Mom is sitting in the kitchen drinking her tea and she says, “My goodness, why are you up so early on a holiday? Do you feel sick?”

“Nah, I’m all right.” I pour out a cup of coffee to warm my hands on and dump in three or four spoons of sugar.

“Davey, have you got a chill? You don’t look to me as if you felt quite right.”

“Mom, for Pete’s sake, it’s cold out! I feel fine.”

“Well, you don’t have to go out. Why don’t you just go back to bed and snooze and read a bit, and I’ll bring you some breakfast.”

I see it’s got to be faced, so while I’m getting down the cereal and a bowl, I say, “Well, as a matter of fact, I’m going over to Coney Island today.”

“Coney island!” Mom sounds like it was Siberia. “What in the world are you going to do there in the middle of winter?”

“Who’s going? Nick?”

“Nick wasn’t sure—I’ll stop by his house and see.” I’d just as soon steer clear of this “who’s going” business, so I start into a long spiel about how we’re studying marine life in biology, and we have to take some notes at the aquarium. Mom is swallowing this pretty well, but Pop comes into the kitchen just then and gives me the fishy eye.

“First time I ever heard of you spending a holiday on homework. I bet they got a new twist palace going out there.”

I slam down my coffee cup. “Holy cats! Can’t I walk out of here on a holiday without going through the third degree? What am I, some kind of a nut or a convict?”

“Just a growing boy,” says Pop. “And don’t talk so sassy to your mother.”

“I’m talking to you!”

Pop draws in a breath to start bellowing, but Mom beats him to it by starting to wheeze, which she can do without drawing breath.

I fly off the handle! How do you like that?

I give Mom a kiss. “Cheer up, Mom. I won’t ride on the roller coaster. It’s not even running.”

I grab a sweater and gloves and money and get out before they can start anymore questions. On the subway I start wondering if Mary will show up. It’s almost two months since we made this sort of crazy date, and the weather sure isn’t helping any.

Coney Island is made to be crowded and noisy. All the billboards scream at you, as if they had to get your attention. So when the place is empty, it looks like the whole thing was a freak or an accident.

It’s sure empty today. There’s practically no one on the street in the five or six blocks from the subway station to the aquarium. But it’s not quiet. There are a few places open—merry-go-rounds and hot-dog shops—and tinny little trickles of music come out of them, but the big noise is the wind. All the signs are swinging and screeching. Rubbish cans blow over and their tops clang and bang rolling down the street. The wind makes a whistling noise all by itself.

I lean into the wind and walk up the empty street. My sweater is about as warm as a sieve. I wonder if I’m crazy to have come. No girl would get out on a boardwalk on a day like this. It must be practically a hurricane.

She’s there, though. As soon as I turn the corner to the beach, I can see one figure, with its back to the ocean, scarf and hair blowing inland toward me. I can’t see her face, but it’s Mary, all right. There isn’t another soul in sight. I wave and she hunches her shoulders up and down to semaphore, not wishing to take her hands out of her pockets.

I come up beside her on the boardwalk and turn my back to the ocean, too. I’d like to go on looking at it—it’s all black and white and thundery—but the wind blows your breath right back down into your stomach. I freeze.

“I was afraid you wouldn’t come on a day like this,” I say.

“Me too. I mean I was afraid you wouldn’t.”

“Mom and Pop thought I was crazy. I spent about an hour arguing with them. What’d your mother say?”

“Nothing. She thinks I’m walking alone with the wind in my hair, thinking poetic thoughts.”

“Huh? What for?”

Mary shrugs. “Mom’s like that. You’ll see. Come on, let’s go home and make cocoa or something to warm up, and then we’ll think up something to do. We can’t just stand here.”

She’s right about that, so I don’t argue. Her house is a few blocks away, a two-family type with a sloped driveway going down into a cellar garage. Neat. My pop is always going nuts hunting for a place to park.

Mary goes in and shouts, “Hi, Nina! I brought a friend home. We’re going to make some cocoa. We’re freezing.”

I wonder who Nina is. I don’t hear her mother come into the kitchen. Then I turn around and there she is. Holy crow! We got some pretty beat-looking types at school, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen a beatnik mother.

