Chapter 12
What Was Left
Rhoda did not lift her hand from the silver-cream coat that had stilled. Edgar had come to stand behind her with his hand on the back of her neck, and he did not move either. Roam stood at the parlor threshold where he had been standing since the front door had closed on The Pokey.
In the front hall behind them, Fat Bastard, Boba, and Jango had stepped back three feet from the rug and sat in a small uneven row.
Honey crossed the rug and knelt beside her mother. She did not speak either. She laid one hand on her mother's hand on the silver-cream coat, closed her eyes a moment, and opened her other hand on the rug beside her.
The pink glitter came up. It came up slow, and it came up pale.
The pink that had bloomed for Soot before in the small storage room was not the pink that bloomed now.
The blue that should have come next was a thin grey.
The yellow was a yellow Honey had never seen before, watery and weak, the color of broth left too long on a stove.
The colors held in their pale rough arc above the small silver-cream body, like a fading rainbow.
The arc held and waited as Duchess's body lifted slowly, going up the way a thing goes up that is heavier than it ought to be, the cloudy blue eye still closed, the plume tail dragging, and the pale arc took her, and held her a long quiet moment in its diluted center, and then it folded itself in on its bleached colors, and then it was gone.
The rug was empty.
Honey did not stand up. "It wasn't enough." Her voice cracked at the second word.
Rhoda lifted her hand off the rug and took her daughter's hand instead. "It was what she could take, sweetheart," she said. "Some passage gives back only what's offered."
"Mama," Honey said quietly.
"I know, my love."
"She killed Soot. But at the end…"
"I know."
Rhoda held her daughter's hand a while on the parlor rug where Duchess had been. "She was a creature who was never let to be what she was, sweetheart. We'll mourn her too. Not the same as Soot. But yes."
Honey wiped her face again. She did not stand. Her free hand had gone to the front pocket of her jeans, where it had been resting on top of the small thing she had carried in from the threshold, and the small thing was still there.
"Mama," she said again.
"Yes, my love."
"Lazlo dropped this thing from his pocket."
Rhoda's hand stilled on her daughter's hand. "What thing."
"This."
Honey drew it out and laid it on her open palm. The rabbit's foot lay in the parlor light, dark and old. The fur on it was a dark brown that was not quite the color of any rabbit Honey had ever seen.
Rhoda Hadwin looked at it. She did not reach for it. Then she took it carefully out of her daughter's palm and her face went pale.
"Oh my." Rhoda's voice was very quiet. "Goddess.
He's had this the whole time." She turned it once in her palm.
"There's no way he should have gotten his hands on this.
This is from Rabbit Hash. Another lifetime.
" Her hand closed. "This is for another day, sweetheart.
A day when you will meet your Mom's other oldest and closest friend, Vera. "
She stood up off the rug on slow legs, crossed the parlor, and stopped beside her husband. She laid the rabbit's foot on his open palm without looking at it again.
"Edgar," she said.
"Aye, darlin'."
"Put it somewhere safe. I'll let Leahnora and Vera know." She whispered.
"Aye, darlin'."
Edgar's big hand closed gently around the small rabbit's foot.
He crossed into the dining room with it and laid it on the green leather blotter of his desk.
He passed his hand once over the small dark thing, and a faint lavender flicker settled across it before fading into the leather. Then he came back to her.
Honey, still on the rug, watched her mother cross back from her father.
She did not ask who Vera was. She did not ask what was for another day.
She did not ask why a small rabbit's foot had made her mother go the color of a buried memory.
She had been raised in this house long enough to know that some questions had their own clock, and that clock had not yet struck. She let it be.
Outside, in the growing dusk, the stray cats had moved closer to the porch step. They had not been pulled here by the Telling, and the Telling had no claim on their leaving. They watched the house with their long slow eyes and waited to be told what to do now.
In the front hall, Fat Bastard rolled to his feet. Boba came up behind him. Jango came up behind Boba.
"Sir," Fat Bastard said. "Mr. Hadwin."
Edgar turned from the parlor doorway. "Boys."
"We'll be takin' our leave, sir. Zelda's wonderin' where her three favorite gentlemen got to, and we ought to head home before she gets to wonderin' too loud. Zelda's a fine witch and a fiercer one when she's wonderin'."
"You tell Zelda," Rhoda said from behind him, her voice slowly coming back to her, "that the Hadwins of Cauldron Falls owe her three favors. Any cat from her place will be welcome on this hill for the rest of her long life."
"Ma'am." Fat Bastard nodded his enormous head. "We'll tell her."
The household moved as one slow procession out onto the porch.
Rhoda first, with Edgar at her shoulder.
Honey behind her, with Roam's hand at her lower back.
Dean Martin lit on the railing without comment.
Quill came out of the parlor on his own four feet.
He did not stop to be petted. He did not look at anyone.
