Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury

CAT ON A BAD COUCH Lee Martin

I’ll admit I was drunk when I bought it, so I shouldn’t blame anyone else for my error in judgment, my lack of taste, my total disregard for the aesthetics of fabric and color and design necessary to what my wife, Vonnie, used to call the healing home. She got that from a book she read, one that encouraged her to use aromatherapy, light, feng shui, color, and natural materials to create a space where she and I would feel connected to earth, air, and each other. It was our last chance, though of course we didn’t know it then. All we knew was that we’d started to lose sight of what first brought us together—I couldn’t even have said what that something was—and still we were tongue-tied and dumb. If there were words that might have made a difference, we were having trouble finding them.

“A healing home is a happy home,” Vonnie said one day, and I agreed I’d give it a shot.

Then we got Henry, and everything went to hell in a hurry.

He showed up at our house in late October, just as the days were starting to cool and winter was in the air. A long, skinny tabby with a notch bitten out of his ear, a limp to his roll, a smirk on his face—yes, I swear a cat can smirk—and the most pitiful meow you’d ever want to hear. A croak that made Vonnie fall in love.

“Poor baby,” she said. “Where’s your house? Do you have a house?”

He was winding himself in and out around her legs, tail straight up in the air, as she stood on the front porch, petting him. I was inside watching through the storm door, and when I opened it to step outside, he saw his chance; he shot the gap, and presto, he was inside.

“Hey,” I said, but it was too late.

He’d already curled up on the window seat, smack-dab in the middle of the ramie-covered cushions Vonnie had purchased from IKEA earlier that morning. In an instant, he was asleep. Vonnie and I could see him through the front windows, and I could tell from the way she looked at him there’d be nothing I could say to convince her that a bit-eared, gimpy, smart-mouthed stray was nothing but bad news.

“Oh, my.” I heard her intake of breath. She touched me on the arm, and it was one of the few times in more than a year—yes, it had been that long—that we’d touched at all. “Lex,” she said to me. “Sweetie, he looks so peaceful there.”

I knew then that this scruffy-assed junkyard cat, soon to be named Prince Henry Boo-Boo Ca-Choo, had taken his last fall and landed in the gravy.

He’d been looking for us, Vonnie would say that night as he made himself comfy on our bed, stretched out longways between us, his claws pricking my back. He was home.

But I was telling you about my couch. I bought it one night when I’d been drinking at the Rusty Bucket, drinking more than I should have because it was easier to do that than to go home to Vonnie. What was our problem? I don’t imagine there’s any way to say it was this or that; it was more a combination of things, one of them being time and what it can do to romance. We’d been together since we were eighteen, and somewhere along the line the thrill went away, and then we were left with the people we really were—I mean the people we were deep down inside—and maybe what we were finding out was that we didn’t really like those people. They just didn’t match up. That’s the best I’ve been able to do, at least in the time I’ve had to think about it. People fall out of love. I didn’t mean for that to be the case with Vonnie and me, nor I imagine did she, but that’s what happened, and maybe—just maybe—the start of the end was when I ducked into the discount furniture store that evening all because that couch, which I could see through the display window, caught my eye.

I walked in, and the salesgirl, a pretty girl with her eyes just a little too close together, asked if she could help me find something.

Lord, the questions people ask, not having any idea what they can mean to a person. This girl was a pleasant sort who smiled a lot and had dimples in her cheeks, and she was so eager to help me find exactly what I needed, I almost told her the truth. I almost said, Please, help me find my way.

Instead, I said I’d spotted that couch. “That one.” I pointed to a harvest-gold couch with a high back, and a plaid pattern formed from brown and green lines, and kick-pleat skirting around the bottom. “The one with the kick-pleat skirting,” I said, and the girl’s smile got even wider.

“You know your material, I can see that.” She gave me a wink of one of her too-close-together eyes. “I’ll have to be on my toes with you.”

The store was nearly empty that near to closing. Somewhere toward the back, a radio was playing, some old big-band tune from the forties, a time, if the movies I’d seen were any evidence, when men and women believed in love. I took a glance behind me out the plate-glass display window, and I saw that in the little bit of time that had passed since I’d stepped into the store, the dusk had faded to full dark. It could happen like that. In fact it did every night. In the wink of an eye.

“‘Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,’” I said, and the girl gave me a puzzled look. “The song,” I said, and then I sang along. I was wild again and beguiled, etc.

And I was too loud for the mostly empty store—I was singing too loud and I was too full of booze—and for the first time, I saw a look of concern pass over the girl’s face, as if she feared I might grab her and throw her down and have at her on that couch, which I already knew I was going to buy if for no other reason than to make this all up to her.

She glanced toward the back, looking, I assume, for a coworker, hoping someone would come to the front of the store so she wouldn’t have to be alone with me.

That’s when I nearly lost it, knowing I’d caused a nice girl like her alarm, and I said, “I’ll take it. The couch. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.”

