He nodded once. He didn't push. He slid off my counter, careful of his hand, and bent down for his jacket on the floor. He held it in his good hand at his side, and the small smile he hadn't quite let himself wear earlier finally surfaced—quiet, private, only for me.
"Seven."
I nodded.
"I'll come get you."
"Okay."
He looked at the cat in the crate. He looked at me.
"What are you gonna do with him?"
"Patch him up. Feed him. See in the morning."
"Yeah." He shifted his weight toward the door but didn't move.
"Easton."
"Yeah."
"Go home. Wash the deep one. Put a clean shirt on. Eat something."
"Yes, ma'am." He gave me the corner of a grin, the same one I'd been watching not-quite-happen at his mouth for the last twenty minutes.
He left.
The deadbolt slid behind him. I stood with my forehead against the wood of the door and breathed.
Then I did what I always did when I didn't know what I was doing. I went back to work.
The cat was sleeping in the back corner of the crate when I lifted the towel. He came up onto his haunches and watched me with the yellow eye and the half-shut eye, and didn't hiss. I sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, opened the crate door, set my hand palm-up on the towel at the bottom, and let him decide.
It took him four minutes to come to me. He came across the towel low on his belly, put his nose against my knuckles, then his head against my palm. I held still.
"Hello, sir."
He had a bald patch behind his left ear the size of a dime. Old scarring across the bridge of his nose. He was a cat who'd been a stray long enough to give up on people once and was, against his better judgment, considering them again.
"You and I are going to have to figure some things out."
I gave him a real exam. Skin and coat. Eyes. Mouth. Ears. A low-grade infection in the bad eye that needed an ointment I'd pick up in the morning. Ear mites. Ribs you could see through the coat. He weighed about half what he should have weighed. None of that was anything I hadn't seen before.
"You're going to live, sir. We'll do the rest of you tomorrow."
I gave him a can of the wet food I had on the shelf for Moose. He ate without lifting his head, the way an animal eats who isn't sure when the next meal is coming. I let him eat in peace and washed my hands at the sink.
The window above the sink looked out over Maple.
His porch light was on. The downstairs window where the leather chair sat had a lamp on inside it—the chair I'd sat across from three weeks ago when he made me tea and we talked about Penny. He was a hundred and twenty feet from my sink.
I stood at the sink and let myself look at his house and let myself want what I wanted.
I turned the water off. I dried my hands. I went back to the table.
The phone was face up on the punch list. I picked it up.
Audrey was the obvious call. She'd been waiting for it since the morning I'd stood at the curb in a Hartsdale Fire T-shirt with my hair wet on one side. She would lose her mind in the best possible way.
