Last Updated on June 1, 2026 by admin
Today is the first day of Pride Month. In a third-floor apartment in Jamaica Plain, an orange cat is asleep on a folded blanket on a small armchair that was once carried up a fire escape.
The cat is Tangerine. Eight years old. The blanket has been washed seventy-four times. The chair belonged to Vincent’s grandmother.
Jamil Whitcomb is thirty-five. He is a children’s librarian at the Boston Public Library — Jamaica Plain branch. He met Vincent Aguilar in 2017, in line at a coffee shop, at the precise moment the espresso machine made a sound that both of them mistook for a small animal.
They were married in October 2019 at City Hall, in a courthouse ceremony attended by Jamil’s mother (who flew in from Memphis), Vincent’s sister (who drove down from Maine), and the woman who ran the coffee shop where they had met (who closed the shop for an hour to attend).
The next week, Vincent came home with a cat in a cardboard box. The box was held shut with one rubber band. Inside was a six-month-old orange shorthair who had been found behind a dumpster on Centre Street.
“I was going to ask first,” Vincent said. “But she looked at me, and the asking got skipped.”
That was Tangerine.
The first night, she slept on the wedding-band box that was still sitting on the dresser because they hadn’t put away the wedding things yet. She put one paw on the box. She did not move it. She slept there for nine hours.
Jamil took a photograph at 6:11 a.m. The photograph is now in a small wooden frame on a shelf in the apartment.
In the seven years since, Tangerine has moved with them twice. She has survived one upstairs neighbor with a dog, one downstairs neighbor with a violin, and one nephew who came to visit for ten days and decided cats were terrible (he is now nine, and writes Tangerine a card every December).
She has watched Jamil get his master’s degree, watched Vincent get promoted at the architecture firm, and watched both of them sit on the floor at two in the morning during the difficult March of 2022 when Jamil’s mother was in the hospital.
Vincent says Tangerine is the best decision he has ever made.
Jamil says Vincent is the best decision he has ever made.
Tangerine has no comment.
Today is the first day of Pride Month. The library where Jamil works is closed on Mondays. He is at home, reading a book about salt cod, and Tangerine is on the armchair, on the blanket, on top of a man’s grandmother’s chair.
Some things travel a long way to find the place they are going to sleep.
This is one of them.