She’s got on a black T-shirt and blue jeans and old sneakers, and her hair is in a long braid, with uneven bangs in front.

Mary waves a saucepan vaguely at us both and says, “Nina—Davey—this is my mother.”

So Nina is her mother. I stick out my hand. “Uh—how do you do?”

“Hel-looo.” Her voice is low and musical. “I think there is coffee on the stove.”

“I thought I’d make cocoa for a change,” says Mary.

“All right.” Nina puts a cigarette in her mouth and offers one to me.

I say, “No, thank you.”

“Tell me....” She talks in this low, intense kind of voice. “Are you in school with Mary?”

So I tell her I live in Manhattan, and how I ran into Mary when I had Cat on the beach, because that makes it sound sort of respectable, not like a pickup. But she doesn’t seem to be interested in Cat and the beach.

“What do you read? In your school?” she asks, launching each question like a torpedo.

I remember Mary saying something about her mother and poetry, so I say, “Well, uh—last week we read ‘The Highwayman’ and ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus.’ They’re about—I mean, we were studying metaphors and similes. Looking at the ocean today, I sure can see what Longfellow meant about the icy....”

I thought I was doing pretty well, but she cut me off again.

“Don’t you read any real poetry? Donne? Auden? Baudelaire?”

Three more torpedoes. “We didn’t get to them yet.”

Nina blows out a great angry cloud of smoke and explodes, “Schools!” Then she sails out of the kitchen.

I guess I look a little shook up. Mary laughs and shoves a mug of cocoa and a plate of cinnamon toast in front of me. “Don’t mind Mother. She just can’t get used to New York schools. Or Coney Island. Or hardly anything around here.

“She grew up on the Left Bank in Paris. Her father was an artist and her mother was a writer, and they taught her to read at home, starting with Chaucer, probably. She never read a kids’ book in her life.

“Anything I ever tell her about school pretty much sounds either childish or stupid to her. What I really love is science—experiments and stuff—and she can’t see that for beans.”

“Our science teacher is a dope,” I say, because she is, “so I really never got very interested in science. But I told Mom and Dad I was coming to the aquarium to take notes today, so they wouldn’t kick up such a fuss.”

Mary shakes her head. “We ought to get our mothers together. Mine thinks I’m wasting time if I even go to the aquarium. I do, though, all the time. I love the walrus.”

“What does your pop do?”

“Father? He teaches philosophy at Brooklyn College. So I get it from both sides. Just think, think, think. Father and Nina aren’t hardly even interested in food. Once in a while Nina spends all day cooking some great fish soup or a chicken in wine, but the rest of the time I’m the only one who takes time off from thinking to cook a hamburger. They live on rolls and coffee and sardines.”

Mary puts our cups in the sink and then opens a low cupboard. Instead of pots and pans it has stacks of records in it. She pulls out West Side Story and then I see there’s a record player on a side table. What d’you know? A record player in the kitchen! This Left Bank style of living has its advantages.

“I sit down here and eat and play records while I do my homework,” says Mary, which sounds pretty nice.

I ask her if she has any Belafonte, and she says, “Yes, a couple,” but she puts on something else. It’s slow, but sort of powerful, and it makes you feel kind of powerful yourself, as if you could do anything.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“It’s called ‘The Moldau’—that’s a river in Europe. It’s by a Czech named Smetana.”

I wander around the kitchen and look out the window. The wind’s still howling, but not so hard. I remember the ocean, all gray and powerful, spotted with whitecaps. I’d like to be out on it.

“You know what’d be fun?” I say out loud. “To be out in a boat on the harbor today. If you didn’t sink.”

“We could take the Staten Island ferry,” Mary says.

“Huh?” I hadn’t even thought there was really any boat we could get on. “Really? Where do you get it?”

“Down at Sixty-ninth Street and Fourth Avenue. It’s quite a ways. I’ve always gone there in a car. But maybe we could do it on bikes, if we don’t freeze.”

“We won’t freeze. But what about bikes?”

“You can use my brother’s. He’s away at college. Maybe I can find a windbreaker of his, too.”

