After he visited Dad on Friday, Deet stopped by the used CD place as usual. As soon as he walked in, he knew what he was going to do.
“You still got that cat?”
The young guy with the earring gestured to the top shelf, where the cat was curled up, paws tucked under his chest, eyes closed.
“How about if I take him home?” asked Deet.
“Cool,” said the guy. “He needs a good home in the worst way.” He looked at Deet carefully. “Sure your mom won’t mind?”
Deet hadn’t even thought about Mom, but he knew she wouldn’t mind. He shook his head. The guy reached up to the shelf, took the cat down, and put him in Deet’s arms. “Congratulations, Homeless. You got a home.”
“I’m going to call him Ronny,” said Deet.
“How come Ronny?”
“Just after a guy I know,” said Deet.
When Deet got him home, Ronny sniffed every corner of the house carefully, let himself be petted by the girls, and found a warm corner on the shelf over the washing machine, in a pile of extra towels. Deet put down a bowl of tuna and some milk. Ronny didn’t like the milk, but he went mad for the tuna and purred crazily the whole time he was eating. When Mom got home and saw Ronny, she got the same look on her face that she got when someone gave her a baby to hold. Deet could see that Mom really liked cats. She rubbed the cat’s chin while Deet told her about the CD guys and all.
“He’s been fighting,” she said. “See the scar on the back of his neck? And here on his muzzle. He’ll have to be fixed, or he’ll keep fighting.” Deet raised his eyebrows at her. He hadn’t known she knew anything about cats, and here she was sounding like some kind of expert.
“We had cats on our farm,” she said. “One day my dad got mad and shot them all because he said there were too many.” There was a tight line around Mom’s mouth when she said that. It was the first time Deet had ever heard her talk about her dad. He had a pretty good idea now why she hadn’t wanted to talk about him before.
“Oh, I’m glad to have a cat around again,” she said, when the cat closed his eyes and rubbed his jaw against her finger. “What’re you going to call him?”
“Ronny,” Deet told her. Mom looked at him searchingly, and then she nodded sadly. “Ronny,” she said.
Dad was sentenced in early May and was released for the rest of his time not already served to a halfway house. He went back to work, though he had to come back to the halfway house after work. He would be out on parole in another two months.
A lot of the people who had disappeared from the jail over the months were at the halfway house with Dad. The first time Deet visited, he saw the black girl and her dad, and the fat girl with the baby, who could walk now. The sleek-haired Eskimo boy was there too, though someone besides his grandparents, or whoever those old people were, was visiting him. Everyone looked so different out of their prison uniforms.
Visiting was as loose as could be—no searches, and everyone sat in a big room with beat-up couches, a pool table, and Coke machines. It felt like a party to Deet, everybody so relaxed. You didn’t notice how tense people were in jail until you saw them in the halfway house.
Deet saw Andy in the supermarket, and he said Della was out of jail and they were getting married at the end of the summer.
Deet had news for Andy: Michael’s mom was now working as a cook in the diner where Mom worked. Mom said she was a really good cook, and lots of people came in now for her specialties, like barbecued ribs and what she called her down-home meat loaf.
Deet brought Dad a book every week. You had to give it to the staff member who signed you in, so they could check it for contraband, but at least he didn’t have to mail everything he wanted Dad to have. He’d read another of Deet’s favorites, All Quiet on the Western Front.
Dad had had a letter from his roommate, the bank robber, who’d been sent to the States to a federal prison, and he said it wasn’t so bad there. But he was homesick and missed his wife and kids. And his dog. Ronny had been sent to another prison too, but Dad had Ronny’s address, and he sent magazines to him every month. Not much he could do for Ronny, he said, but he could do that.
“Whatever happened to the guy who just wanted a house and a dog?” asked Deet.
“I don’t know,” said Dad. “I’d sure like to believe he got them. But people get in the habit of screwing up, and they just can’t break it.”
“Like Ronny,” said Deet.
Dad looked at Deet with the sorrowful expression he always had when he thought of Ronny. “Yeah,” Dad said. “Like Ronny.”
Sheena’s brother was sent to the prison near Anchorage. She wrote to him twice a week. Deet wondered what she found to write to him about, when he’d been so hard to talk to.
“Well, I write like you did for Mr. Hodges,” she said. “I just write down anything I think about anything, and that can fill up a long letter. Maybe none of it will be interesting to him, but I don’t want him to be alone in the world.”
“Does he write back?”
Sheena smiled, a real smile, not just her face-tightening thing. “I just got a letter from him yesterday. And he wrote what he thought about everything I wrote. It was like having a real conversation with him, and not like any I ever had with him before. He’s like a different person when he writes. Isn’t that funny?” She smiled at Deet. “And I sent him a quote book, too. I hope he enjoys it as much as you did.”
Deet took Ronny the cat to the vet to have him neutered, and the vet gave him some special food to make up for the long period of malnutrition. After a few months Ronny’s coat was sleek and glossy, and he purred all the time. Not the usual cat purr, but some kind of jerky, erratic, loud noise, more like an engine breaking down. It always made people laugh when they heard him the first time. Ronny especially liked Sheena.
Mom said that she’d gotten used to working again and she liked her job, so she was going to work for a while longer, to finish paying the lawyer’s bills. Deet said he didn’t mind doing the housework and cooking and that he didn’t mind taking care of the girls in the afternoon when Mom was at work. He could go to the garage in the mornings now that school was out for the summer, and he and the girls could ride their bikes to the library. They’d stick to the budget that Mom and Deet had made up so that they’d get the credit card paid off. And they’d never go into debt again.
Mr. Hodges sent a postcard from the Rockies, where he’d gone on a canoe trip. He didn’t write anything, just drew a picture of himself in a canoe, paddling like mad and looking terrified.
Sheena came to the house a few afternoons a week, and she helped Deet bake brownies and things he hadn’t tried to cook yet. The girls were pleased to have her there, a big girl, even when she wouldn’t play Barbies with them. In fact, when Sheena told them she thought Barbies were stupid, the girls stopped playing with them so much. Mom always asked Sheena to eat dinner with them when she was there on the weekends, and Deet liked to hear the two of them in the kitchen together, laughing. It seemed to Deet that Mom had taught Sheena to laugh.
Sometimes when it was raining they called Nelly to come over. He taught them to play poker, which was a lot of fun, and sometimes they played Monopoly. The first time Deet got the card that said, “Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200,” he and Sheena looked at each other, but it didn’t hurt like it used to.
They knew jail wasn’t funny, and maybe they would always wince when people made a joke of it, but they were a lot tougher than they used to be.