The first time it happened that November, Janet Pruitt thought the cat was dying.
She came up out of sleep the way she came up out of a hospital page, already half-sitting, heart slamming, one hand reaching for a chart that wasn't there. Something heavy was standing on her chest. Something was breathing fish into her face. She opened her eyes and there was Milo, eleven pounds of gray tabby with a white bib like a dinner napkin, his front paws planted on her sternum and his nose an inch from her nose.
"Mrrp," he said.
The clock radio on the nightstand flipped its little plastic numbers over with a soft click. 2:14.
"Milo." She pushed at him. He didn't move. He was a cat who could make himself weigh twice as much when he didn't want to be moved, a trick Del called going to lead. "Milo, get off. I'm on at seven."
He put one paw on her mouth. Not a swat. A press, deliberate, the pads cool and slightly damp, like he was checking whether she was really in there.
Beside her, Del slept the way Del always slept, on his back with his hands folded on his stomach like a man laid out at Routsong's Funeral Home, breathing in long, untroubled drafts. Eleven years of marriage and Janet had never once seen him wake up for a thunderstorm, a smoke alarm, or the Kowalskis' Fourth of July. He said it came from the Army; she said it came from having nothing on his conscience.
She lifted Milo off her chest and set him on the carpet. He jumped right back up. She set him down again. He went to the bedroom door, which stood open a hand's width the way it always did so he could come and go, and he looked back at her over his shoulder, and then he looked out at the hallway, and then back at her.
"You've got food," she told him. "I filled your bowl at nine. I watched you eat it."
He blinked at her, slow, the way cats did when they were being patient with idiots. Then he sat in the doorway with his tail wrapped around his feet and stared out into the dark.
Janet lay back down. She listened to the furnace tick in the ductwork and the refrigerator hum two rooms away and the far-off hiss of a truck out on Route 235. She watched the clock flip to 2:15, 2:16. Milo didn't move. At some point she stopped watching him and the next thing she knew the alarm was going off with that flat electronic bleat she hated, and it was 5:45 and dark as a closet, and her eyes felt like someone had rubbed them with sand.
Milo was asleep at the foot of the bed, curled in the hollow behind Del's knees, as innocent as a hymnal.
* * *
"He's getting old," Del said at breakfast. "Old cats get funny."
"He's seven."
"That's forty-something in cat. That's me." Del was eating a bowl of Grape-Nuts the way he did everything, steadily and without complaint, the newspaper folded into quarters beside him. He was already in his uniform, the blue-gray shirt with the eagle patch on the sleeve, his satchel by the door. He'd carried the same route through the east side of Fairborn for fourteen years, and there wasn't a dog on it that didn't know his name. "Maybe he heard a mouse."