She finds the things and we get ready and go into the living room, where Nina is sitting reading and sipping a glass of wine.

“We’re going on our bikes to the ferry and over to Staten Island,” Mary says. She doesn’t even ask.

“Oh-h-h.” It’s a long, low note, faintly questioning.

“We thought with the wind blowing and all, it’d be exciting,” Mary explains, and I think, Uh-o, that’s going to cook it. My mother would have kittens if I said I was going out on a ferry in a storm.

But Nina just says, “I see,” and goes back to reading her book. I say good-bye and she looks up again and smiles, and that’s all.

It’s another funny thing—Nina doesn’t seem to pay any attention to who Mary brings home, like most mothers are always snooping if their daughter brings home a guy. Without stopping to think, I say, “Do you bring home a lot of guys?”

Mary laughs. “Not a lot. Sometimes one of the boys at school comes home when we’re studying for a science test.”

I laugh, too, but what I’m thinking of is how Pop would look if I brought a girl home and said we were studying for a test!

All of a sudden we’re circling a golf course. What d’you know? Right in New York City!

“Ever play golf?” The wind snatches the words out of my mouth and carries them back to Mary. I see her mouth shaping like a “No,” but no sound comes my way. I drop back beside her and say, “I’ll show you sometime. My pop’s got a set of clubs I used a couple of times.”

“Probably I better carry the clubs and you play. I can play tennis, though.”

We pass the golf course and head down into a sort of main street. Anyway there’s lots of banks and dime stores and traffic. Mary leads the way. We make a couple of turns and zigzags and then go under the parkway, and there’s the ferry. It’s taken us most of an hour to get from Mary’s house.

I’m hoping the ferry isn’t too expensive, so I’ll have plenty of money left for a good lunch. But while I’m mooning, Mary has wheeled her bike right up and paid her own fare. Well, I guess that’s one of the things I like about her. She’s independent. Still, I’m going to buy lunch.

The ferry ride is fast, only about fifteen minutes. We ride off in Staten Island and start thinking where to go. I know what’s first with me.

I ask Mary, “What do you like, hamburgers or sandwiches?”

“Both. I mean either,” she says.

The first place we see is a delicatessen, which is about my favorite kind of place to eat anyway. I order a hot pastrami, and Mary says she never had one, but she’ll try the same.

“Where could we go on Staten Island?” I say. “I never was here before.”

“About the only place I’ve been is the zoo. I’ve been there lots of times. The vet let me watch her operate on a snake once.”

This is a pretty surprising thing for a girl to tell you in the middle of a mouthful of hot pastrami. The pastrami is great, and they put it on a roll with a lot of olives and onions and relish. Mary likes it too.

“Is the vet a woman? Aren’t you scared of snakes?”

“Uh-un, I never was really. But when you’re watching an operation, you get so interested you don’t think about it being icky or scary. The vet is a woman. She’s been there quite a while.”

I digest this along with the rest of my sandwich. Then we both have a piece of apple pie. You can tell from the way the crust looks—browned and a little uneven—that they make it right here.

“So shall we go to the zoo?” Mary asks.

“O.K.” I get up to get her coat and mine. When I turn around, there she is up by the cashier, getting ready to pay her check.

“Hey, I’m buying lunch,” I say, steaming up with the other check.

“Oh, that’s all right.” She smiles. “I’ve got it.”

I don’t care if she’s got it. I want to pay it. I suppose it’s a silly thing to get sore about, but it sort of annoys me. Anyway, how do you maneuver around to do something for a girl when she doesn’t even know you want to?

The man in the deli gives us directions to get to the zoo, which isn’t far. It’s a low brick building in a nice park. In the lobby there are some fish tanks, then there’s a wing for birds on one side, animals on the other, and snakes straight ahead.

We go for snakes. Mary really seems to like them.

She says, “The vet here likes them, and I guess she got me interested. You know, they don’t really understand how a snake moves? Mechanically, I mean. She’s trying to find out.”

We look at them all, little ones and big ones, and then we go watch the birds. The keeper is just feeding them. The parrot shouts at him, and the pelican and the eagles gobble up their fish and raw meat, but the vulture just sits on his perch looking bored. Probably needs a desert and a dying Legionnaire to whet his appetite.

