The officer took one look at my cat and stopped in the bedroom doorway.
“Sir,” he said, “where did you get that animal?”
I was standing beside an overturned nightstand, trying to understand why three men had broken into my house and left without taking anything.
“In the woods,” I answered. “He was just a kitten.”
The officer looked at me again.
“How long ago?”
“Four years.”
He slowly lowered his flashlight.
Until that morning, I thought the strangest thing about Gus was that he looked angry even when he was happy.
I was fifty-three when I found him, living alone outside a small town in southern Missouri. Behind my house, the paved road gave way to gravel, then fields and a strip of woods along a creek.
After a few difficult years, I had gotten good at keeping to myself.
I stopped returning some calls. Turned down invitations. Learned which grocery-store hours were quietest.