The next morning I woke up and went outside to retrieve the Dispatch from the front step. That was the first time I saw Mr. Mendes, the man who would become my neighbor across the street.

He was moving in. The HER Realty sign was leaning against the maple tree in the front yard. The previous owners, a Mr. and Mrs. Zambesi, had raked the last of the fallen leaves before bidding the neighborhood fare thee well. No one had been sorry to see them go. They were, in short, a disruption to the generally tranquil cul-de-sac. They were people with tempers, and more than once their arguments had escalated to the point where some of us had called the police. It wasn’t uncommon to hear shouting in the middle of the night, doors slamming, glass breaking, car tires squealing. “You’re no one I care about,” I heard Mrs. Zambesi scream one night. “Do you hear me? No one!”

Our expectations for Mr. Mendes, then, were high. It didn’t matter to us that he was a single man. In fact, that was a plus. A single man who led a pleasant and quiet life. At least that was our hope.

The house was a four-bedroom two-story with a brick façade halfway up the front and vinyl siding the rest of the way. The siding was light yellow and the window shutters were green.

A house that said howdy-do and welcome.

The front door was wide open that morning, and a couple of men in sleeveless T-shirts were unloading furniture from a white truck that said TWO MEN AND A TRUCK on the side. Truth in advertising. There they were: two men and their truck.

Mr. Mendes had parked his red Volvo wagon along the curb in front of my house—such a cheery color, red—and was easing a birdcage out of the back. He had a cockatiel inside—a gray-feathered cockatiel with a yellow head and a bright orange spot on each cheek. The bird was whistling and clicking to beat the band, singing and trilling like he was the happiest Gus on this old planet Earth. Mr. Mendes looked quite chipper himself, dressed in crisply pressed navy slacks and a shirt the color of a robin’s egg. The crowning touch? A cardigan sweater of white, violet, and sky-blue stripes—vertical stripes along the front and back, and short horizontal hatches on the sleeves. On this day, when the trees were bare and the sky was leaden and there was just enough bite in the air to remind us that soon we’d settle into winter, he and his bird were a glorious sight.

I couldn’t help but call out to him. “Hello,” I said. “Welcome to Saddlebrook Estates. I’m Lex. I like your sweater.”

He looked down at the front of his sweater, as if he’d forgotten what he was wearing. Then he gave me a pleasant grin. “My name is Mendes,” he said, “and this is Popcorn.”

What a delightful name for a cockatiel, and I said as much.

“Thank you,” Mr. Mendes said. “He’s the light of my life. I’ve had him fifteen years.”

“Does he talk?”

“Oh, yes, very much.”

Mr. Mendes leaned over and said something to the bird. Soon Popcorn’s chirpy bird voice rang out. “Touchdown,” he said. “Touchdown. Touchdown.”

“It’s football season,” I said with a laugh. “And you know how football-crazy Columbus is. Go, Bucks! You’ll be the hit of the neighborhood.”

And he was. All because of Popcorn, who charmed the neighbors when they dropped by to bring Mr. Mendes a loaf of bread, a pound cake, some homemade cookies. Mr. Mendes himself was civil but quiet. He withstood the neighbors’ visits, but I could tell it was painful for him. He was a man who liked to keep to himself. As the weeks went on, I took note of the way he kept his curtains drawn and how I mostly saw him when he was leaving for work—he did something with computers at Cardinal Health—or coming home.

As winter settled in, we saw each other less frequently, and to be fair, the same could be said about all the neighbors. We were starting to hunker in, holing up for the long haul that was winter in central Ohio, all of us having to face the facts of our own lives.

For a while I thought I might develop a lasting friendship with Mr. Mendes—out of all the neighbors, it seemed to be me, the first to welcome him, with whom he felt most at ease. Chick Hartwell on the corner was too har-de-har-har, a backslapping sort who acted like he’d never had a sad day in his life. How could someone like Mr. Mendes not feel even more down in the mouth about his solitary life in the presence of someone like Chick? Herb Shipley, two doors down from me, was too angry. Fuck this and Fuck that. Pissed off about the homeowners’ association, which told him he couldn’t store his garbage can outside his garage. Pissed off about the Buckeyes and their lack of want-it. Just pissed off at the world in general. Then there were the Biminrammers—Benny and Missy—next door to Mr. Mendes, who were clearly incompetent, though cheerily so, and on a dead-straight course toward disaster. They were always asking Mr. Mendes to do them a favor. Maybe they’d locked themselves out of their house and needed to use his phone. Maybe Benny had sliced his thumb open with a carving knife when Missy was at a Mary Kay party, and now he wanted to know if Mr. Mendes would be good enough to drive him to the emergency room.

I, on the other hand, asked nothing of my new neighbor, and for that reason alone he found me to be someone he could confide in.

His own story was a story of heartache. He’d left his native Cuba in 1980 during the Mariel boatlift. Castro, besieged by Cuba’s economic problems, agreed that anyone who wanted to leave the country could. Mr. Mendes was fourteen years old and in love with a beautiful girl named Eva. She and her family stayed behind, and he never saw her again. He still thought of her, he told me one evening when we were chatting by the curb. It was nearly dusk and too cold to be standing outside, but we’d both come out to our mailboxes at the same time and he crossed the street to say hello and one thing led to another.

