"I can cook if you've got anything in there besides clean nothing."
"I have eggs and four condiments and a frozen thing. Make it work or we order."
"That's a dare."
"It's a fridge. You're the one who toned down a whole recipe for me and thought I didn't clock it." He says it to the tank, not to me, which is the only way he'd ever say it. "I clock everything. The jambalaya was a war crime against your own taste buds and you did it anyway."
"You ate the whole bowl."
"I'm getting more adventurous. There's a cat coming. I'm practicing being a person who can handle a little mess in the apartment." He nods at a corner where a covered litter box already sits, brand new, waiting, the most un-Soucy object in a room full of clean lines. "Saturday. After the home game. I drove past the shelter four times and then I went in."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." The smallest thing at the corner of his mouth. "You can come. He bit a volunteer. I have a type."
"You're doing it again," I say, because two can read a room.
"Doing what."
"Letting me in and pretending it's logistics."
He doesn't answer that. He reaches over without looking and bumps the back of his hand against mine. Knuckles to knuckles. The smallest possible amount of contact. He leaves it there. "Thank you. For the mysis. It's the right one. Nobody ever gets the right one."
"I round up," I say. We stand there in the weather of his strange beautiful tank. His hand against my hand. The shark making its slow circuit of a world he built and can't control and loves precisely because he can't. I let the question I can't answer keep swimming, and I don't reach for the net.
?
Chapter 11: Soucy
The shelter smells like bleach over something older. The woman walking us back keeps a careful half step ahead, the way people do when they've decided which animal you're getting before you have.
"He's a project," she says, for the third time. "I want to be upfront with you. He came in feral. He doesn't love hands. He put a volunteer in urgent care for two stitches back in March. We've had him eight months. People meet him once and change their minds."
"I read his file. All of it."
"People say that."
"I read the intake notes. The medical history. The three failed fosters. The second foster returned him for, quote, hostility, after nine days. The third kept him five weeks and cited, quote, an inability to bond." I keep my voice level. "I'm not looking for a cat that bonds in five weeks."
"What are you looking for?"
"A cat that takes nine months and means it." Beside me Lundy makes a sound in his chest that he converts, poorly, into a cough.
The cat is in the last kennel. A gray scrap of a thing pressed into the back corner with his ears flat and his eyes doing math on all three of us. Skinny. A notch torn out of one ear. He looks like he's been losing a fight he refuses to stop having.
I crouch down level with the bars and I don't reach in because the file said he hates reaching. I just stay there, low and still, letting him run his numbers.
"You can't pet him through the bars," she says.
"I know. I'm not going to." I keep my hands loose on my knees where he can see them. "I'm letting him decide."
"That could take a while. He doesn't usually come to people."
"Then we'll wait."
It takes nine minutes. I count them.
Lundy stands behind me the whole nine without a word. Its own kind of patience from a man whose entire body is built to fill a room, making himself into furniture so the cat has one less variable to track.