He crossed the porch boards on a small steady pace and sat down on the top step facing the lawn, with his small grey back to the house, and he did not move again.
Fat Bastard came down the porch step first. Boba behind him. Jango stopped, last of them, at the bottom of the step, and looked up at Honey.
Honey crouched. She laid two fingers on his head. He pressed up into them.
"Thank you, Jango."
"Ma'am."
He went, and the three of them rolled out across the lawn in their odd ragged formation, past the unbonded cats, past the bend in the road where the wisteria-tangled oaks turned the lane, and the late-day light went with them.
The porch was quiet. The moon, which had not been there when they had come out, was a thin pale shape over the oaks now.
On the lawn, and along the porch railings, and on the wood basket inside the parlor, the cats who had been summoned by the Telling began to go.
They did not slink. They did not run. They sat where they had been sitting, and they lifted their tails once, and they were gone.
A calico from the wood basket here, a Persian from the armchair there, a russet queen from the lawn, a long-haired white tom from the porch rail.
Each one fading slowly out of the dusk like a thing being unmade by a hand that had finally remembered them.
Some of them flicked their tails once in small respectful goodbyes as they went. Some did not.
The Hadwin family stood on the porch and watched them go. The lawn emptied. But the unbonded did not move.
Edgar stepped down to the top step. The wisteria moved softly behind him.
"Friends," he said.
The grey tom with the scar from lip to ear lifted his head.
"You'll come back inside," Edgar said. "There's a fire. There's a place by it. And there's a place in this house, for any one of you who would like one."
The grey tom looked at him a moment. The cats behind him looked at the grey tom.
The grey tom looked back at Edgar. "We did not come for that, sir."
"No, son," Edgar said. "You came for Lazlo. But that thing is done. Now you'll let us give you this."
The grey tom held his eyes a moment longer. Then his shoulders moved once with the small letting-go of a creature who had been holding a careful posture for years. "My name is Mose."
"Edgar Hadwin. Welcome, Mose. Come on inside."
Mose came up the porch step alone. The cats behind him began to come up after him, in twos and threes, in the careful tired dignity of creatures who had never been welcomed inside anything for as long as they had been alive. Rhoda met every one of them at the top of the porch steps.
"Welcome. What's your name?"
She took their names one at a time. Mose. Lou. Iris. Bess.
Honey went in to begin the slow work of clearing the parlor for the small bowls and folded blankets that thirty-eight tired cats would need before the night was finished.
Edgar named them in the front hall as they passed.
Rhoda's hand brushed each small head at the top step.
The house took them in, one at a time. The last of them passed through the door behind Rhoda's hand, and the front hall light spilled warm onto the porch boards, and the lawn was empty. Quill had not moved.
He sat on the top step with his small grey back to the house, facing the place where the moon had finally climbed clear of the oaks, and he did not turn.
Rhoda Hadwin looked at the small grey back. Then she looked at her husband.
"Quill," she whispered.
Edgar's big lavender-veined hand was on the porch railing. He saw her face, the tears she had been holding, finally given permission to fall.
"Go on, darlin'." He kissed her cheek. Then he stepped back, and he went quietly into the house, and he left her with the cat on the step.
Rhoda crossed the porch slowly, lowering herself onto the porch boards two feet behind him.
"Quill," she said.
"Yes, ma'am." His voice was small.
Rhoda's hand went up to her face once and came back down. "What are you looking for, sweetheart?"
Quill did not answer. He kept his small grey back to her. His tail tip moved once on the boards. "I'm not sure, ma'am." Another pause. The tail tip moved again. "A home, I guess?"
Rhoda's tears, which she had been holding through the whole ordeal, came finally to her eyes and did not stay there.
"Well. You've got one. Right here. If you would like to stay." She sniffed.
The grey tabby turned his head and looked up at her. His eyes were the soft mild eyes Phineas Grove's had been, and the mildness met her now with a surprised delight.
"I'd love nothing more, ma'am."
Rhoda laughed once, a small wet laugh, the kind a woman laughs through tears when a long worry has been answered. "Well. You'll have to call me Rhoda."
Quill considered her. "Rhoda."
He stepped off the top step and crossed the porch boards on a small steady pace, and he stepped up into the dip of her lap where she had folded her hands. He turned twice. He settled. He laid his small grey chin across the back of her wrist.
Rhoda did not move. She had logged a thousand bondings in her own hand.
She had not, in all her long years, ever had a cat of her own.
In the doorway, with the front hall light behind him and a tea towel in his hand, Edgar Hadwin watched his wife sit very still on the top step of their own porch with a small grey tabby asleep across her lap, and he watched her hand close, finally, gently, around the small warm body of the first familiar she had ever had, and he watched the thin pale moon catch on the soft sleepy fur of Phineas Grove's cat.