“I wonder what happened to her,” he said. “I wonder if she ever thinks about me.”

“Forgive me for being too personal,” I said, “but surely you’ve had other loves.”

“A few.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But nothing to last. No one like her.”

At that moment Henry came slinking across the street. He’d been out gallivanting somewhere, and now he was eager for the warmth of home, his food dish, and Vonnie’s fussing over him as he stretched out beside her on the new couch.

Perhaps it was something about what Mr. Mendes and I had been discussing there on a winter’s evening with the dark settling in and the lights glowing in our neighbors’ windows that made him reach down to pet Henry, who promptly hissed at him and lashed out with a claw that scraped Mr. Mendes across the back of his hand.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“You should keep that cat inside,” said Mr. Mendes, and that was the last time I spoke with him that winter.

It was a winter of odd occurrences that further frayed the flimsy threads barely holding Vonnie and me together.

Our phone rang often, and when one of us answered, there was no one on the other end of the line. Nothing you’d think about if it happened occasionally, but something else altogether if it happened three or four nights a week to the point that we finally had to give in and change our number.

Of course, Vonnie accused me of having an affair. Of course, I did the same.

“How could it be a boyfriend or a girlfriend calling?” I finally asked her, “if they’re hanging up when either one of us answers?”

“That makes sense.”

I could have pressed on, but I decided against it. The truth was neither would accuse the other of infidelity if the accuser hadn’t already wondered, him or herself, what that might be like. If Vonnie thought a phone call with no one on the other end was a sign that I’d been unfaithful, then that told me she’d been imagining another life for herself and was looking for a reason to walk out the door.

We hung in there through the holidays. We even managed to find some small degree of pleasure in each other’s company—mulling cider, watching Christmas movies on TV, stringing lights around the outside of our house.

Our cul-de-sac was festive with lights and lawn ornaments, even the inflatable kind—Santas in sleighs, snowmen in snow globes, penguins waving, Snoopy wearing a Santa’s hat, Winnie-the-Pooh and Tigger decorating a tree.

Mr. Mendes was more restrained, but even he couldn’t resist hanging a wreath and putting an electric candle in each of his front windows. One evening I had to knock on his door because the mail carrier had left a piece of his mail in my box by mistake. It was a letter, postmarked Miami and addressed to Mr. Hugo Mendes in a feminine handwriting. I knocked on the door and even rang the bell, but though there were lights on inside, Mr. Mendes never came to see who had decided to call on him. I shaded my eyes and peered through the glass sidelight of the front door. I could see down a hallway to the family room, and there in the corner was Popcorn’s cage, the door open. Mr. Mendes had draped the cage with a string of white twinkle lights. I tried the storm door and found it unlocked. I left the letter between it and the front door, sure that Mr. Mendes would find it.

It wasn’t long before Vonnie or I began walking into our bedroom to find the ceiling-fan lights on. At first we thought that one of us had been forgetful, neglecting to turn off the lights when leaving the room. We picked up the remote that controlled them and punched them off.

Then one night we went to sleep only to wake up shortly because the lights had come on. I sat up in bed. “Did you?”

Vonnie was lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling as if she were seeing the most amazing thing. “No,” she said. “Did you?”

“The battery in the remote must be bad,” I told her. I turned off the lights. “We’ll replace it tomorrow.”

Which we did.

That night, the lights came on again.

“Just take the battery out,” she told me.

The next night we came upstairs for bed, and voilà, the lights were on.

“How can that be?” I said. “There’s no battery in the remote.”

Vonnie shook her head. “This is getting spooky, Lex. This house.”

She’d never liked the house. Not even the fifteen years we’d lived there had made her feel at home. It was the most popular style of home in Columbus—a four-bedroom two-story. The bedrooms and two baths upstairs. A formal living room, dining room, kitchen, family room, half bath, and laundry room on the main floor. A neat little box of a house composed of smaller boxes inside. There was no flow, Vonnie said, and I had to admit she was right. The front door opened up to a wall, and each time we had guests and it was time for folks to enter or leave, we all did an excuse-me, squeeze-by, and shuffle in our pitiful entryway. We had more than 2,100 square feet of living space, but because it was split between up and down, and because the living space downstairs was sectioned the way it was, we often felt like we were living in an efficiency apartment.

I’ll give Vonnie credit, though. She spruced that house up come the holidays, and our good spirits carried us into January and through most of February. She tried her best to make our house a healing home. We had candles and silk flower arrangements and throw pillows and pottery, and everything was positioned just so. We had Henry, who curled up on the window seat or on the bamboo mat in the family room.

A house with a cat was a peaceful house, Vonnie said.

“Even if that cat’s Henry?” I asked.

“Yes, even Henry. Prince Boo-Boo-Ca-Choo.”

