There’s no such thing as doorbells in our building, so Ma just went right up and rapped on the door with the dangling B.

Ma’s got solid knuckles. Knuckles that mean business. Still, no one came runnin’ to answer the door. She waited a minute, her ear perked near the flaky paint of the door, before using those knuckles again. “Mrs. Graves!” she shouted. “We’ve got your groceries!”

After another minute, I whispered, “I still say it’s just storage. Or empty. Look at the knob.” It was loose from the wood, and kind of sloppy. Like nothing important was stored behind it, and definitely not a person.

Which made me think that the Shop-Wise guy was actually just a wise guy who’d played some sort of trick on us. Although I couldn’t really put my finger on what that trick might be.

Ma’s mind wasn’t on storage or the Shop-Wise guy. “Ha!” she huffed, giving me the sly-eye, with a grin to match. “Here she comes.” She pulled her ear away from the door and whispered, “A hundred dollars says she’s old.”

I had all of zero dollars, so I couldn’t take that bet. And that’s a good thing, ’cause when the door finally creaked open, we were definitely looking at old.

Old face.

Old clothes.

Old smell.

“Mrs. Graves?” Ma asked, turning up the volume. “We’re your new neighbors. I’m Maribelle, and this is my son, Lincoln.”

She said it like she was talking to someone underwater, but the words still seemed to swim right by Mrs. Graves.

“We have your groceries!” Ma shouted.

“I can hear you, Maribelle,” the old lady said, and she bared her dingy teeth a little, like a dog fixin’ to bite. Then she turned to me and said, “Nice to meet you, Lincoln,” and did the dog-bite thing again, which I was catching on was her way of smiling.

Ma held her bag a little higher. “Would you like us to carry these into your kitchen?”

“Not necessary,” Mrs. Graves said back.

“We don’t mind,” Ma said. “And Lincoln would be happy to take out your trash, or whatever else needs doing.”

Mrs. Graves gave me a doubtful look. “He would, would he?”

“Sure,” I said after Ma nudged me. And it did seem like something I should do. Besides being old, Mrs. Graves was small. Her body was like twigs stuck together inside a heavy wool sweater.

I sneaked a peek past her, wondering how much work I might have gotten myself into. Her place was bigger than ours, but what I noticed most was sunshine. It’s something that never sets foot in our place, but here, right next door, it streaked in through a window, making the air seem like it was dusted with gold.

A cat nosed in, its face poking out between the door and Mrs. Graves’s leg. It was black and white and had crazy green eyes that were bright and deep and hypnotizing.

“Me-ow!” it cried, and the sound was so pitiful I had an instant wish for a can of tuna.

I knelt down to pet it and could see another cat padding over that looked like the twin of the first cat, but wasn’t. It was the mirror image. All the markings were in the exact opposite place, except the white tip of the tail, which was in the exact same place.

I was so busy figuring out the Mirror Cats that at first I didn’t see a third cat coming from the other side of the room. It was dusty gray and small, with one eye insistin’ on sleeping while the other one was wide open, scouting things out. I thought, Pretty neat trick, but as the cat moved closer, I figured out that the one eye wasn’t sleeping after all. It was missing.

My mind started flashing around. Whatever had happened must’ve been epic. Maybe dogs had cornered him in a dark alley! Maybe he’d been viciously attacked! Left for dead with a geyser of blood spurting from his eye!

I was just picturing him staggering home in a tattered war uniform, with a crutch and a lame leg to go along with his bloody eye, when Mrs. Graves pushed One Eye aside with her foot.

It was a quick move, and she did the same thing to the other two without even looking down. “Just leave the bags there,” she told Ma, pointing to the ground at our feet.

“They’re heavy,” Ma said. “Why don’t you let us—” But the door was already closing in Ma’s face.

After staring at flaky paint for a solid minute, Ma finally set her bag down next to where mine was already resting. “Did you see the cats?” I whispered on our way home, and I was all pumped up.

“I didn’t have to see them to smell them,” she said, letting us into our apartment. “How can she even breathe in there?” Her head quivered like the tail of a snake, and what rattled out of her mouth was, “Where are her kids? Where is her family? What is wrong with folks?”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you notice? There were dishes everywhere! And piles of garbage!”

I almost let out, “There were?” but I pulled back the reins in time and said, “Maybe she doesn’t have kids?”

“I saw pictures. In frames. By her couch.”

“You did?”

“I’ve got a good eye for these things,” she said, giving me a stealthy look.

I couldn’t believe how we’d been looking through the exact same doorway and had seen such different things. “Were they pictures of people?” I asked.

“What else would they be of?”

“I don’t know…cats?”

She grinned at me like she thought I was joking, but when she saw I wasn’t, she got all serious. “Her kids need to know.”

“Need to know what?”

“That she’s living in unsanitary conditions with seventeen cats!”

“Seventeen? I only saw three!”

“Where there’s three, there’s seventeen,” she said with a huff.

That made no kind of sense to me, but she sure seemed serious.

And I liked the happy feeling that it might be true.