That night the sash was down, because it was November and cold. Boog was on the inside sill, and when my father turned left at the bottom of the steps, Boog stood up on his back legs and put his front paws on the glass and started to yowl. It wasn't a meow. It was a noise I had never heard him make, low and ragged, like something being dragged. And then he started clawing. Not scratching, the way a cat will scratch a door to be let out. Clawing. Both paws, fast, over and over, his nails skidding on the glass, his whole body going with it. He threw himself at the window. He bit at the sash lock.
"Joey, get him down," my mother said from the hallway. She was standing at the bottom of the stairs with her arms crossed tight over her chest, still in her black uniform from Haussner's, with the white apron off and folded over the banister. She had not gone to the door. She had not said goodbye. "Get him down before he breaks something."
I didn't get him down. I was at the window myself, kneeling on the radiator cover, with my face as close to the glass as Boog's. I didn't care if he broke something. I wanted him to.
Before I could stop myself I reached over and shoved the sash up. I don't know what I was thinking. Maybe that I would yell something. The cold came in, smelling like the harbor and somebody's coal stove, and Boog went straight through the gap and hit the painted screen with his whole sixteen pounds.
The screen was old. My grandfather had painted it in 1962. The wire had gotten soft in places, and the paint had gone brittle, and when Boog hit it with his claws out, it tore. I heard it, a sound like a zipper. A long rip opened up right through the middle of the cottage, through the red roof and down through the front door, and Boog's head and both his front legs came out through it into the night air, and he hung there, half in and half out of the picture, screaming at my father's back.
My father was three houses down by then, almost to the Florkowskis' far wall. He heard it. Everybody on the block must have heard it. A light went on across the street at the Iannuzzis'.
He stopped.
He stood there on the sidewalk under the streetlight with the suitcase in his right hand. He had on his tan canvas work coat with the corduroy collar, the one with the Local 2610 pin on the lapel, and his good gray slacks, and the black shoes he wore to funerals. He stood very still. Then he set the suitcase down, carefully, standing it upright on the pavement the way you'd set down something that might spill. He turned around and looked back at our house, at the window, at the cottage with the cat coming out of the door of it.
And he reached into his coat.
I want you to understand what went through my head when he did that, because it's part of the story too. I thought he was getting his cigarettes. Then I remembered he'd quit, two years before, for my mother. Then I thought he was getting the bus ticket, to look at it, to make sure, the way you check your pocket for your keys. Then, for one awful second, because I was eleven and I had seen too many episodes of things on Channel 13 that I wasn't supposed to watch, I thought it could be anything. A letter. Money. Something terrible.