We were trying.

But this thing with the ceiling-fan lights had us spooked.

“It must be the receiver in the fan going bad,” an electrician said when we consulted him. “Get a new one from Home Depot, and I’ll install it.”

A good fellow working at Home Depot gave us a receiver from an old display model that was like our fan and didn’t charge us anything. “This should do the trick,” he said.

But it didn’t. I took the fan apart, found the receiver that was in it, and saw immediately that the new one wouldn’t fit.

That’s when Vonnie called the manufacturer, intending to order a new receiver from them. But the customer-service rep on the other end of the line said, “You know there’s a code you have to set on the receiver, don’t you?” Vonnie reported this all to me once she was off the phone. “There are four pins you can set either up or down in whatever combination you choose. Same with your remote. It has to be set to the same combination. Have you checked that?”

No, we hadn’t. The rep explained that all the fans were set to the same combination when they left the factory, and the manufacturer recommended resetting the combination during the installation process. If someone in the neighborhood had the same fan, and if we and that neighbor hadn’t changed our combination, it would be possible that the neighbor’s remote would control our fan and vice versa.

“Has anyone moved into your neighborhood lately?” the rep wanted to know.

“Mendes,” Vonnie said to me with glee in her voice. She even said, “Aha!” And I feared that soon she’d rub her hands together and shout, Eureka!

She had no use for Mendes and was only too glad to blame the business with the ceiling fan on him. He was too smug, she said. Him and those flashy clothes and his bright red car and that bird? What a dog-and-pony trick, she’d said all the times that autumn when she’d heard the neighbors talking about Popcorn and what a delight he was. Isn’t that a mixed-species metaphor? I asked her, and she gave me the stink eye. You know perfectly well what I mean.

The truth is she was jealous. Everything about Mendes—his clothes, his car, his bird—cast a spotlight onto our own lives and made it impossible to hide from the fact that, despite Vonnie’s efforts with interior decorating, there really wasn’t anything pretty about us.

Take that couch, for instance. Take Henry, who came home after getting the short end of a number of fights. Sometimes a hind leg was dragging. On other occasions there was blood matting his chest or bite marks on his haunch or a bare spot on his tail. Take my drinking, which left me sullen and closed off. Take the way Vonnie and I lay down in the dark each night, weary with the burden of staying together long past the point when we should have said good-bye. We didn’t even have the diversion of the ceiling fan once I flipped the pins and changed the combination.

“Wait a minute,” Vonnie said. “If it’s indeed Mendes’s fan that’s been causing the trouble, wouldn’t that mean our remote would have been doing the same thing to his?”

“I suppose.” I looked out our bedroom window to Mendes’s house across the street. “But nothing should go wrong now that I’ve changed the code.”

We stood there awhile with nothing more to say. Then she walked out of the room. I heard her footsteps on the stairs. Spring was coming, but we were at the end.

For some reason, I pointed the remote toward the window and pressed the button that turned on our fan. To my surprise, Mr. Mendes’s garage door began to rise. Surely, it couldn’t be because of my remote. Surely, I thought, Mendes himself was opening that door.

Soon the door was fully up, and I saw that the backup lights on Mr. Mendes’s Volvo were on, and he was backing down the drive. The garage door lowered itself as he started up the court, and I stood there, trembling, still shaken by what I’d thought was possible.

Then Popcorn disappeared. “Lit out for the wild blue yonder,” Vonnie said when she came home one afternoon from grocery shopping at Giant Eagle. “I saw the signs.”

“Signs? Do you mean you’re psychic? You saw this coming?”

It was late March, and the first warm days of spring were upon us. We had our sliding deck door open, and a breeze stirred the wind chime Vonnie had on a hook in the ceiling above the floor vent. The chime had hung there all winter so that each time the furnace kicked on, the harmonic tones could soothe us. That chime, the Bamboo Wind Dancer, was the last artifact from Vonnie’s feng shui days. As winter deepened, she began packing everything up. Gone were the candles and the silk flowers and the pottery and the Zen sand garden and the Buddha fountain. Little by little, our house became Spartan. Dishes disappeared from cabinets. Knickknacks and clothes got boxed up and bundled off to Goodwill. I watched our house get loud with emptiness. Just that morning, before I opened the windows and the doors, I noticed how every little sound—footsteps, throat clearing, doors closing—made an echo. We were living in a cavern.

“Since when have I ever seen anything coming?” she asked me. “I’m talking about the reward signs.”

I saw them that afternoon when I went out for a walk—flyers taped to the street sign poles: LOST BIRD! There were yard signs, banners spread between two stakes, driven into the ground at the entrance to Saddlebrook Estates. They advertised a website: www.findpopcorn.com. By evening, there were flyers wedged between screen doors and their frames, or stuffed in behind the red flags on mailboxes throughout the subdivision. I saw Mendes delivering them that afternoon. Apparently, he’d taken off work so he could deliver those flyers. I’d never seen him in such a state. Disheveled. He wore a pair of dark gray sweatpants, the ends of the drawstring flapping loose at his crotch, and a faded maroon polo shirt that may have been fetching once but now was just drab. He had on white socks and a pair of house shoes, the shapeless kind covered with tan corduroy. Nothing like his customary sartorial splendor.

