She rinsed her mug. On her way to the bedroom to get her shoes she stopped in the hallway and stood there for a moment for no reason she could have named. It was a short hall, the kind every ranch house in Ohio had: bathroom on one side, the spare room on the other, the linen closet at the end beside their bedroom door.
Nothing. It was just a hallway.
Milo came and wound once around her ankles, and then he sat down at the end of the hall in front of the linen closet and looked up, as if the closet had said something to him.
"You're nuts," she told him. "You know that? You're a nut."
* * *
He did it again that night, at 2:40. And the next night at 1:55. And the night after that, which was a Friday, at a quarter past three.
Each time it was the same. The weight on her chest, the fish breath, the paw. The insistent mrrp, low in his throat, not the bright chirp he used when he wanted breakfast or the indignant yowl he used when Del accidentally shut him in the garage. This was something else. Each time, once she was awake, he went to the doorway and sat and stared into the hall.
"Look," she said on Saturday morning, holding up a hand. "Look at my hand, Del."
"What about it?"
"It's shaking. I gave Mrs. Ferrante the wrong pill cup yesterday. I caught it, thank God, but I picked it up and I gave it to her and she had it halfway to her mouth. I've never done that. Fourteen years." She was surprised to find her voice cracking. "I can't do this. I can't keep getting woken up at two o'clock in the morning by a cat."
Del looked at her. He had a long, plain face, a farmer's face though he'd never farmed, and gray eyes that took things in slowly and let very little out. He put down his coffee.
"Okay," he said. "We'll shut the door."
"He'll yowl."
"Let him yowl. I'll sleep through it."
"I won't."
Janet pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. "I just want to know what he wants. If I knew what he wanted, I could give it to him."
"Maybe he doesn't want anything. Maybe he's just a cat."