While I Was Gone Read Online Free PDF Page B

entirely too familiar to me. I tried, for the sixth or seventh time, to persuade his owner that he should be neutered.
    “Neutralized” she insisted on calling it, as though it were some science fiction fate I’d inflict on him with a ray gun. She was young, what we might have called a hippie thirty years ago. The flannel shirt rather than the pierced nostril kind. She always turned me down about Henry.
    “I like him to know he’s a boy,” she said to me coyly today.
    “Louise, he has absolutely no doubt that he’s a boy!”
    I said.
    “He’s tormented by being a boy. How many times have I treated him for abscesses? Do you think he enjoys that? Do you think he enjoys the fights? It’s not dating when you’re a cat, Louise.”
    She stroked his scarred orange head. He’d lost a good chunk of ear long ago. He looked tired today. Tired and dusty.
    “We don’t know what it’s like for him,” she said.
    “I think it’s fair to say that this stuff hurts. I would venture that.”
    “But you can’t say he’d choose not to do it.”
    “It’syour choice, Louise. Not his.”
    “Well, I like him just the way he is.” She put her face down next to his head. He squinted his eyes shut in pleasure. His tail whipped, once, on the table.
    I heaved a sigh.
    “Well, I have to accede to that, but I also have to say I don’t like to. It’s against medical advice, and it’s contrary to common sense. And it’s not too responsible either.” I pointed at her.
    “All those kittens and no child support.”
    She laughed gaily and carried Henry out.
    Over lunch, Beattie talked about her older sister, who had lived with her since her retirement and who was addicted to the shopping network. It made her mad, Beattie said.
    “It should be like gambling,” she announced.
    “You should have to go someplace special to do it, like Atlantic City, so’s you’d notice it more, what you were up to.” She said her sister often didn’t even bother to open the cartons and packages when they came now. They were stacked in the hall, or behind the couch her sister pulled out to sleep on.
    When she said this, Beattie gestured over her shoulder, where, as it happened, the dog runs were. We were sitting at a picnic table out back in the weak sunlight, wearing sweaters against the fall chill and listening to the intermittent barking. Our off fice was in one of the tiny malls that had sprung up everywhere around these old towns as quickly as mushroom patches after rain. It was next to a bagel shop and a dry cleaner, and the land behind us rolled slowly down to a brook whose name I loved, Brother Brook. When the dogs were quiet, you could hear its steady rush.
    “Isn’t there something like TV Shoppers Anonymous?” I asked.
    “Some group cure?”
    She made a snorting sound.
    “Should be, if there isn’t,” she said. She took a tiny bite from her sandwich and chewed, daintily.
    “And how’s your family?” she asked after a moment, as though it were all part of the same enterprise, from her perspective. Beattie was white-haired, small, with a birdlike quick delicacy. She’d known the girls since they were babies.
    “Good,” I said.
    “We never hear from Cass, but Nora and Sadie are well. Thriving, I’d say.”
    “And how’s my boy?” she asked, grinning. The wind puffed her thin hair strangely around her ears, and I looked away.
    “Daniel? He’s fine. He caught two trout yesterday, and he said he was happy.”
    “Happy,” she said in a faraway voice, as though it were an emotion she could only vaguely recollect.
    “Lovely.”
    The afternoon jammed up and was crazy, as often happened.
    I had a cat who’d been hit by a car and needed a bone set. A dog who’d gotten into a fight with some kind of wild animal. A boa constrictor who seemed “depressed,” according to his worried teenage owner—he had, I thought, a cold. It wasn’t until after four that Beattie tossed a folder labeled Jean Bennett onto the steel