“Mendes!” I called to him from across Appaloosa Court. He was coming down the driveway of the house on the corner, a sheaf of flyers hugged to his chest. I could tell he hadn’t shaved or combed his hair. “Mendes,” I called again, but he wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t even look at me. He waved his arm over his head as he went on up the court.

“Like he was telling me to go to hell,” I said to Vonnie when I got back to the house. “I know he’s upset, but jeezy Pete. Whatever happened to common courtesy?”

“It went out the window,” she said. “Flew the coop.”

We laughed because that was the story with Popcorn. He saw his chance for daylight, saw all that sky through an open deck door, and he made his break. Vonnie and I laughed and laughed until we were both doubled over, holding our sides. We laughed until our hoots turned into something else, something I couldn’t quite identify until Vonnie said,“Lex, I’m done. I can’t live with you anymore.”

I knew, then, that our laughter had been the hysteria of letting go.

“We’ve both known it awhile,” I said, and she agreed. We were talking quietly now, and after the explosive noise of our hilarity—a percussion that sent Henry running to find somewhere to hide—our voices were too small for the sorts of words we were saying, words you have to say when you’re finally at that place where you have no other choice, words you have to find for love passing, for lives once lived together now coming apart. “It’s been no picnic these last few years,” she said, and I stood there as she counted off all the things that made it so.

My drinking, for one, which I had to admit had become more frequent those last months. “Look at that couch,” she said. “You bought that when you were drunk. Just look at that ugly couch.”

I didn’t know how to explain that I’d bought it because I’d given an innocent salesgirl cause for alarm. I didn’t know how to say I’d wanted to prove I was a decent man.

Vonnie went on with her list. The way I’d stopped being her friend, she said. “I used to be able to count on you, Lex.” She stopped before she filled in the rest, the part about how I wasn’t there for her anymore and hadn’t been for some time.

Guilty. We were strangers. Like everyone, we’d set forth with no idea of that ever happening, but it had, and now there we were.

Not for long, though.

“I’ve found a townhouse,” she told me. “I’m moving out.”

So there were two stories causing quite a buzz in Saddlebrook Estates that spring—Popcorn was missing, and my wife, after thirty-three years of marriage, had left me. I was fifty-five years old, and I was alone. I didn’t even have Henry because the night Vonnie packed as much as she could into her car, saving a space for his carrier, he slipped out the door, and when it came time for her to gather him up, he was nowhere to be found.

“I’m sure he’ll come back soon,” I told her.

We stood in the driveway in the dark, keeping our voices low because the neighbors were out—the Hartwells and the Ship-leys and the Biminrammers, everyone talking about Popcorn and poor Mr. Mendes—and we didn’t want them to hear us.

“Call me when he does,” she said. She opened the door to her Explorer, an SUV now stuffed with what she’d decided was most important to her, important enough to carry away from our house. She turned back to me. “Call me on my cell.”

I stood there a long time after she’d driven away. My life felt strange to me, and I didn’t know what to do next.

Then I saw him. Henry. He came from the direction of Mr. Mendes’s house, slinking, belly low, across the street. I saw him as he passed through the glow of the streetlight. Then he disappeared into the darkness, and I didn’t know where he was until, finally, I felt him rubbing against my leg.

We went inside. I picked up the phone, meaning to call Vonnie’s cell, meaning to tell her to come back and get Henry, but then he jumped up on that couch and began primping it with his front paws, making his bed, getting comfortable. He didn’t care how ugly that couch was. He just knew it was a good place to sleep after being out on the town, a comfort I’d provided for him. He looked up at me once and meowed without making a sound. Then he closed his eyes and went to sleep, and I couldn’t make that call. It was the two of us now.

As the days went on, Vonnie kept calling to see if Henry had come home. “Haven’t seen him,” I told her. “Are you doing okay?”

“Yes. You?”

“Sure,” I said.

But the truth is I was pretty low, and I think it started to get to Henry—the way I moped around. Even though I’d known a long time that things were over between Vonnie and me, I hadn’t counted on this tremendous pit of loneliness that invited me to sink into it. To make matters worse, the neighbors were spending all their sympathy on Mr. Mendes and poor, poor Popcorn. Granted, Vonnie and I had never really been close with the Hartwells or the Shipleys or the Biminrammers, but still, I thought that once word was out about our breakup, someone would express concern.

I’d see Missy Biminrammer walking her sheltie, or Chick Hartwell mowing his lawn, or Peg Shipley working in her flower beds, and I’d give a wave and wait for them to say something about not seeing Vonnie around for a while, but they just waved back and didn’t say much of anything at all except to tell me to keep an eye out for Popcorn.

