Don’t Let Me Go(49)

He sat up.

But, oddly, he found himself missing the warmth and the vibration. It was something he’d been feeling all the way down into his gut. And, apparently, he’d been feeling it for much longer than he’d realized. Apparently he’d grown partially accustomed to the feeling before it had even wakened him.

Slowly, gingerly, he lay back down again. The cat did not move.

For the next hour or so, Billy just lay there and listened, and felt.

He thought about Grace, and worried about her. What if she never came over to his apartment again? What if there were no more dance lessons? What if Grace never again yelled at him for biting his nails, or for interrupting? What if they’d ruined that, forever, with what they’d tried to do, with their little kidnapping plot?

There was no real answer to the questions, at least, nothing available. But the purring helped a little.

It wasn’t until the end of the hour, when he finally rose from bed, that Billy realized he had slept without a visit from the wings.

? ? ?

At the usual time, around three thirty in the afternoon, Felipe came knocking on Billy’s door.

He did not have Grace in tow.

Billy looked at Felipe and Felipe looked at Billy. It was something a little like having a mirror to look into, Billy thought. An emotional mirror, at least.

“She’s definitely with her mom,” Felipe said.

“You saw her?”

“Yeah. I went to pick her up. But her mom was there to pick her up, too. So what was I supposed to do? Can’t you just see this Hispanic guy taking off with somebody else’s kid while her real mother’s standing right there? That would have been a disaster, huh?”

“Did you even get to talk to her? How did she seem?”

“She tried to come over and talk to me, but her mom wouldn’t let her. So I guess she seemed sort of…not free. Like she wants to do something or be somewhere, but there’s no getting around her mom. But she did call out something to me.”

“Yeah? What did she say?”

“She said, ‘Tell Billy I’m sorry about the cat.’ So then that’s why I came by here. I know you don’t like it too much when people knock on your door, but I just wanted to let you know I’ll take the cat. You know. If you need me to.”

“Oh,” Billy said. “That’s nice. How nice. But, you know what? We seem to be getting used to each other. We’ve actually been getting along OK. We’re kind of…settling in.”

“Oh. OK. Good. Fine, then.”

“You realize,” Billy said, “that if her mom stays clean we may never see her again.”

To his surprise, his lip quivered slightly with the words, as if they might make him cry. Which, in front of Felipe, would be quite humiliating.

“I thought of that, yeah,” Felipe replied, not tearful, but equally down.

“Would you like to come in?” Billy asked.

It was unusual behavior on Billy’s part, and he questioned himself regarding the move, both at the time he said it, and later, after the fact. The simplest possible answer seemed to ring true: he was now used to having company at three thirty in the afternoon.

Felipe came in and sat on Billy’s couch.

“Coffee?” Billy asked.

“Great, yeah,” Felipe said. “I’ll be awake when I get to work. That’ll be good.”

Before Billy could even get into the kitchen to start a pot, the cat came walking in from the bedroom, headed straight for Felipe, and sniffed at the cuffs of his jeans.

“Well, well, well,” Billy said. “Here’s Mr. Lafferty the Cat now.”

Felipe looked up quickly, as if to gauge whether Billy was joking or not.

“Are you kiddin’ me? She named the cat Mr. Lafferty?”

“I would not kid about a thing like that.”

“Geez. There’s just no getting away from the guy.”

“At least this Mr. Lafferty likes you,” Billy noted, just as the cat jumped into Felipe’s lap.

“Yeah. Thank God, huh? Thank God there’s no such thing as an animal bigot.”

Billy went off to make the coffee.

As he was measuring the grounds into the filter, he looked up to see Felipe leaning in the kitchen doorway, watching. Mr. Lafferty the Cat circled back and forth, around and through legs — first Felipe’s and then Billy’s — rubbing and purring and arching his back.

“I guess you two have settled in,” Felipe said.

He indicated with a flip of his head the china cup of water and the saucer of dry cat food, neatly arranged on a cloth placemat on Billy’s kitchen floor.

“Fine china, yet,” Felipe added.

“We all have to eat, and there’s no need being a barbarian.”

“So, I used to have this neighbor,” Felipe said, “years ago, before I lived here. She had this big dog, like a Doberman, I think, and she used to swear to me that this dog was prejudiced. It was such a crock. She told me this story once where she says she’s walking down the street with the dog, and, heading right towards them on the sidewalk, she says, there comes this big black buck—”

“Buck?”

“Right. Exac’ly. I know. This is my point. So she says the dog right away starts growling at the guy. Long story short, turns out this woman is so stupid she doesn’t get how the dog won’t trust black people because it can tell she doesn’t.”