For a long time, we thought Vina was meant to be an only cat.
We knew her history. She had been a stray before the shelter took her in, and out on the street other cats weren’t friends — they were competition. She didn’t like them. She had never liked them. So we told ourselves the kindest thing we could do was keep her world small and safe and ours.
Spring 2023. We took a birthday trip up to Yosemite and stayed in our trailer, and that night it rained — the kind of steady, closed-in rain that makes a small space feel even smaller.
So we did what every cat parent does from a hundred and eighty miles away. We opened the camera app and checked on Vina.
She was on our bed.
We refreshed. Still on the bed. An hour later, still there. All day, apparently — the same cat, the same spot, the same empty apartment around her.
I don’t know how to explain what shifted in that moment, except that we had been asking the wrong question. We had been asking whether Vina could tolerate another cat. Sitting in a rained-in trailer watching a black cat wait out an empty day, the question became something else: what if we weren’t enough? What if the thing she actually needed was not two humans who come home at six, but somebody her own size?
We drove home the next day and, before we had even really unpacked, called the same rescue that had given us Vina.
There’s an energetic black kitty here, they said. Still waiting.
So we got in the car and went down to Southern California again — the same long I-5 run we had made for Vina three years earlier.
Ricky was the opposite of everything we knew about cats.
Where Vina is careful, Ricky was a blur. He ran. He jumped. He hit the ground and immediately needed to be somewhere else. Six months old and running on something close to jet fuel.
But here’s the part that got us: all that motion, and he still wanted to be near people. He would rocket across the room and then crash straight into your hands and purr like an engine. Wild and affectionate at the same time. We didn’t need long to decide.
Same freeway, same direction, second black cat. Vina had a brother now — though nobody had asked her about it.
Ricky came home with a rough six months behind him. He had a respiratory issue and bad diarrhea, and for a while our lives were a rotation of wet food brands, looking for the one that would let him keep a meal down. Eventually we found it. The respiratory trouble faded as he grew, mostly thanks to Winnie, who nursed him through all of it with more patience than I had.
We had set up a big cage for him — not as punishment, but as a border. Vina needed to be able to see this creature without having to share the floor with him.
She was not thrilled. This was her apartment. Every surface in it was hers, and now there was a small black comet in the corner filing a claim on all of it.
Settling into a spot that was not offered to him
After about a month we let him out.
Ricky’s whole approach to his big sister was joy, at volume. He wanted to play. He wanted to chase. He wanted to be right there, all the time.
Vina hissed and ran.
That went on for a while, and I’d be lying if I said I never wondered whether we had made a beautiful, permanent mistake.
Then one day I looked over and Vina was licking Ricky’s head.
That was it. No ceremony. Just an older sister cleaning her brother’s ears like she had been doing it all along.
I knew right then that all of it had been worth it — the cage, the food rotation, the hissing, the drive. They were going to be fine. They were going to be family.
Ricky is four now, and he is unmistakably the powerhouse of this house.
He wants to eat when we eat. He does full-speed laps through the apartment for no announced reason. And he has Duckie — a yellow duck that has survived more than any toy should — which he carries around and guards like treasure.
He’s not a lap cat the way Vina is. You don’t get to decide when Ricky is cuddly. But when he decides, he is the sweetest little boy in the world, and there is nothing else I’d rather be doing.
Vina taught us that black cats sit in shelters the longest. Ricky taught us something slightly different: that “energetic black kitty, still waiting” is a sentence that shows up over and over in rescue listings, and that the cat behind it is often the best thing that will ever happen to a household.
Both of ours were somebody’s overlooked cat. Now one of them is our angel and the other one is our chaos, and we can’t imagine the apartment without either.
If you’re looking — go meet the black one. Go meet the loud one.
You might be the thing they’ve been waiting on.
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