One evening I saw Herb Shipley washing his car in his driveway. I walked down the sidewalk, past the Biminrammers’, who lived next door to me, and the Hartwells’ on the other side of them, until I was standing in the Shipleys’ drive, out of the way of the spray coming from Herb’s hose. Henry was stretched out on the sidewalk in the sun. He rolled over onto his back and closed his eyes.

Herb was washing the vintage 1963 Thunderbird—red with a black ragtop—that he’d restored. He was an industrial-arts teacher at Davidson High School, a wiry man with a nice head of silvery hair. He didn’t have much of a chin, which made it seem that his lips were stretched tight in a constant state of alarm, as they were now when he turned and saw me standing there.

I just blurted it out. It makes me feel like an idiot to think of it now. I said, “My wife left me.” Maybe it was that look on his face. Maybe it was the fact that I thought of him as an angry man and assumed he’d be angry for my sake. “Vonnie,” I said. “She’s gone.”

He was holding the hose with the nozzle pointed in my direction, and to anyone who might have been watching, it probably looked liked I’d said something he didn’t like and he was about to squirt me in the face.

But all he said was, “Did you hear? Mendes just got a call. A woman in Plain City. She thinks she’s found Popcorn.” He was there now, Herb explained. “We’re all hoping for a happy ending.”

Just then, Henry jumped up onto the trunk of the T-Bird. He stood up on his hind legs so he could reach the ragtop, and then he went to town, picking at it with his claws.

“Henry,” I said. “No.”

But it was too late. Herb turned around and saw what was happening—that ragtop getting shredded—and he did the only thing he could. He turned that hose on full blast. The force knocked Henry off the T-Bird. He landed on his feet and shook himself. His fur was slicked down with water, and he didn’t wait around to see what might be coming next. He took out up the sidewalk as fast as he could run. I watched him until he disappeared around the side of my garage.

“I’ll pay for whatever it costs to fix that,” I said to Herb.

“Damn straight you will.” He looked past me, and I heard a car turning down our court. I wondered if it might be Vonnie coming back to give us one more try. Then, before I could turn to look, Herb said, “It’s Mendes.”

It didn’t take long for the word to spread. Peg came out the front door as if she’d been watching, and who knows, maybe she had been.

“It’s him,” Herb said, and the two of them brushed right past me and started up the street.

Chick and Connie Hartwell came out of their house to join them. Even Benny and Missy Biminrammer tagged along to see whether Mr. Mendes had indeed recovered Popcorn.

I stood there watching as Mr. Mendes got out of his Volvo, and the neighbors gathered around him. He said something and then bowed his head. Connie Hartwell put a hand on his shoulder, and I heard Herb say, “Damn it all to hell,” and I knew that the woman in Plain City had turned out to have the wrong bird.

Everyone stood in Mr. Mendes’s driveway talking, and I went back to my house, where Henry, wet and trembling, waited for me to let him inside.

“Damn it, Henry,” I said. Then I opened the front door. He stayed on the step, hesitating, as if he knew I was going to be out some cash for what he’d done to Herb’s ragtop. “Come on,” I said. “You know that couch just won’t look right without you on it.”

I swear he was pissed off the rest of that night and the days that followed. He prowled around the house, letting out these guttural yowls. I opened the door to see if he wanted to go outside, but all he did was come to the threshold, sniff at the air, yowl some more, and then head for the couch.

One day, he got up on the window seat, where I sat watching the whoop-dee-do across the street. Herb Shipley had volunteered to weld Popcorn’s cage to an iron rod and then anchor it to Mr. Mendes’s roof. I watched Herb bolt it to each side of the roof ridge. Mr. Mendes watched from the ground, his head tipped back, his hand shading his eyes from the sun. When Herb was done, he left the cage door open, so Popcorn could fly right in if he happened to be in the vicinity and took a notion. Herb climbed down the ladder, and Mr. Mendes solemnly shook his hand.

A news van—WNBS 10TV—pulled to the curb, and two men got out. One of them had a video camera on his shoulder. The other one, a young man with perfectly combed blond hair, had a microphone. He was wearing khaki slacks and penny loafers. A navy-blue poplin jacket with a white shirt. The knot of a robin’s-egg-blue tie poked out above the jacket’s zipper.

I watched a little while as the blond man talked to Mr. Mendes, sticking the microphone up to his face from time to time. Then Henry pawed at the window and hissed.

“My sentiments exactly,” I said.

I picked him up in my arms and headed toward the kitchen, where I kept the Evan Williams bourbon. It was five o’clock, a perfectly reasonable time for a cocktail.

What was it about Mendes and his story that Henry and I found so objectionable? How could our hearts turn so hard toward a man who’d lost something dear to him? I suppose we were jealous. Here we were in the midst of our own story of loss, but no one had time for that. Mr. Mendes and Popcorn—that was the story that had captured everyone’s heart.

