Page 18 of But For You

“Look, he can fetch!” My son was so happy.

“Little shit,” Sam muttered under his breath because he knew as well as I did that it was a done deal at that point.

I had concerns—like the way the cat just ran, for no apparent reason, from one end of the house to the other—but over that, Sam just raised an eyebrow.

“He’s a spaz, just like you.”

I scowled at the marshal.

The appointment had been made to have the cat declawed, but the night before the surgery, Sam came home with an assortment of scratching posts—a few that looked like abstract art—and an enormous multilevel cat tower for Chilly to climb and sit on.

I just waited as Sam put everything down in the living room.

He had cleared his throat. “We’ll try this first.”

Apparently, whatever the marshal had read on the internet about declawing, he didn’t like. So, Chilly—who, as it had turned out, really liked his plethora of alternatives to shredding the couch—got to keep the murder mittens he had been born with.

Kola adored him, and Hannah kept calling for him to do whatever trick he had been doing again and again, and he got so wound up that I thought he would ricochet off the walls. She chanted his name, bounced on her toes, and squealed. My girl was in love.

My boy was in love too. He taught Chilly to fetch on purpose and not by accident.

Hannah taught Chilly that batting things off the counter—spoons, forks, broccoli, pretzels, even yogurt very carefully spooned out—would get him lots of petting as a reward. When she was sticky, inevitably, so was the cat, and I ended up having to clean them both. Chilly never pulled away or leaned out of reach; instead, he allowed grubby hands to stroke him in whatever condition they were in.

The kids loved to carry him, put him in a backpack with his head sticking out, and walk him on the leash, which Sam thought was the height of absurdity—who walked a cat, for heaven’s sake?—and sleep with him. The fact that he would sleep, stretched out beside them, in their beds was hysterical. And the part where my kids would contort themselves into absurd positions because they didn’t want to wake him was even funnier. Heaven forbid we disturbed the cat.

He was a member of our family, and even Sam was pleased when he was greeted by all of us at the door when he came home at night. Chilly would scold him if he didn’t get his own pat of affection, so Sam and he had their own routine. Sam would walk to the couch, where the cat would run to meet him and leap onto the arm; then my husband could bend down, and Chilly could lift up, and they could touch noses. I had taken a picture of it once just to show Sam’s mother, and I was supposed to delete it afterward. I still had it.

“Why do you have to scent-mark the mail?” I asked the cat, who was purring loudly under my ministrations.

As I gathered the scattered correspondence, the doorbell rang. When I answered it, the man there showed me his badge. It was a marshal badge, like Sam’s.

“Good afternoon,” he greeted me. “May I speak to Supervisory⁠—”

“Deputy White?” Sam said, walking up beside me, standing close.

The man held a manila envelope out for Sam. “These came for you, and I remember you saying if anything came from Phoenix, you were to get it right away.”

“Thank you,” he said, opening it up.

The marshal shoved his hands down into his pockets, but didn’t say anything.

I was uncomfortable just looking at him and leaned ever so slightly to get Sam’s attention.

He turned to me, and I made my eyes big, and because it was Sam and he knew me, his eyes flicked over to the marshal on my porch. “Something you wanna say?”

The younger man cleared his throat. “I just—we … if you need us while you’re out there on vacation … not that you would, but if you do … we can be on a plane in an hour, day or night. Just so you know.”

He squinted at White. “No one but you, Sanchez, Kowalski, Ryan, and Dorsey know where I’m going, right?”

“That’s correct, sir.”

Sam nodded. “Good. So, if anything⁠—”

“We’re your team, yeah?” He looked Sam in the eye. “Whatever you need, just call.”

“Understood.”

White took a breath. “Do you really?”