Chapter 24: Hands Off

I was dressed and out the door before Wylie had his boots laced.

A Stonemere pickup sat at our gate with its engine ticking in the cold.

Ansel climbed out of the driver's side.

He looked around at the tin roofs and the wolves pretending not to stare from their porches.

"So this is it," he said.

"This is it."

"It's small."

"It's mine."

Then he went around and opened the passenger door.

Tilly got out slowly, the way Wylie used to get out of my truck.

She wore a plain gray coat and no makeup.

Her curls were pulled back in an elastic.

She held a plastic cat carrier against her chest with both arms.

Behind me I heard Wylie come down the steps and stop.

Tilly didn't look at him.

She walked up to me through the snow, one careful step at a time, and held out the carrier.

Her voice came out slow and rusty.

"I remembered the road," she said.

I didn't take it.

"I remembered where I opened the door," she said. "By the county line. I made Ansel drive me. Two Sundays."

Ansel shoved his hands in his jacket.

"She knocked on every farmhouse for ten miles," he said. "She couldn't say more than a sentence at a time. People thought she was drunk."

Something was moving inside the carrier.

"An old woman by the river," Tilly said. "She said he walked out of her hay field eleven years ago. Skinny. Bleeding from one ear."

My hands had started to shake.

"She called him Pumpkin," Tilly said.

I knelt in the snow and opened the wire door.

He was enormous.

Old and broad and orange, gone white around the muzzle, with one ear torn in a ragged notch at the tip.

He looked at me with flat yellow eyes for a long time.

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