Part 3
The thaw exposed every careless thing winter had hidden. Bottle caps appeared beside the road. A torn feed sack surfaced behind Wes Harlow’s shed. Beneath Ben’s deck lay three turkey bones, a paper towel, and the saucer he had used for tuna in October, carried there by something smaller and less dignified than a bobcat.
Ben picked it all up, then spent a Saturday with Wes replacing the loose latch on the chicken run and moving sacks of feed into metal cans. Wes worked without unnecessary conversation, asking only for the drill, a half-inch bit, and the box of deck screws. Ben supplied each one before being asked twice. Neither man mentioned March.
At noon, Lucy brought them grilled cheese sandwiches and stood on the other side of the wire.
“Is Walter mad at me?” she asked.
Ben set down his drill. “No.”
“Grandpa says wild animals don’t get mad the same way people do.”
“Your grandpa is right.”
Wes looked up from the hinge he was aligning, surprised enough to lose his grip on it. Lucy considered Ben through the fence.
“Is she your cat?”
“No. She’s not anybody’s cat.”
“Then why did you name her?”
Ben looked toward the pines. “That was for me, I guess. Not for her.”
When they finished, Ben apologized to Wes. He had planned a precise statement about good intentions, incomplete information, and corrected procedure. What came out was shorter.
“I put Lucy in a bad spot.”
Wes tightened the last bolt. “You did.”
“I’m sorry.”
“All right.”
Wes handed him the drill, and they moved to the next hinge.
Ben removed the winter shelter after the last hard freeze. The grass beneath it was flattened and yellow. He took the box apart rather than storing it, because he knew that if he left it whole he would put it back under the deck at the first cold rain.
Walter stayed away for nineteen days, a number Ben knew without marking any of them on a calendar. He repaired a loose stair tread, changed the oil in the generator, and drove to Grand Rapids for Maggie’s fifty-fifth birthday. He arrived with a card and no unrequested advice about the sound her car made on startup.
Maggie noticed both omissions.
“You can look under the hood after cake,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Now I’m worried about you.”
Her house was crowded with adult children, grandchildren, cousins, and two teachers from the middle school. Ben lasted almost three hours. When he left, Maggie walked him to the truck carrying a square knitted footstool that had once belonged to their mother.
“I found this in the basement,” she said. “You always put your boots on it when you were a kid.”
The wool cover was brown and mustard yellow, colors chosen during a decade that had not feared either one. Ben took it.
“About the phone call,” he said.
“Which bad part?”
“Most of it.”
Maggie tucked her hands into her sweater pockets. She waited. Ben felt the old desire to offer a complete defense, polished smooth enough that she would have nowhere to put her anger.
“You were right that I kept feeding her after I knew better,” he said. “The rest I’m still thinking about.”
“That’ll do for now.”
On the drive home, Ben thought about Beth for the first time in weeks. Her father had died during the last winter of their marriage. One night she sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea gone cold and asked Ben not to do anything, just sit with her.
Ben had noticed that the cabinet door above her shoulder hung crooked. He fetched a screwdriver, adjusted both hinges, and then made a list of calls they should place about the estate. When Beth said she did not need a plan, he told her somebody had to keep things moving.
He could still see her hand flatten over the yellow legal pad, covering his list.
“You keep fixing the room I’m crying in,” she had said.
At the time, Ben had heard the line as unfair. He had repaired the cabinet, handled the calls, and kept dinner from burning. Those were acts a person could point to. Sitting without improving anything had seemed like neglect.
By spring, Beth had stopped asking him to sit. When she finally asked him to leave, he had supplied boxes, a moving schedule, and no argument she could use to believe he wanted to stay.
The memory followed him for forty miles. Ben did not turn it into a conclusion. He drove with both hands on the wheel and kept seeing Beth’s palm over his yellow pad while the newly tightened cabinet door hung square above her head.
Back home, Ben placed the footstool beside his recliner. It smelled faintly of cedar chest and the hand lotion their mother had used. He told himself he kept it because his chair needed one.
The following afternoon, Walter returned. Ben was reading when a shadow crossed the deck. The bobcat stepped into the patch of sunlight outside the glass door and stood there, heavier through the shoulders than she had been in October, coat clean, ragged ear unmistakable.
His body moved before his judgment did. He reached toward the side table, where he once kept a small jar of treats. His fingers closed on empty air.
Walter looked through the glass.
Ben stayed in his chair.
After a minute, she sat. Sun warmed the pale fur beneath her chin. She showed no interest in the old stump and did not sniff the threshold. She simply watched a blue jay hammer a seed against the deck rail while Ben watched her.
Ten minutes later, she left, but she returned twice that week and once the next. No food passed between them. The distance changed by inches rather than leaps. Ben stopped measuring it.
In late May, he came home from the grocery store during a warm rain and carried two bags through the mudroom. The back door failed to latch behind him. He set the bags on the kitchen counter, went back for a case of water, and had just carried it inside when he turned to find Walter standing on the rubber boot tray.
Ben stopped beside the kitchen counter. Rain stippled the deck behind Walter, and the back door rested open against its closer. She stood three feet inside the house, paws among the dried curls of mud Ben had meant to sweep, body stiff and low. Her nose worked rapidly as she looked at the hanging coats, the galvanized umbrella bucket, and Ben.
His first thought was to close the outside door before she changed her mind.
The thought shamed him with its speed.
He set down the case of water. Without moving toward Walter, he backed through the kitchen into the living room, leaving the mudroom and the open back door unobstructed.
Walter did not leave. She inspected one grocery bag, flinched when the refrigerator motor came on, then padded into the kitchen. Her nails clicked once on the linoleum. Ben could hear rain, his own breathing, and the small mechanical tick of the wall clock.
The bobcat moved into the living room. She stopped beside the knitted footstool and pressed her cheek against one corner, leaving three silver hairs caught in the wool. Then she turned toward Ben’s canvas work boot.
He kept both hands loose at his sides as Walter sniffed the toe, touched it once with the side of her face, and walked back through the kitchen. At the mudroom threshold, she paused. Ben did not call her. She slipped through the open door and disappeared beneath the dripping pines.
Maggie phoned that evening, and Ben told her what had happened from beginning to end, including the part about wanting to shut the door.
“But you didn’t,” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
Ben looked at the three pale hairs on the footstool. “Because I was standing between her and the only way out.”
Maggie was quiet. Then she asked, “Do you want me to say something wise, or can I just be glad you called?”
Ben sat down and put his boots on the ugly little stool.
“You can just be glad,” he said.
After they hung up, he called Nora and reported the visit. Her first question was whether anyone had been scratched or cornered. Her second was whether he had closed an exit. Ben answered no to both.
“Months of food and watching you through glass made that threshold familiar,” Nora said. “Keep the doors latched. A four-minute tour of your mudroom is not a permit for a second one.”
“It was closer to six minutes.”
“That is not reassuring.”
Ben swept the boot tray, stored the grocery bags, and adjusted the faulty door closer before bed. He did not move the footstool or pick the hairs from its wool…
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