RUNAWAY
Catherine Uroff
Vincent calls this afternoon. He’s talking fast, bouncing from word to word. I can hardly keep up.
“Took a walk yesterday. Up by Sumner. This cat, Elle? Left on the sidewalk. Pretty thing. Stretched out. Owned the place. Purring. I used to have a cat like that, a tabby, when I was a kid. Bet you didn’t know that. My father ran her over, backing out of the garage. Comes running in the house, swearing. Fuck me, he says. My mom? You idiot, she says. But she’s calm about it. Anyway, so, this cat. This cat on Sumner.”
He pauses. I imagine he’s sitting in his easy chair in the low-ceilinged, boxy living room of his one bedroom apartment. He’s got sweats on and a hoodie, even though it’s summertime. The television is on mute but he’s gripping the remote control tightly in one hand, flipping rapidly through channels.
“I took it. Brought her home.”
“Someone may be missing that cat now. The owners –”
“Fuck ‘em.”
He’s on disability now but he was on the Springfield PD for seventeen years. His partner, Rodney, would raid the evidence room, swipe pills from criminal cases, snort stuff off of his desk, right next to his Officer-of-the-Year crystal trophy. No matter who I’ll be? I’ll never be as bad as Rod, Vincent joked with me once.
“Bought food for her,” he’s saying. “Cans and cans of it. Got toys too. Little bird on a string. She likes that the best. Nothing’s too good for her.”
“You can’t just take someone’s pet, Vin. Make it your own.”
He lowers his voice, as if there’s someone else in the apartment with him even though I know that can’t be true. No one comes to visit Vincent anymore.
“You’re turning on me. Like all the rest.”
“I’m just trying to explain. It’s not too late. You can bring it back.”
“Well, not now I can’t. She slipped out today. Here I am, just trying to get the morning paper. Open the door and out she goes. Fast, little thing. Couldn’t stop her. Runaway. Dammit but I tried. Almost slipped and fell, trying to chase her. Runaway, that’s what she is. Like that song. Remember that old song? That’s what she’s like.”
He keeps asking if I know that song about runaways. Then he starts singing it even though most of the lyrics are missing. As I walk along, I hum, hum, hum/What went wrong with la-la-la/A love that was so mmmmmm. His voice isn’t half bad, considering all the meds he’s on.
First thing I do is pick up the cat. It’s still hanging around his apartment building, rubbing against the outside brick wall, swishing its skinny tail. Its pink collar doesn’t have any tags. When I try to pick it up, it scratches but I hold on tight. I take it to the pound, a few blocks away, walking in with it squirming and hissing and blood still dripping from my arm where it scratched me. The receptionist stands up from her seat but doesn’t come around from behind the counter, frozen in place by the very sight of me. A woman in the waiting room shrieks. She’s holding her small dog to her chest like she’s clutching pearls. Some other woman in a lab coat rushes out from the back room. She’s got lines on her forehead and a small mouth and she’s holding a carrying case and a long, white towel. I assume the towel is for me but she throws the towel over the cat, plucks it out of my arms, swaddles it like it’s a baby, and drops it in the case. All the while, the cat’s making this really strange noise, a whirring sound that reminds me of something bad. When I ask the woman if we’re hurting the cat, she looks directly at me for the first time, points to my arm, and says, “Looks like you’re the one who’s hurting.”
The cat must’ve been chipped because an hour later the owners come in. I’m still around, sitting in the waiting area, because I can’t think of anything else to do. The woman with the small dog is long gone. The owners are young, around the same age as I was when I first met Vincent. The man has red cheeks and freckles on his nose. He’s wearing biker shorts. The woman is hugging him around his waist. She’s crying but she’s smiling. It’s all I can do not to jump out of my seat, slap her across the face, call her a negligent bitch for letting the cat out in the first place, ready for the taking. Instead, I go home before the receptionist can point me out. “Here’s the lady who found your cat,” she’ll say and then they’ll look at me like I’m a hero.
A realtor comes to the house for a preliminary meeting. “Our first get-together,” she says to me over the phone, as if we’re real friends. She gets a lot of good reviews online; that’s how I picked her. Her name is Jolly. Actually, she explains, her real name is Jolanda but everyone has always called her Jolly, ever since she was a little girl. She has pitch-black hair cut in a bob and she wears big black-framed glasses. There’s something so ugly about her that she’s actually very pretty.
She wants a tour. I start with the living room and dining room and then the little study where Vincent used to read the paper and then the kitchen and the pantry and the laundry room and the half bath. We’re not even upstairs before she starts talking about money.
