Del straightened up and wiped his face with the heel of his hand.
"He's going to be in the hospital down there another three weeks, at least, and then rehab. He was crying so hard I could barely understand him." Mrs. Odom looked at them over the tops of her glasses. "He asked me—he was very insistent about this—whether there was any way the boy could stay with somebody on Linden Street. Somebody Kevin knows. He said the mailman always looked out for him." She paused. "I told him that's not how it usually works. There's licensing. There's a home study. There's paperwork you would not believe."
"We'll do it," Janet said.
Del looked at her.
"We'll do it," she said again, and she looked right back at him, and she saw the answer in his face before he said it.
"Whatever you need," Del told Mrs. Odom. "Whatever it takes."
Mrs. Odom regarded them both for a long moment. Then she opened her folder and took out a pen.
"There's a provision," she said, "for emergency placement with a responsible adult known to the child, pending certification. I'll need to see the house. I'll need references. And I'll need you to fix whatever is going on with that garage door." She clicked her pen. "And Mrs. Pruitt? You'll need to get rid of that heater."
* * *
Del got rid of the heater that afternoon. He carried it out to the curb himself, along with the red can of kerosene, and when the garbage men came on Tuesday he stood in the driveway in his uniform and watched them throw it in the back of the truck and didn't go to work until the truck had turned the corner.
He put a deadbolt on the garage side door and a new cord on the attic hatch. He asked a confused teenage salesman at Sears if they made a smoke detector for carbon monoxide, and when the boy said he didn't think so, Del said, well, somebody ought to, and wrote a letter to the Dayton Daily News about it that they actually printed, under the headline LOCAL MAILMAN: KEROSENE HEATERS A "SILENT KILLER." Janet cut it out and stuck it on the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a strawberry.
Kevin came home to Linden Street on the Monday of Thanksgiving week, with a paper bag of clothes Mrs. Odom had brought from the Xenia family and a get-well card signed by all six of their kids. They gave him the spare room across from the bathroom. Janet had cleared out the sewing machine and the boxes of old tax returns, and Del had found a twin bed at a yard sale on Kemp Road and painted the frame Reds red, two coats, so that the whole house smelled like enamel for a week.
The first night, Janet woke at 2:20 to an empty bed.
Not Milo. Del.
She found him standing in the hall in his pajamas, in front of the spare room door, which stood open a hand's width. In the gray light from the bathroom—Del had put the bulb back in the nightlight—she could see Kevin asleep on his side under the Star Wars comforter Bev had brought over, one arm flung out, his mouth open. Curled in the hollow behind his knees, gray and white, perfectly round, was Milo.
The cat opened one eye and looked at them. Then he closed it again.