"Jan? You there?"
"I'm here," she said. "Yeah. Okay. Give me half an hour."
She put the stool back. She put the broom back. Before she left, she went to the door between the kitchen and the garage and opened it and stood looking out at the garage. The empty space under the workbench where the kerosene heater had been. The square scuttle hole in the garage ceiling above the freezer, which led into the attic over the garage. It was dark up there. It was always dark up there.
Milo was sitting on top of the chest freezer. He looked at her. He looked up at the scuttle hole. He looked at her again.
"Get in the house," she said, and her voice came out strange. He hopped down and trotted past her into the kitchen.
She closed the garage door and turned the button lock, and then she stood there with her hand on the knob, exactly the way Del had, and felt like a fool, and went to work.
* * *
On Thursday morning she picked tufts of pink insulation out of the cat.
She found the first one while he was eating breakfast, a pink wisp caught in the fur behind his ear like a bit of cotton candy. Then she found more: a clump on his white bib, a few fibers on his back, bits of it between the pads of his paws. She held him on the kitchen counter and went over him like she was checking a patient for ticks, and he let her, which was not like him. He seemed sluggish. When she put him down he walked to his water dish and drank for a long time, and then he went and threw up neatly on the linoleum by the back door, and then he went and lay down under the kitchen table with his chin on his paws.
"Del," she said. "Look at this."
Del was lacing up his work boots by the door. He came and looked at the little pile of pink fiberglass she'd made on a paper towel.
"That's attic insulation," he said.
"I know what it is. How did it get on the cat?"
He didn't say anything for a moment. Then he said, "He must be getting up into the garage attic. Through the scuttle. He can jump to the shelf above the freezer, and from there—" He stopped.
"And from there, what?"
"From there he could get up in the rafters, I guess."
"Why would he do that?"