In the animal wing a strange-looking dame is down at the end, talking to a sleepy tiger.

“Come on, darling, just a little roar. Couldn’t you give me just a soft one today?” she’s cooing at him. The tiger blinks and looks away.

The lady notices us standing there and says, “He’s my baby. I’ve been coming to see him for fourteen years. Some days he roars for me beautifully.”

She has a short conversation with the lion, then moves along with us toward the small cats, a puma and a jaguar. She looks in the next cage, which is empty, and shakes her head mournfully.

“I had the sweetest little leopard. He died last week. Would you believe it? The zoo never let me know he was sick. I could have come and helped take care of him. I might have saved his life.”

She goes on talking, sometimes to herself, sometimes to the puma, and we cross over to look at two otters chasing each other up an underwater tunnel.

“What is she, some kind of nut?” Mary says. “Does she think this is her private zoo?”

I shrug. “I suppose she’s a little off. But so’s my Aunt Kate, the one who gave me Cat. They just happen to like cats better than people. Kate thinks all the stray cats in the world are her children, and I guess this one feels the same way about the big cats here.”

We mosey around a little bit more and then head back to the ferry. I make good and sure I’m ahead, and I get to the ticket office and buy two tickets.

“Would you care for a ride across the harbor in my yacht?” I say.

“Why, of course. I’d be delighted,” says Mary.

A small thing, but it makes me feel good.

I phone and get Pop. He’s home early from work. Just my luck.

“I got to get this bike back to this kid in Coney,” I tell him. “Then I’ll be right home. About seven.”

“What do you mean this bike and this kid? Who? Anyway, I thought you were already at Coney Island.”

I suppose lawyers just get in the habit of asking questions. I start explaining. “Well, it was awfully cold over in Coney, and we thought we’d go over to Staten Island on the ferry and go to the zoo. So now we just got back to Brooklyn, and I’m downtown and I got to take the bike back.”

“So who’s ‘we’? You got a rat in your pocket?”

I can distract Mom but not Pop. “Well, actually, it’s a girl named Mary. It’s her brother’s bike. He’s away in college.”

All I can hear now is Pop at the other end of the line, laughing his head off.

“So what’s so funny about that?”

“Oh.”

“O.K. Now mind you get that girl, as well as the bicycle of the brother who goes to college, home safe. Hear? I’ll tell your mother you narrowly escaped drowning, and she’ll probably save you a bone for dinner. O.K.?”

“O.K. Bye.”

Him and his jokes. Ha, ha, ha. Funny, though, him worrying about me getting Mary home safe, when her own mother doesn’t worry any.

We start along toward her house slowly, as there’s a good deal of traffic now. I’m wondering how to see Mary again without having to ask for her number and phoning and making a date. Something about telephoning I don’t like. Besides, I’d probably go out to a pay phone so the family wouldn’t listen, and that’d make me feel stupid to begin with.

Just then we start rounding the golf course, and I whack the handle bar of my bike and say, “Hey, that’s it!”

“What’s it?”

“Hunh?” Mary looks startled. “Well, I suppose I could try, or anyway I could walk around.”

“It’s easy. I’ll show you.” The two times I played, I only hit the ball decently about four or five times. But the times I did hit it, it seemed easy.

We get to Mary’s house and I put the bikes away and give her back her brother’s jacket. “I guess I’ll go right along. It’s getting late. See you Election Day.”

“O.K., bye. Say—thanks for the ferry ride!”

That seems pretty true. It must be tough not getting regular holidays off, too. “You have to work all day tomorrow?” I ask.

“I open the store up at seven and start working on orders we’ve already got. I’ll get through around three or four.”

“Hey, you want to come for dinner? We’re not eating till evening.”

Tom grins. “You cooking the dinner? Maybe you better ask your mother.”

“It’ll be all right with Mom. Look, I’ll ask her and come let you know in the store tomorrow, O.K.?”

“Hmm. Well, sure. Thanks. I’ve got a date with Hilda later in the evening, but she’s got to eat with her folks first.”

“O.K. See you tomorrow.”