“If you could just make more space, clear things out—there’s way too much furniture in the living room, for one—I can probably sell your house in a week for about fifty thousand more than what it was worth last year.”
“What was it worth last year?”
“People are going nuts these days. Paying way more than asking,” she says, rolling her eyes.
I laugh. She looks surprised for a second and then she laughs with me. She must think that the thought of all that extra money is making me happy, but that’s not quite it.
I rent a storage unit and move a lot there. I also go through my closets and drawers because Jolly says I’d be surprised at how nosy some buyers can be. There’s a lot to throw out. Mostly junk that has crept into our lives over the years. A porcelain bowl with a cardinal painted on the bottom of it. A cloth coin purse shaped to look like a dog’s head. A shot glass from Las Vegas even though neither Vincent or I have ever stepped foot in Nevada. A small wooden basket with a matching wooden nutcracker. Three bells running down a rope. Some loose glass beads. Vincent’s vinyl records: Frampton Comes Alive, Cheap Trick, REO Speedwagon’s You Can Tune A Piano But You Can’t Tuna Fish. I toss his baseball card collection too. When he moved out, he said he didn’t want any of it. He told me I could keep the cards or throw them away. It didn’t make any difference to him. So I kept them. I was so sure he’d change his mind.
Vincent calls me about the cat. He’s named it even though he hasn’t seen it in a week. He calls it Tabitha because it’s a tabby. He says that he’s ordered some more cat toys for Tabitha. Cats need to play, he says. I don’t tell him that she’s already been returned to her rightful owner, that he should stop staring out the window, putting out bowls of wet food, waiting for her to come back.
Right before the house goes on the market, I hire a kid down the street to come and mow the lawn and weed the flower garden. His name is Tommy and—this is years ago now—Vincent caught him once sitting in the middle of the high school football field late at night, too stoned to move. He took the pipe out of Tommy’s hands, sat with him until he could see straight again, and then told him to get the hell home before he changed his mind and charged him for something. Now Tommy’s graduated from U Mass and living back home again because he can’t find a job on account of the pandemic.
“Everyone says that everyone is hiring now but that’s a lie. Not true at all. It’s rough as hell out there,” Tommy says when I pay him for his services.
He’s done a crap job. There are patches of the lawn that he didn’t even touch. He seems to have pulled out my flowers instead of the weeds. I’m left with something worse than what I started with.
“You’ll find something eventually,” I say, staring down at my ruined garden.
“First thing I’m going to do? Move out.”
Tommy’s black hair is too long and it’s almost covering his eyes. I keep waiting for him to shake his head, brush his fingers through his hair so that he can see better. But he keeps pretty still.
“I’m putting the house on the market in a few days.”
“Vincent know about that?”
“Haven’t told him yet. I will.”
“I think about him sometimes.”
Apparently, Tommy cried when Vincent caught him on the football field. He begged Vin not to bust him, to spare him from his father’s wrath.
“He wasn’t all bad, is what I’m trying to get at,” Tommy says now.
Someone wants to see the house a day after it goes on the market. Not even twenty-four hours. Jolly says I need to leave, make myself invisible. It will feel awkward if I’m around. But I don’t go too far. I park my car down the street and wait for a while before getting out and walking down the sidewalk like I’m just another neighbor, taking an afternoon stroll. There’s a strange car parked in front of the house, a sedan with dirty windows and a crumpled fender. I sneak up the driveway and go around to the back yard so that I can peek into one of the windows. Recon, that’s what it’s called. Vincent used to do that a lot when he was a detective. “Getting the lay of the land,” he told me once. “It’s important to know exactly what you’re getting yourself into before the shit starts up.”
I squeeze past a rose bush to get a better view. I planted that bush when we first moved in but now it’s more tangled, thorny branches than blooms. Inside, I see a woman and a man standing in the living room with their realtor who resembles Jolly in so much as she’s a certain age and her clothes are very tailored and she’s wearing a lot of lipstick. A little girl is there too, dancing in between her parents. She’s holding their hands, trying to get them to swing around with her. The man has his head tilted back. He’s looking up at the ceiling and I’m reminded of the time—a few months before he moved out—when Vincent turned on the water for a bath and then forgot about it. He just drifted downstairs and went outside, naked except for his striped boxers. I rushed out behind him, tried to cajole him back inside, convince him to cover up, put a t-shirt on, something. I didn’t want anyone to see the scars on his back, the dazed look on his face. But by the time we came back inside, the water damage was done.
