"Edgar Hadwin. Welcome, Mose. Come on inside."
Mose came up the porch step alone. The cats behind him began to come up after him, in twos and threes, in the careful tired dignity of creatures who had never been welcomed inside anything for as long as they had been alive. Rhoda met every one of them at the top of the porch steps.
"Welcome. What's your name?"
She took their names one at a time. Mose. Lou. Iris. Bess.
Honey went in to begin the slow work of clearing the parlor for the small bowls and folded blankets that thirty-eight tired cats would need before the night was finished. Edgar named them in the front hall as they passed. Rhoda's hand brushed each small head at the top step. The house took them in, one at a time. The last of them passed through the door behind Rhoda's hand, and the front hall light spilled warm onto the porch boards, and the lawn was empty. Quill had not moved.
He sat on the top step with his small grey back to the house, facing the place where the moon had finally climbed clear of the oaks, and he did not turn.
Rhoda Hadwin looked at the small grey back. Then she looked at her husband.
"Quill," she whispered.
Edgar's big lavender-veined hand was on the porch railing. He saw her face, the tears she had been holding, finally given permission to fall.
"Go on, darlin'." He kissed her cheek. Then he stepped back, and he went quietly into the house, and he left her with the cat on the step.
Rhoda crossed the porch slowly, lowering herself onto the porch boards two feet behind him.
"Quill," she said.
"Yes, ma'am." His voice was small.
Rhoda's hand went up to her face once and came back down. "What are you looking for, sweetheart?"
Quill did not answer. He kept his small grey back to her. His tail tip moved once on the boards. "I'm not sure, ma'am." Another pause. The tail tip moved again. "A home, I guess?"
Rhoda's tears, which she had been holding through the whole ordeal, came finally to her eyes and did not stay there.
"Well. You've got one. Right here. If you would like to stay." She sniffed.
The grey tabby turned his head and looked up at her. His eyes were the soft mild eyes Phineas Grove's had been, and the mildness met her now with a surprised delight.
"I'd love nothing more, ma'am."
Rhoda laughed once, a small wet laugh, the kind a woman laughs through tears when a long worry has been answered. "Well. You'll have to call me Rhoda."
Quill considered her. "Rhoda."
He stepped off the top step and crossed the porch boards on a small steady pace, and he stepped up into the dip of her lap where she had folded her hands. He turned twice. He settled. He laid his small grey chin across the back of her wrist.
Rhoda did not move. She had logged a thousand bondings in her own hand. She had not, in all her long years, ever had a cat of her own. In the doorway, with the front hall light behind him and a tea towel in his hand, Edgar Hadwin watched his wife sit very still on the top step of their own porch with a small grey tabby asleep across her lap, and he watched her hand close, finally, gently, around the small warm body of the first familiar she had ever had, and he watched the thin pale moon catch on the soft sleepy fur of Phineas Grove's cat.
Chapter 13
The House Guests
Rhoda Hadwin sat at the small writing desk in her study with the lamp low and the letter half-written. Quill was asleep on her lap with his small grey chin still laid across the back of her wrist, the way he had laid it on the porch step the evening before. He had not, in the hours since, moved.
She had been at this letter since before the light came up. The ink was good. The page was kind. The words, she had found, did not want to come easily.
To the family of Phineas Grove, Sibiu.
She had written that line and then she had stopped. She had writtenHe came to our door three days ago,and stopped again. She had writtenHe saved us,and crossed it out.
Edgar came into the study with two cups of coffee and set one beside her elbow. He did not read over her shoulder. He lowered himself into the chair by the window with his own cup and looked out at the lawn.