So Henry and I sat on our couch, and the longer I sat there, drinking, the more I began to enjoy the way he looked, propped up on his rear end, wedged into the corner, his belly exposed. I swear sometimes it looked like he was almost human, the way he sat there. I started telling him the story of how I came to buy the couch, and before I knew it, I was relating the details of how Vonnie and I had once loved each other. “Believe it or not, Henry. We were young and in love, and we thought we’d have kids and grandkids and a long and happy life. Now look what’s happened.”

He nodded off from time to time, and I poked him. He grumbled, curling his mouth into that sneer he so often had, but I didn’t care how put out he felt. I wanted to talk, and he was the only one around to listen.

“Oh, Henry,” I said. “The first time you fall in love, you think it’ll be forever, but you know what? There ain’t no forever. Ain’t no forever, ever. That’s what I’ve learned, my fabulous feline friend. Mendes is going to learn it, too. You and I both know that bird’s not coming home.”

How did I know that? Let’s just say I had a good idea. Maybe I was jaded because of how everything had gone wrong for Vonnie and me, or maybe I hoped that in our shared sadness Mendes and I would rekindle our friendship. Maybe I, and not Herb Shipley or Chick Hartwell—jeezy Pete, I’d even seen Mr. Mendes asking favors of Benny Biminrammer—would be the one Mendes would count on.

“I can be that kind of person,” I told Henry, but I knew I was lying. I hadn’t been that sort in a good while. I sure as shooting hadn’t been that person for Vonnie in quite some time. “I’m a drunk,” I said. “I’m a man of a certain age, a retired man who no longer matters to the world at large. Now, I’m alone.” I took in the way Henry was slouched against the corner of the couch, that pissed-off look on his face. “We’re alone,” I said to him, “but the only thing anyone cares about is that bird.”

Henry gave a little snort, as if to say, Damn bird, or else, Where’s the woman who loves me, the one who feeds me tuna and lets me sleep in bed with her and calls me Prince Henry Boo-Boo Ca-Choo. How’d I end up on this ugly-assed couch with a drunk man who’s always feeling sorry for himself?

“You just did,” I said.

Then, because I felt my heart go out to him, I made up a little song—or, to be more exact, the bourbon wrote a few lyrics. I could imagine Henry as one of those angry rappers I sometimes saw on TV, someone like that 50 Cent or that Eminem. Put a baseball cap turned sideways on Henry and a load of silver chains and medallions, and he’d be ready to go. I just started rapping whatever came into my muzzy head:

I could tell he was unimpressed. “We’ve all got a story,” I told him, “and, like it or not, that’s yours.”

The next evening, I turned on the news and there was Mendes talking about how much Popcorn meant to him, how he’d had him a number of years, and when you lived alone, as Mendes did, you came to count on the affections of a pet.

“I’m hopeful,” Mr. Mendes said. The camera was close on his face, and I could see that his eyes were wet. “I don’t know how he got out,” he said, and then he blotted his eyes with the heel of his palm. “I left the deck door open just a little when I went to work that morning, so he could enjoy the warm air from outside, but I made sure the sliding screen was secure. He liked to fly around the house. I always gave him free range. I swear that screen was closed.”

The news story ended with a shot of Popcorn’s cage atop the house. The reporter’s voice was somber. “If anyone has any information that might lead to Popcorn’s return, please call the number at the bottom of your screen, or visit www.findpopcorn.com.” The camera zoomed in closer to the cage, and the reporter added, “In the meantime, the cage door is open, and a worried pet owner watches and waits.”

All night I tried to get that image out of my head, but I couldn’t. I drifted in and out of a restless sleep, finally falling more “in” than “out.” By the time I got out of bed, it was after eleven o’clock. It was another pretty spring day. I slid open the deck door and stood at the screen, smelling the scents of the earth coming back to life after a long winter. The daffodils were in bloom along the side of the deck. The sunlight slanting through the screen was warm on my face, and yet I felt miserable.

I heard Henry jump down from his couch—I’d come to think of it as his—and soon he was weaving in and out between my legs, meowing and looking up at me with contentment.

“Henry,” I said, “it’s time Mr. Mendes and I had a little talk.”

When I rang the bell at his house, I heard his footsteps coming quick and hard over the floor.

He opened the door, and it swung free with a complaining groan, as if it had been closed throughout the winter and was just now letting loose from its seal.

I said, “Mr. Mendes, please.” I didn’t know quite how to begin. “If I may,” I said, trying to find the words for why I’d come.

He took my arm. He pulled me into his house. “Mr. Lex. Oh, Mr. Lex.” His face was beaming. “Come, please.”

I let him usher me down the hallway to the open space that, like in my own home, contained kitchen, breakfast area, and family room. There, on the counter, was a cage, and inside that cage was a cockatiel that looked very much like Popcorn.

“Popcorn,” Mr. Mendes said with a flourish of his arm as if he were a spokes model on a TV game show. “Last night a woman called from New Albany, and now”—he waved his arm once more, his hand sweeping in front of the cage—“gracias a Dios, a miracle has come to me.”

New Albany was nearly thirty miles away, a fact I pointed out to Mr. Mendes. “That’s quite a flight for the little guy,” I said.