Now I’ve got my nose pressed against the windowpane in an effort to hear what they’re saying. All I see are mouths moving. But the little girl stops swinging and starts screaming instead, pointing at me. In my hurry, I fall back into the rose bush, stinging the palms of my hands as I scramble up. I run as fast as I can. My throat feels sore and my lungs are full and my ankle hurts but I keep going anyway. Crashing through backyards. Skirting fences. Dodging the cars parked in the driveways.
Jolly calls me later that night. I’m sitting on the couch with my leg up because my ankle is swollen. I’ve got bandaids on my hands, where the thorns ripped into them. I’m watching television. Someone is reporting that Kim Kardashian has finally left Kanye West. The reporter makes reference to Kanye’s mental illness. She refers to it so easily, so calmly, like she’s reporting on the weather. Cloudy with a chance of passing rain.
“You can’t do that again,” Jolly says.
“I’ve been in this house a long time. I deserve to know who’s looking at it.”
“Do you want this or not?”
“Yes.”
“Then you need to listen to me.”
“I am.”
“The truth is no one wants to know who came before. They want to see themselves in this house, and they can’t do that if you’re around.”
I go to the pound to pick up a cat. I ask for a tabby. The girl at the counter, who is not the same girl who was here when I brought Tabitha in, looks at her nails and says that there’s not much inventory these days on account of COVID. Everyone wants to adopt something while they’re still at home. She leads me to a cage that has a cat at the very back of it. It’s all black and one of its ears is missing. It takes a lot of coaxing for it to leave its cage but once it’s in my arms, it curls itself into a ball, its tail wrapped around itself.
Vincent doesn’t want it.
“Please,” I say to him. “Here’s something for you.”
“No.”
I made a makeshift carrying case out of a cardboard box. I try to hand the box to Vincent but he crosses his arms and shakes his head, as if he’s a kid who’s refusing his medicine. The cat is moving around, and it’s hard for me to keep the box level.
“I’ve already got Tabitha. I’m just waiting for her to come back.”
“She won’t though.”
“How do you know?”
“She must be back home already, Vin.”
He rocks back on his heels. The meds he’s on makes him bloated and tired-looking but he looks even worse today.
“She wouldn’t leave me,” he says.
Jolly’s not happy about the cat. She says that buyers don’t want any animals around. It’ll bring down the value of the house if they see kitty litter. I ask Tommy to take care of the cat and he agrees, even though his mom is allergic. I say that it’s just temporary, until Vincent comes around. I put a red collar on it with my name on the tag. Just in case.
Another couple makes an appointment to see the house. The wife is pregnant. Jolly tells me that they are interested in the house because of the number of bedrooms it has. They plan on having a big family, she says. For a second, I feel mean and bitter because Vincent and I used to talk about having a lot of kids when we first got married. Before their appointment, I park down the street, the front of my car pointed towards the house so that I can see everything clearly. They’re inside for a long time. When they come back outside, the husband walks around the perimeter of the house, pointing at something on the roof. He’s very solicitous towards his wife when they finally leave, opening the car door for her, cupping her elbow with his hand to help her in, waiting until her legs are tucked in before carefully closing the door.
I follow them at a discrete distance. They turn to the right, onto Route 5, and don’t stop until they get to the County Line package store. The husband is the one who goes into the store, coming out a few minutes later holding a small paper bag. He doesn’t look like a young man, a soon-to-be new father. He’s losing the hair on top of his head, and he’s got a little paunch in his stomach that ripples as he moves. He doesn’t even wait to get back into the car before he’s unscrewing the top of whatever’s inside the bag.
When Jolly calls me later that day to tell me they’re interested in the house but have concerns about the roof, I tell her that I don’t care. I wouldn’t take an offer from them anyway.
“I have my reasons,” I say when she asks.
Vincent is out at the Cardinal Tavern tonight, making a scene. He likes that bar the best because it’s where he used to go, at the end of his shifts. Everyone still knows Vin there and, usually, someone calls me if things get out of hand. Just like tonight. Vin’s weeping about Tabitha and throwing punches at anyone who dares to approach him. When I get there, he calms down.
“She knows,” he says, pointing at me.
The crowd parts to give me room at the bar. Someone touches my shoulder, squeezes.
“It’s OK, Vin,” I say.
“You know the truth, don’t you? And now you’re here and it’s perfect and you can drink with me. Won’t you, Ellie?”
