From the first time that Fred showed up on the other side of the glass door from Penelope, we began a dance, Fred and me. There was never a question of who was leading this dance in the beginning. It was Fred all the way, making me dance to his tune.

Each morning, I would come downstairs, and more often than not, a mangy feline face greeted me. We weren’t sure yet if Fred was a girl or a boy, but I remember asking my husband what we should call him or her, since we didn’t know the gender.

Flippantly he said, “We’ll call him Fred.” And that settled it. After all, we had Bob, and Jeff once had a cat named George, so it seemed perfect. Whether Fred turned out to be a girl or a boy really didn’t matter. After all, I am a woman named Michael!

We also had no idea how old Fred was. He wasn’t a kitten, but he also clearly wasn’t a full-grown cat. His little ragamuffin head barely popped up above the bottom board of the glass door, yet he was long in the torso, which made us guess that he was about 7-10 months old.

In the beginning, his visits were a little erratic, but they were always in the morning. I was always so thankful to see him, and nervous when I didn’t. He had no idea what his lack of consistency was doing to my nerves.

But on that first morning when he was tormenting Penelope and giving her a taste of her own medicine, I decided to go out to feed him. I was so eager, and so excited to get this relationship started, that I thought I blew it on day one.

I walked out with a bowl of food, and he sprinted across the lawn, up the fence, over and gone again in a flash. I left the food out for quite a while hoping he’d come back, but no such luck.

Until the next morning. There he was again, pitiful little face at the door. I took my time this morning to get food and water and headed towards the door more slowly. He watched me intently as I moved about the kitchen.

As I neared the door, he backed down the stairs and into the yard, and as I opened the door he ran again to the fence, but this time, instead of climbing it, he just watched me. It made me wonder if he had watched me from afar the day before and knew I was bringing food.

There was no way he was going to come eat it while I stood on the porch, so I slowly moved myself back inside and closed the door. He watched me from that safe distance for a few moments before he took a few tentative steps forward. I tried to hold as still as possible while he cautiously climbed each step. He sniffed at the food for a fraction of a second, and then he went to town.

I am quite certain he didn’t not chew any of the food, but rather inhaled it, gorging himself in under a minute.

He didn’t even glance at the bowl of water, but rather finished his hasty meal and looked at me with eyes that seemed to beg the question, “Is that all you’ve got?”

I turned back to the kitchen, ready to refill his bowl, but by the time I got back, he was already gone. I refilled the bowl anyway, hoping he would return, but he didn’t that day.

For the next several weeks Fred would arrive almost daily for breakfast. I began to leave him smaller amounts in the bowl to encourage his desire to stay for seconds, and he soon agreed to that arrangement. When he would finish the first bowl, he would move back to the lawn until I came out and gave refills, and then, once I was safely back in the house again, he would return for more.

After the first week he didn’t gorge himself so quickly, and you could see that he wasn’t quite as skinny as before. The regular food gave him energy. But some of the new energy was also resulting in more wounds, as if the extra calories made him more of a fighter in his scrappy stray cat world.

Some of these mornings he would also lounge on our deck after eating, relaxing, grooming himself, and staring at Penelope as hard as she was staring at him.

On the mornings that he didn’t arrive, I would be anxious, worried that he didn’t make it through the night. A couple of times he missed 2 or 3 days in a row, and the first time I saw him after being gone for 3 days I burst into tears. I was so thankful to see him. I was terribly afraid that he wasn’t safe out there, all alone in the world.

Interestingly enough, he never drank out of the water bowl. Not once. I still wonder about that. But I guess a cat that was only used to water out of puddles might not know what good fresh water was.

Nearly the entire month of June, this was our dance.

I would feed him, he would eat, relax, and leave. This was totally a one sided relationship. Honestly, I began to get a little cranky and felt quite used. I was ready for something more, and I now had a mission. I was going to make sure we could capture him, have him neutered, and then see if he wanted to stay with us.

I had many texts with our friend Joyce, the woman responsible for Penelope in our lives and an untiring TNR proponent. She helped me to know what I needed to do to trap him, to help prepare a room for him in our house to acclimate safely, to details like give him deworming meds and flea and tick meds to minimize danger to Penelope when we were able to capture him.

But I also knew that none of that was going to be possible until I changed the rules. I had to move from being the on-demand waitress to a fellow diner. I needed him comfortable with my presence for real, not just behind a closed door.

So, on July 4, a very hot summer morning in Houston, I decided to lead this dance.