“Right.”

She comes, and she looks like someone from another world. I’ve never seen her in anything but her old skirts and sneakers, so the “good clothes” she’s wearing now must have been hanging in a closet twenty years. The dress and shoes are way out of style, and she’s carrying a real old black patent-leather pocketbook. Usually she just lugs her old cloth shopping bag, mostly full of cat goodies. Come to think of it, that’s it: Kate lives in a world that is just her own and the cats’. I never saw her trying to fit into the ordinary world before.

Cat knows her right away, though. Clothes don’t fool him. He rubs her leg and curls up on the sofa beside her, still keeping a half-open eye on the oven door in the kitchen, where the turkey is roasting.

Tom comes in, also in city clothes—a white shirt and tie and jacket—the first time I ever saw him in them. He sits down on the other side of Cat, who stretches one paw out toward him negligently.

Looking at Kate and Tom sitting there on the sofa, both looking a little ill at ease, I get a funny idea. My family is starting to collect people the way Kate collects homeless cats. Of course, Kate and Tom aren’t homeless. They’re people-less—not part of any family. I think Mom always wanted more people to take care of, so she’s glad to have them.

Kidding, I ask Kate, “How many cats at your home for Thanksgiving dinner?”

She stops stroking Cat a minute and thinks. “Hmm, Susan’s got four new kittens, just got their eyes open. A beautiful little orange one and three tigers. Then there’s two big kittens, strays, and one old stray tom. Makes eight, that’s all. Sometimes I’ve had lots more than that.”

“Doesn’t the landlord ever object?” Pop asks.

Kate snorts. “Him! Huh! I pay my rent. And I have my own padlock on the door, so he can’t come snooping around.”

We all sit down to dinner. Pop gives Cat the turkey neck to crunch up in the kitchen. He finishes that and crouches and stares at us eating. Kate gives him tidbits, which I’m not supposed to do. I don’t think she really wants to eat the turkey herself. She’s pretty strictly a fruit and yogurt type.

After dinner Tom leaves to meet Hilda, and I walk home with Kate, carrying a bag of scraps and giblets for her cats. While she’s fiddling with the two sets of keys to open her door, the man next door sticks his head out. “Messenger was here a little while ago with a telegram for you. Wouldn’t give it to me.”

“A telegram?” Kate gapes.

“Yeah. He’ll be back.” The man looks pleased, like he’s been able to deliver some bad news, and pulls his head in and shuts his door.

We go into Kate’s apartment, and cats come meowing and rubbing against her legs, and they jump up on the sink and rub and nudge the bag of scraps when she puts it down. Kate is muttering rapidly to herself and fidgeting with her coat and bag and not really paying much attention to the cats, which is odd.

“Lots of people send telegrams on holidays. It’s probably just greetings,” I say.

“Not to me, they don’t!” Kate snaps, also sounding as if they better hadn’t.

The doorbell rings, and Kate yanks open the door, practically bowling over an ancient little messenger leaning sleepily against the side of the door.

“Take it easy, lady, take it easy. Just sign here,” he says.

She signs, hands him the pencil, and slams the door. The orange kitten has got out again, and Kate does come close to stepping on him as she walks across the room tearing open the telegram. He doesn’t know enough to dodge feet yet. I scoop him back in this time.

Kate reads the telegram and sits down. She looks quite calm now. She says, “Well, he died.”

“Huh? Who?”

“My brother. He’s the only person in the world I know who would send me a telegram. So he’s dead now.”

She repeats it, and I can’t figure whether to say I’m sorry or what. I always thought when someone heard of a death in the family, there’d be a lot of crying and commotion. Kate looks perfectly calm, but strange somehow.

“Has he been sick?”

Kate shakes her head. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in twenty years.”

There is silence a moment, and then Kate goes on, talking half to herself and half to me. “Mean old coot. He never talked to anyone, except about his money. That’s all he cared about. Once he tried to get me to give him money to invest. That’s the last time I saw him. He has an old house way up in the Bronx. But we never did get along, even when we were kids.”

“Did he have a wife or anything? Who sent the telegram?”