For just an instant, his face became very somber. Just a moment when the two of us looked into each other’s eyes, and we both knew the bird in the cage wasn’t Popcorn but rather some other cockatiel who’d strayed from home. There’d been a number of other false alarms since Popcorn had been gone, and, for whatever reason—maybe there just comes a time when you make a choice and life goes on—Mr. Mendes had decided to accept this one as fact.

His face brightened. He said, “It’s not for us to question miracles. They come to us for a reason. We don’t have to know what that reason is. Yes?”

I bent over with my hands on my knees and peered into the cage. The bird sat on his perch. He had the same markings as Popcorn—same yellow head, same orange spots on his face. He was even doing a little bob and sway the way Popcorn had done the first time I’d seen him. It was easy enough to believe. All it took was faith.

Mr. Mendes was telling me another story. The girl he’d left in Cuba, Eva, had written him a letter. I thought of the letter with the Miami postmark I’d left inside the front door close to Christmas. They’d exchanged e-mails throughout the winter.

“She’s coming to see me,” he said. “I’m so very much scared. What if she doesn’t like me? What if I don’t like her? So many years have passed since we were young and in love.”

I tapped my finger on the front of the cage, and I couldn’t help but think of Vonnie, then, and the way she was when we were first falling for each other. The way we were when we were setting out together. Hearts wide open with wonder.

“Touchdown,” I said, remembering Popcorn’s call, and how back in the autumn it delighted everyone on the court to hear it. “Touchdown, touchdown,” I kept repeating, but the bird in the cage didn’t say a word.

Finally, Mr. Mendes stopped me, his voice low and kind. “Mr. Lex,” he said, “it’s not yet the football season.”

I couldn’t bring myself to say what I’d come to tell him—that unbeknownst to him I’d come into his house on the day that Popcorn disappeared. I’d seen Mr. Mendes leave for work. I knew he wouldn’t come home until his lunch hour. For weeks, ever since I’d pressed the button on the remote for the ceiling fan and seen his garage door lift, I’d tried to talk myself out of a crazy thought. Didn’t a garage door opener work by the same principle of a code set between transmitter and receiver? What would happen if I fooled around with combinations on my own opener until I found the one that would work on Mr. Mendes’s door?

The door would go up. That’s what would happen, as I discovered that day in late March. I walked across the street, wondering whether anyone was watching. I walked into Mr. Mendes’s garage and used the control on the wall to lower the door. I opened the door from the garage to the house, and I stepped inside.

All I wanted was a place to be that wasn’t my house. That’s what I couldn’t explain to Mr. Mendes. I couldn’t tell him how I enjoyed the open deck door and the warm breeze. I sat in the quiet of his home, content to be away from my own house, eager to believe, if only for an hour or so, that such peace and quiet belonged to me—that I deserved such rest.

Popcorn was in his cage, but the door was open so he could have free rein of the house. He chirped and trilled. Then he said, “Touchdown, touchdown.”

At one point, he came out of his cage and made a few low swoops around the breakfast area and family room.

I wasn’t thinking. I’d explain that to Mr. Mendes if I could. I’d tell him how I went to the deck door, and I felt so much at ease that I wanted to sit on his deck for a few moments, letting the sun warm me. I slid open the screen.

It was then that I felt a whisk of wings at my ear. With horror, I watched Popcorn lift beyond the beech tree in the backyard, then disappear around the corner of Chick Hartwell’s house.

What could I do but go home? If I’d been a better man, I would’ve come clean, but how in the world would I have explained being in that house in the first place? How would I have been able to tell Mr. Mendes how much those peaceful moments meant to me? How would I have said I knew my life was coming apart, and I didn’t know how to stop it?

I couldn’t say it then, and I can’t say it now that Vonnie has come for Henry and taken him away. It’s just me and that couch now. That sorry-assed couch. I sit here now in the dog days of summer, drinking. I remember that day when Mr. Mendes was so pleased to have this cockatiel he’d insist was Popcorn. The day he told me about his lost love, Eva, who lives in his home now and is a perfectly pleasant sort. I watch them come and go, often hand in hand, and as much as I want to, I can’t quite begrudge them. I just can’t manage it.

That day in his house, he said to me, “Are you happy for me, Mr. Lex?”

He stood there, wild-eyed—caught, so I imagined, between what was done and what was still ahead. Uncertain, I guess you’d say, and maybe sometimes that’s the best we can hope. I’d tell Vonnie this if I thought it might mean anything to her. A stir of air, a sliver of sky, an open door.

“I am,” I told Mr. Mendes. What else could I say? I didn’t want him to know that I was scared to death. Scared of all the days ahead of me. “Yes.” I patted him on the back. He was my neighbor, and for his sake I could pretend that I was a good man. “I’m happy. I’m very happy.” I even slipped an arm around his shoulders and pressed him to me. Just for an instant. “Very, very happy,” I said.

Then I did the only thing I could. I let him go.