“Oh, Kirby,” Phyllis says when she sees him, and he can’t tell whether this is admonishment or approval or something else.
“I found it,” he mumbles, as if to say, An event occurred and I succumbed to it, which is not incorrect. Wanda squirms past Phyllis to see what all this fuss is about and when she glimpses the living thing in her father’s hands, she gasps. She examines it carefully, so close her nose almost brushes against his fingertips.
“Where did it come from?” she demands. “Where’s its mother?”
“I’m not sure. It was in the grass.” All three of them gaze down at the kitten, which has begun to squirm, nuzzling its tiny nose into Kirby’s wrinkled palm, searching for a nipple.
“It’s hungry,” Phyllis says.
“We should feed it,” Wanda says. “Bring it inside.”
And this, an immediate understanding of what the kitten needs—nourishment, of course—but also the implementation of the action itself, the swiftness of it, nudges something deep and impossibly tender in Kirby. How is it that his daughter is the first one to know what to do? Isn’t this his job? He follows them back into Phyllis’s house, into the living room, where he has not set foot in many years, and here they care for this creature too small to care for itself. They lay it in a cardboard box lined with dish towels while Phyllis fetches an eyedropper and a cup of milk, and together all three of them sit on the floor while Wanda drips milk into the kitten’s wide pink mouth, its claws grasping at the glass stem of the dropper and sliding off and reaching up to try to grasp it once more. He is reminded of what it felt like to hold Wanda for the first time, to hear her wail, to have nothing to feed her and no one to help, worried that if he looked away from her, even for a second, she might die.
It falls to Phyllis to explain that the kitten might not make it. “It’s too small,” she tells Wanda, “and its mother may have left it because she knew it wouldn’t survive. Mama cats do that sometimes.”
But Wanda isn’t willing to entertain this possibility. “It will live. I’ll feed it,” she insists. “I’ll keep it safe.” Phyllis catches Kirby’s eye, anxious for Wanda’s heart, and he feels ashamed at his shortsightedness. He should have known this would happen.
“All right,” Phyllis says, “but it’ll need kitten formula. Cow milk isn’t good for it.”
Kirby nods. “We’ll get some, then.”
“And you’ll have to feed it every few hours.”
“I will,” Wanda says.
They drive to the grocery store to search for formula, he and Wanda, the kitten in its box on Wanda’s lap. In the parking lot, he realizes it’s been a little while since he shopped here. That became Lucas’s chore at some point over the past few years, a thing his son seemed to enjoy. He’d take off and be gone for hours, then come home with a few bags of groceries. Kirby never asked where the extra time went.
“I’ll be right back,” he says to Wanda, who never takes her eyes off the kitten. Abandoned shopping carts shimmy around the parking lot, rolling back and forth in the wind. There aren’t many cars for them to bump up against; he watches as one sails from one side of the lot to the other, crashing into a bedraggled hedge when it can go no farther. The sliding glass doors at the front of the store are boarded up with plywood. One manual door is left unblocked, a piece of printer paper with a new set of hours duct-taped to it.
Inside, the registers are all closed but one. Its light flickers above the conveyor belt, a bored woman swiping through gallon after gallon of spring water. The store is gloomy with the front boarded up; some of the long fluorescent bulbs overhead have burned out, casting strange oblong shadows on the floor. Going deeper, he sees that many of the shelves are bare. There are wooden pallets full of bottled water and nonperishables that no one has bothered to shelve. A few customers rip into the plastic shipping wrappers themselves, loading up their carts feverishly, as if the grocery store might vanish at any moment. And actually, it might. It will.
He wanders down the bakery aisle, thinking to get a treat for Wanda while he’s here, but the baked goods are all rotting in their plastic clamshells. Mold sprouts on the Danish; icing has slipped off the cakes, slumping into melted pools at the bottoms of the containers. The pet aisle looks more like how he expects it to: kitty litter and dog food still on the shelves. Kirby scans the various cat foods. It seems improbable that a small Floridian grocery store would carry a thing so strange and exotic as kitten milk formula, but it does. It occurs to him that while he’s here he should buy other things. Practical things. But he isn’t sure what to get, so he goes to the register with just this.
The woman at the checkout watches him approach, snapping her gum. She swipes the purchase through without comment, and although he had initially felt a certain tug of self-consciousness about this item, now he is disappointed that she hasn’t asked him any questions.
“I found a stray kitten,” he explains. “My daughter is over the moon about it.”
“Good for you,” she says. “Bag?”
“No bag.”
Coming back to the truck through the empty parking lot, he can see Wanda through the window, still staring into the box on her lap. She’s talking to it; he can see her lips moving and wishes he knew what she was saying.
At home, Wanda shows Lucas. The two of them lie on the floor of the living room and watch the kitten assess its surroundings, still unsure on its feet. Eventually it falls asleep on Lucas’s chest, so comfortable it pees, without even waking. Wanda shrieks with laughter and Lucas is good-natured. Kirby sits in the kitchen, watching them. He’ll miss this. In a strange way, he already does.
That night, he hears the kitten mewing and he’s on his feet before he can identify the sound. He just hears the urgency and goes to it. Standing in the doorway of his children’s room, a film of sleep clouding his eyes, he sees the dim outlines of them both breathing deeply in their bunks, and then he sees the kitten, standing on shaky legs, its erect tail quivering. He sits on the floor next to the box and scoops up the kitten, holding it against his bare chest. It quiets, then presses against him, then begins to sputter, a sound that might one day become a purr. He casts around for the formula and whispers, “Please don’t die,” as he feeds this tiny creature, kitten milk going everywhere, claws flying as it grapples with his hand. Eventually it quiets, tired or full or both, and it falls asleep in his hands, and he falls asleep, too.
Chapter 46
Lucas is ready to leave by the beginning of August. Wanda mopes in the background as he packs his car, flitting around the yard with the black kitten fastened to her shoulder, pretending not to care. He can feel her gaze every time he comes outside with another load, staring down from the live oaks that edge the yard or peeking through the slats of the porch. By now, the kitten’s eyes are open and they track his movements as well. Two pairs of eyes, asking him not to go.
Their pleas are impossible to ignore. Even as he’s filling his car and emptying his room, he wonders if he should stay. A few more days. A week. Another month. Until Kirby finds a new job. Until Wanda’s eleventh birthday. The bargaining goes on. Eventually, Kirby makes it easy: he tells his son he accepted a job offer with a contractor based in Northern California, and all the tightly wound uncertainty about when he might see them again unspools. They’ll be close. He finishes packing up the car. It’s done. It’s decided. He’s ready.