“He’s had a housekeeper. Just as mean as him. She’d buy him day-old bread and dented cans of soup because they were cheaper. She suited him fine—saved him money and never talked to him. Well, she’ll get his money now, if he left any. That’s what she’s been waiting for. She sent me the wire.”

Kate is staring out the window and stroking the old stray tomcat between the ears, and it hits me: there isn’t a person in the world she loves or even hates. I like cats fine, too, but if I didn’t have people that mattered, it wouldn’t be so good. I say “So long” quietly and go out.

“What’ll she have to do?”

“Maybe I better go see her tomorrow,” says Pop. “There can be lots of things—see if he left a will, if he owes any taxes, if he has property that has to be taken care of or sold. You can’t tell.”

“Kate said he was a miser. Maybe he left her a million. Say, that’d be great!”

“Don’t be a dope!” Pop snaps, and he really sounds angry, so I pipe down.

The next morning Pop tells me to go over and see how Kate is. “The way she feels about people, I don’t like to just barge in. I’ll come by in ten minutes, like I was picking you up to go to a movie or something.”

I saunter round the corner onto Third Avenue and stop short. There are two newspaper cars pulled up in front of Kate’s building, one red and one black, and a sizable knot of people gathered on the sidewalk. I move in among them.

“That crazy cat lady ... he musta been a nut too ... left her about a million ... a lotta rich cats, how d’ya like that....”

So I guess he did leave her money, and all of a sudden I see it isn’t “great.” It’s going to be trouble. I push through the people and go upstairs without anyone stopping me. When I open Kate’s door, old stray tomcat shoots out. He’s leaving, and I can see why.

Kate’s room is tiny, and it looks like it’s filled with a mob. Maybe it’s only half a dozen guys, but the photographers are pushing around trying to get shots and the reporters are jabbering.

Orange kitten sticks his head out of the box. Then out he comes, into the sea of feet. I drop him back in and try to get across to Kate. She’s pretty well backed into a corner and looking ready to jump out the window. She has her arms folded in front of her, each hand clenching the other elbow, as if to hold herself together. A reporter with a bunch of scratch paper in his hand is crowding her.

“Miss Carmichael”—funny, I never even knew her last name before—“I just want to ask one or two questions. Could you tell us when you last saw your brother?”

“No, I couldn’t,” she snaps, drawing her head down between her shoulders and trying to melt into the wall.

“Watcha going to do with the money?” a photographer asks. He picks up a cat, one of the big stray kittens, and dumps it on Kate. The cat clings to her and the photographer says, “Hold it now. Just let me snap a picture.”

He takes two steps back.

At the first step the room is silent. At the second step a shattering caterwaul goes up. He has stepped on the adventurous orange kitten.

The scream freezes us all, except Kate. She shoots out of her corner, knowing instantly what has happened. The kitten is jerking slightly now, and bright, bright blood is coming out of its mouth. With one violent, merciful stroke Kate finishes it. She picks the limp body up and wraps it neatly in a paper towel and places it in the wastebasket.

The room is still silent for one congealed instant. Kate seems almost to have forgotten the crowd of men. Then two of them make hastily for the door. The photographer shuffles his feet and says, “Gee, m’am, I didn’t mean ... I wouldn’t for the world....”

Kate whirls and screams at him: “Get out! Get out, all of you! Leave me and my cats alone! I never asked you in here!”

At that moment my pop comes in the door. Of course he doesn’t know anything about the kitten, but he takes in the general situation and herds the two remaining newspapermen to the door. He gives them his card and home address and tells them to look him up a little later.

My knees suddenly feel weak and I slump onto the sofa, and my eyes swivel round to the little package in the wastebasket. It would be the strongest one. I really never saw anything get killed right in front of me before. It hits you.

Pop is trying to calm Kate down. She’s facing him, grabbing each sleeve of his coat. “What am I going to do? What can I do? I don’t want his money. I don’t want anything from anyone. I just want to be let alone!”

“Take it easy, Kate, take it easy. You don’t have to let anyone into your apartment. About the inheritance, well, I’ll have to look into that.” Over his shoulder Pop signals to me to go home and get Mom.

