What We Bet Against Ourselves

The office betting pool was simple: how long before Sarah's marriage cracked open like an overripe fruit? Friday night at the bar, Mark from accounting slipped five dollars into the mason jar, whispering two months. I contributed nothing, watching Sarah through the glass walls of her office—alone, headlights from passing cars sweeping across her face like searchlights.

A stray cat appeared in the parking lot that week, mangy and persistent, curling beneath Sarah's car. She brought it tuna from home, ignoring the HR policy about feeding animals on company premises. I watched her crouch in her pencil skirt and heels, palm extended with the offering, while the cat regarded her with ancient, judging eyes.

"My daughter won a goldfish at the fair last month," she told me one evening as we both worked late, the building humming around us like a dying machine. "It died in three days. She cried for an hour, then asked if we could go back for another one. That's marriage, isn't it? Wanting another one immediately after the first one stops moving."

I'd been divorced two years. My ex-husband was sleeping with his yoga instructor.

"The cat's pregnant," I said, changing nothing about the essential truth of the moment.

"Of course it is," Sarah said. "Everything here reproduces. Misery, spreadsheets, bad decisions."

The cat had kittens behind the dumpster—four, blind and mewing. Sarah's husband showed up with papers on a Tuesday, the day before the betting pool closed. I won by default: nobody had guessed "five months and three days." I collected eighty-seven dollars, a fortune built on someone's unraveling.

I gave the money to Sarah in the breakroom, beside the vending machine. She laughed, not bitterly, but like someone finally understanding a joke long after everyone else had stopped laughing.

"Buy the cat a house," she said, and I didn't know if she meant the stray or herself.

The cat disappeared eventually. The kittens too. Sarah's office stayed empty for two weeks after she left, and sometimes I still saw her there, palm against the glass, like she was checking whether she could still pass through to the other side.