Then again, he had also spent the last fifteen minutes cleaning up a kitten-shredded roll of toilet paper and he hadn’t seen Nora for days, so.
So it didn’t seem like any of his instincts were all that great.
“Now,” he said sternly, setting the kittens inside the stuffed-shirt hamper they still preferred as a resting spot, “you gotta behave if you want treats.”
Three days ago he might’ve chastised himself for engaging in the absolutely ridiculous process of negotiating with these two tiny terrorists, but by this point he’d abandoned all pretense of normalcy within these walls. This wasn’t even that high on the list of weird shit he’d done over the last few days. Other examples included: borrowing two shallow dishes (decorated with the painted faces of characters fromThe Wizard of Oz) from Mr. and Mrs. Salas to help the kittens eat more comfortably; accepting a gift of three PVC pipe scraps from Jonah, who’d been right on in assuming that the kittens would like to crawl through and climb over them; drinking craft beer with Benny in the backyard while putting out carefully spaced out “food incentives” for the deadbeat mom cat; and following the directions provided in another note—this one, hand-delivered, with a shy smile—from Emily Goodnight, who had advice on which of his three plants should be kept out of reach with cats in the house.
This didn’t even count all the times he’d thought about going up to Nora’s apartment.
Go up there and knock, the static part of his brain would think.Take the kittens. Make her laugh like that again.
Ask her why she’s stayed away.
Ask her why she’s given up.
Of course that had to be the static talking, because what did he care if she’d given up? In fact, her giving up—no sabotage, no scheming, nonothing—was great. Her giving up meant he was getting back to normal. This morning, in fact, he’d called up the pervert veterinarian himself, who’d all but owned up to blowing smoke the other day—the mother cat coming back had always been a long shot, especially since the kittens had obviously been weaned early, even before Nora and Will had found them. Probably, Dr. Taylor had said, she’d simply moved on, and that meant Will could do the same, rehoming the kittens or placing them with any one of the area rescue operations he’d already spent a bunch of time looking up.
With that done, there’d only be the apartment left. Any minute now, Sally no-longer-Abraham—who’d checked on Will’s progress every few days, even on her vacation—would arrive to look over his almost-finished product, and once she gave him the thumbs-up, he’d list the unit for rent. In two days he’d be back at work, a newly free man, and he wouldn’t have the time to think about these kittens or Donny or his neighbors or Nora Clarke.
It would be sonormal.
“I’m serious now,” he said to the wide-eyed kittens, when Sally’s knock came. “Don’t embarrass me.”
When he opened the door it took his brain a few seconds to process to the truly outrageous tan Sally was sporting; it looked like she’d spent her entire trip with a foil-covered trifold of cardboard under her face. She beamed her extra-white-looking smile at him and went in for a hug like they were long-lost friends, but abandoned him quickly with a shriek of delight once she caught sight of the hamper.
Will sighed, because he knew what was coming. Even Marian Goodnight had cooed and cuddled over those kittens for a good twenty minutes when she’d made an excuse to drop off a package he’d missed in the vestibule. The fact of the matter was, the fucking things were cute, even when they were trying to tear holes in his new slipcovers.
Not that it seemed to matter to Nor—
“What did you name them?” said Sally, who had turned the bottom of her oversized T-shirt into a hammock and was now settling the kittens into it.
Will cleared his throat. “I didn’t name them anything.”
Sally looked up at him with wide eyes, the whites of which, like her teeth, seemed newly bright against her tan. Will hoped for her sake Dr. Abraham hadn’t seen this; he felt very strongly about sun-protection factors.
“How could you notnamethem?”
“I’m not keeping them. Probably the shelter will name them.”
Sally gasped. “My ex-husband must be rubbing off on you!” she exclaimed.
“I found three good ones,” he said quickly, becauseGod. He was not getting to be like Gerald Abraham, was he? “No-kill. Lots of volunteers. Foster homes, that kind of thing.”
“You should be called Quincy,” Sally said to one of the cats, as though Will had not spoken. “And you, you look like a Francis.”
“Would you like to have a look around?” asked Will.
Sally stared dreamily at the kittens and nodded.
Once they got started, Sally rallied. The kittens sat quietly inside her makeshift hammock while Sally praised his progress, asking the kinds of questions that let him explain exactly how much work he’d been doing for all the days and nights he’d been stuck in here. He’d taken all her advice; he’d focused on making it clean, on making it neutral, on making it simple. He could hardly believe the transformation, even though he’d made it happen himself.
“Now in here,” he said, gesturing for Sally to go ahead into the front bedroom, “I still have to empty out the closet, but it’s mostly—”
“Oh, this is where you found these babies, right?” She swung her T-shirt hammock gently.
Will nodded, a dangerous, filthy static-signal kicking up at the edges of his brain as he remembered what it’d looked like, to see Nora get on all fours to investigate. He sent a silent, grudging apology to Dr. Taylor. Who was he to judge?
“My neighbor found them,” Will said. “The one from the third floor.”
