“Arthur and I bought first. We wanted a refuge from the city, and Arthur had dreamed of building a log cabin since he was a boy. George and his wife bought the property next door when it went up for sale a few years later. George loved that he could study his aquatic insects in Turkey Creek, just steps away from his door.”
“How old were your kids when you built the cabin?” Jo asked.
“When we finished it, Gabe wasn’t born yet and his sister was in high school.” She smiled at Jo’s confusion. “I suppose you thought I was Gabe’s grandmother?”
Jo was too embarrassed to admit it.
“Gabe is what they used to call a ‘change-of-life’ baby,” Katherine said. “I had him when I was forty-six and his father was forty-eight. His sister is nineteen years older than him.”
“Is your father still living?” Jo asked Gabe.
Before her son answered, Katherine said, “Arthur died two years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Jo said.
“He was fit as could be,” Katherine said, “but an aneurism took him unexpectedly.”
Ursa had been listening to the conversation, but she ran into another room when Jo dug into her meal. She returned with a paper in her hands. “I have three names so far,” she told Gabe. “Do you want to hear them?”
“Absolutely.” He sat in a chair facing her.
“One of the boy kittens has to be Hamlet.”
“He may come to a sad fate,” Gabe said.
“I know. I read what happened to him,” Ursa said, “but Hamlet is an important person.”
“He is,” Gabe said. “Which one will be Hamlet?”
“The gray one, because gray is kind of a sad color.”
“Makes sense,” Gabe said.
“The white kitten will be Juliet from Romeo and Juliet. I really like that name.”
“So do I,” Gabe said. “But Juliet had a sad fate, too.”
“Stop saying that! These are just names!”
“You’re right. After all, Juliet famously asked, ‘What’s in a name?’ What else do you have?”
“Macbeth.”
“Okay, and no comments on his fate. Which kitten?”
“The black-and-white one.”
“You’ve been busy. That covers three of Shakespeare’s best plays.”
“I looked that up—which plays are most important. Next is Julius Caesar. But don’t you think ‘Julius’ will be too much like ‘Juliet’?”
“You could call him Caesar.”
“Maybe. But first I have to read about him so I know which kitten matches the name.”
“It’s not good . . . fate-wise, I mean.”
Ursa pressed her lips in exasperation, and Gabe swiped his hand over a smile.
Jo loved it. They were already like old friends, playing off each other’s humor.
“Maybe you should move on to the comedies,” Gabe said.
“She should move on home,” Katherine said. “Will you take her or will Jo?”
Gabe glanced nervously at Jo. “We hadn’t discussed that yet.”
“Her parents must be frantic by now,” his mother said.
“They aren’t,” Ursa said. “They’re happy I’m here because I’m getting my PhD.”
Katherine’s sharp blue eyes pinned her son.
“I know, I know,” he said. “Let me talk to Jo about it.”
“The dinner was delicious. Thank you,” Jo said, rising from her chair. Gabe gestured her toward the front door, and when Ursa tried to follow, he said, “Will you do me a favor? Put Jo’s dishes in the sink and rinse them.”
“You’re just saying that so you can talk about me,” Ursa said.
“I’m saying it because I hate doing dishes. Go on.”
He led Jo out the front door and down the porch steps for further privacy. “She can’t stay here. My mother doesn’t know she slept here last night.”
“How could she not know?”
“I didn’t know either. When I went to milk the cow, the dog came barking at me from the barn.”
“She slept in the barn?”
“I guess so.”
“Poor kid. She’s been sleeping in Kinney’s shed.”
“I have a feeling she’s been through worse,” he said.
“Thank you for helping her. She looks like a different girl tonight.”
“Yeah, but she can’t stay. My mother will make me turn her in if she finds out we don’t know where she lives.”
“I guess we have to figure out how to do that. But I can’t take time off tomorrow. I have too many nests that need monitoring.”
“Well, don’t expect me to do it. I’m not locking her up like an animal.”
“I know. It’s horrible to imagine, isn’t it?”
He looked down at Little Bear, as tame as Jo had seen him, licking at the pork chop scent on her fingers. “What if we wait?” he said.
“Wait for what?”
“Don’t you think it’s odd that she set this deadline with the five miracles? Why do that?”
“To stall, of course.”
“But maybe there’s a reason. Maybe she’s waiting for someone she trusts to come home or something like that.”
“Haven’t we established she isn’t from around here?”
“She could have moved here in the last week.” He glanced at the door to make sure Ursa wasn’t listening. “Maybe a grandmother takes care of her and she’s in the hospital. Maybe when her grandmother got sick she had to come here to live with an abusive relative and she ran away.”
“I think up stories like that, too.”
“It fits the situation.”
“What if the grandmother never gets better?” Jo said.
“What if she does and we got the poor kid put in foster care?”
“How long would we wait for the theoretical grandmother to reappear?”
“I’m just saying we should think about it for a few days. Maybe she’ll learn to trust us and tell us the truth.”
Ursa stuck her head out the front door. “Are you done talking about me?”
“Nope. Get back inside,” he said.
The door shut.
“I think we could get in trouble for waiting,” Jo said.
“No one’s reported her missing. No one gives a crap about her, not even that cop you talked to. And like he said, she could get stuck in a shitty foster home, and I see no reason to rush that when we might find a better solution.”
“If we turn her in, we could make sure where she goes isn’t shitty.”
“How?”
She had no answer.
“If you want to turn her in, do it,” he said.
“I don’t.”
“Then take her back to Kinney’s.”
“And leave her alone when I go to work in the morning?”
“Drop her at my road as you drive by. I’ll be doing morning animal care.”
“That’s early.”
“I know. I hear you drive by. She’ll deal with it.”
“How will you explain her to your mother?”
“She’s a local kid who likes hanging out at our farm.”
“I don’t feel right doing this,” she said.
“Don’t you feel worse about locking her in a closet and calling the cops on her?”
“Damn it, I do.”
9
For four days Jo and Gabe surreptitiously exchanged Ursa. Sometimes it felt like she and Gabe were a divorced couple passing a child between their homes. But more often it was like some sort of illegal trade because they handed Ursa off in the dark hours of predawn and twilight. Jo checked missing children websites every night when she got home, expecting to see Ursa’s haunting brown eyes with every scroll of her finger. But after more than a week, no one had reported her missing.
On the third day, Gabe took Ursa to a yard sale to buy clothing, which resulted in a wardrobe heavily biased toward the color purple and screen prints of big-eyed animals. By the fourth day—dressed in decent clothing, well fed, and playing outdoors for long hours—Ursa didn’t look like a changeling anymore. The dark circles under her eyes disappeared, her skin turned a wholesome pink, and she’d gained a few pounds.
Each night after her shower, Ursa told Jo about the fun things she’d done at the homestead, and sometimes Jo was a little jealous of how much Ursa loved being with Gabriel in Wonderland. That was when it felt like a divorce, though she barely knew Gabe.
The tension between the two “parents” became more real on the fifth night when Ursa said, “Guess what Gabe let me do today?”
“Did you milk the cow?”
“I already do that.”
“Ride a baby unicorn?”
“I wish! But shooting his guns was almost that fun.”
Jo set down her fork.
“I hit close to the middle of the target three times!”
Jo pushed out her chair. “Wait here. I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She grabbed her keys and slipped on sandals.
“Where are you going?”
“To talk to Gabe.”
“Why are you mad?”
“What gives you that idea?”
“Your eyes get like thunder.”
“I’m not mad at you. Stay here.”
Jo put Little Bear on the porch so he wouldn’t follow. She cursed Egg Man every time her mother’s precious Honda scraped bottom on his neglected road.