uplifting them. For once, his angular limbs moved gracefully, and though he was leading, he knew she was subtly guiding him.

  When they tired, they sat on the floor, and Barry taught Anette how to spin the dreidel and the meaning of the Hebrew letters painted on its sides.

  “Now I’m an honorary Jew,” Anette said.

  She’d be back to her tree tomorrow, Barry thought, but there was no harm in pretending for a night. Anette stripped foil from a chocolate coin, fed it to Barry, and licked her fingers.

  Mac pounced on the dreidel and it skittered under the tree. Crawling after it, Barry was surrounded by a thick, living smell. It reminded him of the Catskill Mountains, where his family had rented a cabin for two weeks every summer when he was a child. His father traded a three-piece suit for swimming trunks, exposing anemic legs. His mother squeezed her head into a white rubber cap and dog-paddled in a small section of the lake cordoned off with plastic ropes and buoys. At a restaurant in town, his father ordered a cheeseburger, though at home they didn’t mix milk and meat. “We’re on vacation,” his father said, when he saw Barry staring, and Barry ordered a milkshake to go with his lamb chops.

  * * *

  “Forget Christmas, everyone loves cookies,” Anette said in the morning, as she prepared a plate for Barry to take to work. Feeling like a traitor to his people, he set her homemade cookies—stars and trees, painted with icing and dotted with sprinkles—in the break room, a note, from Barry and Anette, alongside. Colleagues who had ignored him in the past stopped by his office. They asked about his holiday plans and shared company gossip. One pounded him on the back while wishing him Merry Christmas. Barry enjoyed the attention, blushing during the boisterous visit, but he resented it took Christmas to bring it about.

  Christmas Eve fell on the seventh night of Hanukkah. Barry lit the menorah and Anette tuned the radio to a station playing carols. She poured eggnog and champagne, made roast duck with latkes on the side, the savory smells filling the apartment, torturing Mac, who paced in front of the oven while the duck cooked. Barry wondered why his holiday rated only a side dish.

  Anette’s family had always opened gifts on Christmas Eve. Barry gave her an antique slide rule for Hanukkah and for Christmas, tickets to the New York Philharmonic performing Handel’s Messiah. For Mac, he bought a New York Mets collar and a pot of catnip. Anette plucked Barry’s present from under the tree and handed it to him. Tearing away the tissue paper, he uncovered a photo of Anette and Mac in a heart-shaped frame, the cat curled in her lap, eyes half closed. “All your loves,” Anette cooed, admiring the photo over his shoulder.

  Barry stared at the picture. “It’s like I don’t even exist.”

  “Come on. It’s to show how much we love you, me and Mac.”

  “Who took the picture?”

  “We went to a studio.”

  “You took a family photo without me?” The picture frame slipped from Barry’s fingers, and the glass broke as it hit the floor.

  Mac hid under the couch. Anette knelt to gather the pieces of the broken gift.

  “I need some air.” Grabbing his coat, Barry left the apartment. Outside, he trudged down frigid, empty streets. Through brightly lit windows he saw rooms full of people celebrating.

  Reviewing his relationship with Anette, Barry found slights everywhere. For his birthday, she had bought him an Italian sport coat and a pair of Hugo Boss loafers. Although grateful at the time, Barry now concluded she was ashamed of the way he dressed. When she introduced him to her parents, she said he was from Brooklyn and his ancestors had emigrated from Eastern Europe. Barry had to add he was Jewish. Was she ever planning to tell them? They were from Scandinavia, the mother six inches taller than Barry. Why had he ever thought it could work?

  Hunger eventually drove him home. Anette had swept up the glass. No evidence of the photo remained. They sat at the dining-room table silently eating a cold meal.

  Christmas Day, Barry studied loss models at the kitchen table, while in the living room, Anette caught up on new IRS regulations. Mac padded between the two, gnawing Anette’s shoelaces, swatting the cuffs of Barry’s pants. When Anette came into the kitchen to heat the kettle, Barry didn’t look up from his laptop. He declined her offer of a cup of tea.

  Darkness swept through the apartment. Though it was the last night of Hanukkah, Barry didn’t bother to lig
ht the menorah. Anette hadn’t cooked. They ate reheated leftovers while watching the evening news.

  “Why don’t we take Mac for a walk,” Anette said after dinner.

  “What else have we got to do?” Barry said, rinsing plates and stacking them in the dishwasher.

  Barry harnessed the cat and they walked along the sidewalk, talking only of mundane things, when they had to be back at work and their need to buy coffee and eggs. As they passed the apartment building where Barry had found Mac so many years before, he glanced through a window into a lobby with a giant Christmas tree and paused when he saw a girl in her late teens, gathering with her family to go out for the holiday. The girl’s down coat hung open over a thick wool sweater and pressed pants. Her hair, neatly brushed, shone.

  “Do you know her?” Anette asked.

  “She could be the girl who gave me Mac. She’s about the right age. But it was a long time ago.” Barry remembered how fragile Mac had seemed; how worried he had been the kitten would suffocate in his pocket, the only place he knew to keep Mac warm; how relieved he had been to get home and find the kitten still alive.

  Anette smiled, her teeth enormous in the streetlamp glow. “Our Mac.” She linked her arm with Barry’s, and he reluctantly left it there.

  Mac jerked the leash forward, pulling Barry and Anette along. Clouds obscured the moon and threatened snow. Shivering, Barry tightened his scarf. It wasn’t long before they arrived at a street he didn’t recognize, without lampposts, stores shuttered and exotic lettering on signs.

  “Did you mean to go this way?” Anette asked.

  “It’s him,” Barry said, motioning with his chin toward Mac. Barry tripped over a raised curbstone as he struggled to keep up. Glancing around, he tried to get his bearings but couldn’t. “Who knows what he’s after?”

  “He must smell a female in heat.” Anette laughed and squeezed Barry’s arm.