Chuck is behind the bar tonight. He’s been working at the Cardinal for twenty years or more. He used to be a drunk and then he stopped cold turkey the night of his 40th birthday. He told me once that he must’ve done harder things in his life but he couldn’t name them if he tried. Now I nod at him and he nods back. This is our routine. Vincent orders two shots—one for him, one for me—and Chuck pours whiskey in Vin’s glass and then turns his back to fill up mine. When it’s time, I throw it back like it hurts, even though it’s only water.
This other woman stops by the house without a realtor. She stands on my front stoop and explains that she’s been passing by my house for days now, staring at the For Sale sign in the front yard, trying to get up the nerve to stop. She says that she’s got a husband who works long hours and two kids who are in elementary school and right now they live in a cramped apartment across the river in Agawam with a registered sex offender not two doors down so she can’t even let her kids play unattended in the courtyard. It’s their dream to move into this town, for the schools of course, and if they could just find a house that they could afford, they’d be all set. She knows that it’s silly to even attempt to ask about something like this but would I consider lowering the price of the house a bit so that regular folks like her and her husband could afford it? One way to do this, she explains, is to cut out the realtor fees. She talks very quickly without moving her lips too much. She hugs herself as she talks. I have a glimpse of a tattoo on the inside of her arm. It looks like a spider or maybe a dragon and I wish she’d just hold her arms out straight so that I could see.
I invite this woman in. I show her around the house. I point out some of the finer details. The built-in cabinets in the dining room. The wooden shutters in the half bath. The double wall oven in the kitchen. I think I’m quite good at this. She pulls out her phone and takes photos. I tell her how Vincent’s Captain lent us a down payment to buy this house, how it took us years and years to pay him back but we did. Every last cent. When I usher her to the front door, she shakes my hand and thanks me for my time. She says she’ll be in touch. I never ask her name and she never gives it to me. It takes me a few days before I realize I won’t hear from her.
When I tell Jolly about it, she’s furious. She says that I should never let strangers inside my house. No matter what they say.
“And you signed a contract,” she warns. “So you can’t cut me out anyway.”
Vincent calls late at night, crying for the cat. He says that if he was a better owner, she never would’ve left. He seems to have forgotten that he stole the cat in the first place. It reminds me of a story he told me, the last year he was on the force. He busted someone for something and the guy threw money at him to make him go away. He took the cash but cuffed the guy anyway.
Jolly comes to the house with a serious look on her face. Tommy has just left, pushing his mower down the street, back to his parent’s house. He’s left clippings everywhere, little green mounds all over the lawn.
Jolly says that it’s highly unusual—in this hot of a market—for a house to be for sale for weeks on end like this, without any real interest. She says that we may need to rethink our marketing strategy. She asks me if there’s anything she should know about this house.
“Like what?” I ask.
We’re sitting at my dining room table. She removes a clipboard and ballpoint pen from her briefcase and puts them down on the table.
“Well,” she says. She clicks the top of her pen to extend the tip, clicks it again to retract.
“What is it that you want to know?”
There’s something tight in my chest, something that I need to cough out.
“This might sound like a strange question but you’d be surprised. People want to know. Has anyone died in this house?”
“That? No.”
Jolly smiles and I feel like I’ve passed a test.
Tommy says that the cat got into his mother’s knitting and she’s furious about it. Ruined yarn everywhere. She was making a sweater for Tommy’s father for Christmas and now what is she going to do? He says that his mother is no better than his father, really, and that as soon as he can get a full time job, he’ll move out the next day.
“But until then,” he says sadly. “The cat’s gotta go.”
I take the cat back to Vincent’s. He’s sitting on his couch, drinking a beer. He doesn’t have a shirt on and it’s hard to look at the bulges of fat on his stomach. He used to be rail thin, too skinny. He could eat anything—three desserts a day—and never gain a pound. The cat must’ve thrown up on the ride over because there’s a bad smell coming from the cardboard box.
“Thought I heard Tabitha last night. By the door.”
“She went back home, Vin. Animals are like that. They know how to find their way back.”
“Jesus but that’s heartless.”
“But, look, I got another cat for you. Remember? Will you reconsider? Will you please just take a look? I need to find a place for her. I can’t keep her.”
“Why not?”
I draw in my breath. I stand up straighter too.
“I need to tell you.”
“What?”
“I’m selling the house. Trying to at least. No one’s interested yet. But, still, it’s what I’m doing.”
Vincent puts his beer can on the floor, next to his feet. He’ll forget about it, I’m sure, and knock it over when he gets up.
“Moving out of the house? Where to?”
“I don’t know.”
