"Last Thursday night I'm coming back from bingo at Our Lady of Pompei, it's dark, it's a quarter after seven, and there he is, sitting on the steps of the library like he's waiting for it to open. The library. Up on Eastern Avenue, across from the five-and-dime. That big orange thing, sitting up on the top step under the light with his tail around his feet like a little gentleman. I said Boog, what are you doing up here, you can't even read." She laughed at her own joke, a big wet laugh. "Your father should keep him in. He's gonna get hit by a bus up there."
I told my father at supper. I told it like a funny story. "Mrs. Florkowski says Boog's been going to the library."
My father's fork stopped halfway to his mouth. Just for a second. Then it kept going.
"That woman," my mother said, "needs to get her eyes checked. Or her head."
"Probably some other cat," my father said. He didn't look at me. He fed Boog a piece of kielbasa under the table, which he wasn't supposed to do, and Boog took it out of his fingers like he was taking communion.
I didn't think about it again for a while. I should have. I think a part of me did, and put it away, the way you put away a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that doesn't seem to go anywhere yet.
The money came next. In the first week of November my mother went to the coffee can on top of the refrigerator, the Chock full o'Nuts can where she kept the tip money she was saving toward Christmas, and counted it, and counted it again, and then sat down at the kitchen table with the bills spread out in front of her and her mouth in a flat line.
"There's sixty dollars gone," she said. "Ted. There's sixty dollars gone out of this can."
My father was in the doorway. Boog was sitting on the stack of ones.
"I took it," my father said.