“Hey, kid,” one of the reporters shoves in front of me, “about this Miss Carmichael. Does she act pretty strange, like talking to herself on the street and stuff?”

I see the story he’s trying to build up. While it’s true in a way, if you really know Kate it’s not. Anyway, I’m against it. I say, “Nah. She’s all right. She’s just sort of scared of people, and she likes cats.”

“How many cats she got?”

There have been up to a dozen on a busy day, but again I play it down. “She’s got a mother cat with kittens. Sometimes a stray or two. Don’t get sucked in by all that jazz these dumb kids around here’ll give you.”

“She gets all that money, you think she’ll buy a big house, set up a home for stray cats?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. She doesn’t want the money anyway. She just wants to be let alone.”

“Doesn’t want the money!” the photographer chips in. “Boy, she must be really nuts! I’m going back to the office.”

Kate is sitting on the sofa, sniffing and wiping her eyes and muttering, but looking calmer. Mom is making tea. Pop is looking out the window, scratching his head.

Kate gulps and draws a big breath. “Tell them I don’t want his old money. Tell them to give it to someone else. Tell them to leave me alone. I just want my own place and my cats. They can’t make me move, can they? I’ve lived here thirty years. I couldn’t go anyplace else.”

She gulps and sniffs some more, and Mom brings her a cup of tea. The stray kittens jump up to see if it’s anything good and nuzzle into her lap. Kate takes a sip of tea and asks Pop again, “They can’t make me move, can they?” This seems to be what worries her most.

“No-o,” says Pop, “it’s only....”

He’s interrupted by a knock on the door, and I go open it a crack. A guy says he’s the landlord. As soon as Kate hears his voice, she yelps at him, “I paid my rent, first of the month like always. Don’t you come bothering me!”

He’s a seedy-looking, whining kind of a man, and he looks real pleased with himself when he says there’s a law about cats.

Kate jumps right at him. “I’m not breaking any laws. I know you. You just want to get me out of here and rent the place for more money. You leave me alone!”

The man whines, “There’s a law, that’s all. I don’t want no violation slapped on my building.”

Pop comes over and tells the man there’s just a mother cat with kittens. “There’s a couple of strays here, too, right now, but I’ll take them home with me.”

“There’s a law, that’s all. Also, I got a right to inspect the premises.” Pop shows no signs of letting him in, and he shuffles and grumbles and goes away.

“Lock the door,” Kate snaps. “I keep it locked all the time.”

She gets up and starts stirring around getting food out for the cats. She buys fish and chicken livers for them, even though she hardly eats any meat herself. She listens at the back door a moment to make sure no one’s out there, then opens the door and puts out the garbage and wastebasket. There goes the adventurous kitten. You got to hand it to Kate. She has no sniffling sentimentality about her cats. Kitten’s dead, it’s dead, that’s all. She doesn’t mope over the limp mite of fur. In fact, anything to do with cats she’s got sense and guts. They’re her family. I don’t know that I could have put that kitten out of its misery.

Just as long as the world doesn’t throw any stray fortunes at her, Kate does fine. But when people get in her way, she needs someone like Pop.

Mom says she’ll stick around a while and tells me to take the two stray kittens home, just in case the landlord comes back trying to make trouble.

“O.K., great—Cat’ll have some company!”

Kate sniffs. “He’ll hate it. Cats don’t like other cats pushing into their house.”

She’s right, of course. I put the kittens down at home, and Cat hisses at them and then runs them under the radiator in the kitchen. Then he sits down in the doorway and glowers at them, on guard.

Things simmer down gradually. Mom and I and sometimes Tom, who’s right at the flower shop on the corner, take turns checking on Kate and doing shopping for her, or going with her so she doesn’t get badgered by people. But pretty soon everyone in the neighborhood forgets all about her and her inheritance. They see her buying just the same old cat food and cottage cheese and fruit, and they probably figure the whole thing was a phony.

It wasn’t though. Pop finds out her brother did leave a will. He lined up his funeral, left something to his housekeeper, something to a little restaurant owner way downtown—apparently that was his one big luxury, a decent meal twice a year when he went down to buy more stocks—and the rest to Kate.