“Gotta figure that out.”
“I will. When it’s time.”
He stares at me. There are some moments—and they don’t come often—when he’s able to shake everything else off and really concentrate.
“You loved that house,” he says.
“Still do.”
We used to be able to tell each other anything, no matter how dark or secret or shameful. Now I wish I could describe how I sobbed when I had to strip the house of our personal touches, take down our photos from the walls. Of all things to cry about, I could say and he’d understand.
“Jolly, she’s the realtor, I’m just doing what she says. And she says we can get a lot for it. You get half, of course. Whatever I get for it? Half of it is yours. I know that.”
He starts messing with the remote again. I’ve lost whatever small chance I had with him.
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“Please, Vin.”
“I don’t want anything from you,” he says. “Including that cat.”
He turns on the television and then gets up to grab a bag of chips from the kitchen. Sure enough, the beer gets knocked over in the process. I clean up the mess and then leave, taking the cat with me.
Tommy gets a second interview with an engineering firm in Springfield. He’s so excited and nervous about the whole thing that he drinks too much the night before and ends up at my house, throwing up in my powder room. All I can hope, as I stand in the front hallway, listening to him retch, is that he doesn’t make a mess. I may have a showing tomorrow, a last minute appointment.
“This is the real thing. I’m ready for it,” Tommy says when he finally comes out of the bathroom. He’s a little wobbly so I guide him into the living room and make him sit him down on the couch.
“Means I won’t be able to help you with your lawn anymore.”
Tommy has very small eyes. They’re hidden a lot by his hair but when he tips his head back, the way he’s doing now, I can see them clearly.
“I’ll make do.”
“This interview? It’ll make or break me.”
“You want to practice?”
“Nah. It’s better if I wing it. I get all tied up with my words when I overthink things.”
He sits up suddenly, tilts his head to the side.
“Where’s the cat?”
For a second, I think he’s referring to Tabitha.
“She still around? That black kitty? Oh, I liked her. I really did.”
“I had to take her back to the pound. Vincent didn’t want her.”
“Aw, that’s too bad.”
“She got adopted though,” I say even though it’s a lie. “I checked the next day and someone told me she was already gone.”
“It’s strange though. I thought I heard her just now.”
We are very quiet for a while. But I can’t hear a thing.
Jolly wants me to paint the rooms downstairs. She says that fresh paint will signal something important to buyers. New beginnings. I get a whole bunch of sample cans from Ace Hardware and paint stripes on the walls and she points at the ones she likes. “But it’s your choice,” she says. They are all very neutral. I pick a gray color because it looks like the color of a stormy sky that’s about to turn. The next day, she comes over to my house dressed in overalls. She says that she’s here to help me. It’s as if she knows the truth: I lack the appropriate amount of motivation to get started myself. Vincent always handled the painting and handiwork in the house. Since he left, things have been left undone. Sometimes it takes me weeks just to replace a lightbulb.
Jolly and I work together. We’re on ladders, on opposite sides of the dining room. I’m being careful not to get any paint on the trim. I don’t want her to tell me that I have to redo all the trim in the house too.
“So, your ex-husband…”
I turn to look at Jolly. It’s hard to twist on the ladder and for a second I think I’ll fall. The paint brush will go with me. Gray everywhere. But she’s still facing the wall, working hard, up and down with her roller. Steady strokes.
“What about him?”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t connect the two of you until just recently.”
“Vincent. Yes, that’s him.”
The story was all over the news for a week straight after it first happened. Vincent with Rodney, walking up the outside stairwell of an apartment building in Hungry Hill. They were responding to a domestic disturbance call. The shooting started before they even got to the top of the stairs. Rodney got it in the face. The man with the gun dragged Vincent into his apartment and beat him before shooting him too. His wife stood just a few feet away and watched the whole thing. Vincent said she had her fingers knit together like she was praying but she didn’t try to help, not even at the end, when it was all over and she could’ve tried to stop the bleeding.
“Houses,” Jolly says, “are like people in a way. They get reputations.”
Rodney had a wife and three boys who liked hockey so much that he built a rink for them in his backyard. That was what everyone kept talking about at his funeral. The damn hockey rink.
Vincent was quiet when he first came home from the hospital. He didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t want to talk about anything. Didn’t even want to testify against the guy in court. He just stared at me all day. Followed me from room to room. When he wasn’t doing that, he was on the internet, all night long, scrolling up and down. One night, I woke up and he was crouched above me, straddling me on his hands and knees, a faraway look in his eyes. He pulled me out of bed, by my hair. He was babbling about world peace and doomsday and there were good people on both sides but not Radical Islamic Terrorists, they weren’t good, but every single system in this entire world was rigged and it was time—thump, I fell out of bed; thump, my head knocked on the floor; thump, he stomped me in the ribs—I fully understood that. A neighbor called the cops because I was screaming. The police officer who came over was a friend of Vin’s. Jimmy Malloy. I’d had him and his wife over for a cookout not even a year before.
“He’s not well,” I say to Jolly now.
“You’ve been through a lot.”
I feel a kinship with her at that moment. I wish we could step down from our ladders, meet together in the center of the room. I could lean up against her, put my head on her shoulder.
“Our best bet – and it’s not impossible — is to get an out of towner,” she says.
Tommy interviews with three different people for two hours straight but never hears back from any of them. He sends follow up thank you emails to the HR representative and to each person he interviewed with. No replies. No acknowledgement. Not even a polite form letter. He calls it ghosting. He says that’s normal these days. People used to do it to people they were dating but now it’s done professionally too.
“Things will get better,” I say. “You’ll get a job.”
We’re talking to each other on the phone. We’ve started doing that lately. He’ll call late at night, right before he goes to bed.
“When?”
“I don’t know that,” I say and I feel good about myself for a moment. “But it’s bound to happen someday.”
Jolly’s got the perfect buyers. They’re moving here from the Midwest. I think of corn fields and little pink houses by the highway. I want to play the John Mellencamp album with that song on it—Ain’t that America, something to see—but then I remember that I threw out Vin’s records and gave away his stereo equipment too.
Apparently, the buyers have already seen pictures of the house and think it’s charming.
“They plan on making a lot of changes, before they even move in. Like painting the exterior, tearing down the garage, building a new one, that kind of thing,” Jolly says.
I make a face and Jolly wags her finger at me.
“That’s a good sign. It means they’ve got a lot of money.”
Tommy decides to move to Colorado. He says that he’s always loved to ski and he’s heard it’s pretty out there. Plus his parents are still giving him a hard time and he can always work remotely if some company wants to hire him. He’s got some money from graduation that will tide him over until he can get on his feet. He stops by the house to say goodbye. He says that it’s been nice knowing me. He asks me to give Vincent his best. His hair looks even worse than usual. It’s so long now that he needs to put it up. I don’t invite him in. I’ve got boxes everywhere. There’s nowhere to sit anymore.
“You driving there?”
“It’ll take me a few days.”
I think of him on the road. The dark highways. The bright high beams coming from cars going the other direction, momentarily blinding him.
“Yeah? Well, I’m moving too. Someone wants the house and I have to move out soon.”
“Where you going?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ever think of Colorado?”
This makes me laugh. I wish I could tell Vincent about it. This young kid asking me to move west with him. Or maybe he’s not asking. Maybe he’s just curious. Have I ever thought of Colorado?
“No,” I say. “Not really.”
“You call me if you ever get there.”
“I will.”
We don’t have a lot to say to each other after that.
The movers come the day before closing. They aren’t very careful with the furniture but I don’t say anything to them. It takes only a few hours for them to store everything in their truck. Jolly comes by to stand with me, watch them work. She says she knows this may be hard for me but I really should be happy with the price that I got. It wasn’t quite what she was hoping for but it’s good enough. She’s waiting for me to thank her but I don’t. I just can’t.
After everything is inside the truck and the straps and wraps and dollies and carts have been stowed away too, the movers pull down the back, lock it, and wave to me before they hop into the cab and pull away. They’ll keep everything secure until I find a new place. I like the thought of all my things—what is left—just waiting for me somewhere.
I drive over to Vincent’s but start coughing on the way over. I open the car door just before I throw up. I’m stopped in front of an OTB and there’s a guy at the window, watching me. I think he’s laughing. When I’m done, I wipe my mouth with my hand. Whatever was scratching my throat is gone.
To get to Vincent’s, I take Sumner Avenue even though it’s out of the way. I don’t really understand what I’m looking for until I see her. Tabitha. Sitting in the middle of the sidewalk again. When I park my car at the curb, she turns her head to watch me but, otherwise, she doesn’t move. She’s not scared at all, here on Sumner. I get out of the car, crouch down, duck waddle over to her, rest on my knees when I get close enough. I notice things about her that I didn’t before. Like her fluffy white belly. She lifts one paw, licks it slowly. Like she has all the time in the world. Like there’s nowhere else in the world she’d rather be.
