Later they go to the grocery in Mary Lou’s car, which rattles excitedly when it hits a pothole and sometimes dies at a stoplight. On the way back they stop at the bakery outlet and the boy’s mother buys them powdered doughnuts. Jimmy eats his right away, but the boy takes tiny bites so the doughnut will last until they reach home. In the front seat, his mother and Mary Lou discuss the no-good men they’ve been dating, bursting into such loud laughter that the boy smiles in the back even though he doesn’t understand most of the things they say. He knows about dates, though. That’s when his mother wears a flared skirt and a sleeveless top (his favorite one is black, with lace over the chest). She sprays herself with perfume and swipes bright lipstick across her mouth and squeezes her feet into shoes with tall, dangerous heels, though later she’ll complain that they hurt. But recently she hasn’t been wearing heels because her new boyfriend, Marvin, is shorter than her and sensitive about the issue.
After they laugh for a while, the women get quiet. They turn up the music and talk in whispers, but the boy knows they’re lamenting the fact that they aren’t getting any younger, and that it’s hard to find a man out there who wants a serious relationship with a woman who’s carrying baggage. The boy wants to ask what kind of baggage, but he doesn’t. He’s afraid he knows already.
The boy doesn’t mind so much when he’s dropped off before a date at Mary Lou’s. But when Mary Lou has a date, too, he and Jimmy are deposited at Mrs. Grogan’s apartment, and that’s not so good because Mrs. Grogan doesn’t have a TV, only a radio that she keeps covered with a lace doily. Mrs. Grogan doesn’t have teeth, either. The boys can’t understand much of what she says, and that makes her angry. Besides, her apartment smells like pee, but when he complains of this to his mother, she says, “We’ll all get old like her-if we’re unlucky enough to live that long!”
(The boy’s own mother will not be unlucky, not in that way. When the boy is in fourth grade, she will collapse at work one day, dying of an aneurysm before the ambulance can get her to a hospital. Later the boy will look up the word in the dictionary, but it will still baffle him.)
When the boy is five and a half, Mary Lou and Jimmy abandon them for Memphis, which is clear across the country. They’re going to live with Mary Lou’s mother, although she constantly bitches at Mary Lou, because Mary Lou can’t make it on her own anymore, and she’s just too tired trying. She cries as she tells the boy’s mother this, wiping at her eyes, smearing mascara over apologetic cheekbones. The boy’s mother doesn’t say anything, but he sees something flicker in her eyes. He thinks it’s anger with Mary Lou for quitting on them. But later he wonders if it’s fear, and that makes him afraid, too. Then Mary Lou and Jimmy are gone, and his memories get a lot worse.
IN THIS AFTERNOON MEMORY, THE BOY IS ABOUT EIGHT, WITH long, untidy hair and clothes that aren’t quite clean. He’s playing by himself in the empty field behind the apartment building that doubles as a junkyard. The junkyard is off-limits-his mother thinks it’s dangerous-but she’s at work and isn’t going to know. Marvin, who lives with them now, is aware of the boy’s disobedience, but Marvin isn’t going to tell his mother. Because then she would insist that the boy stay inside after school, and Marvin wouldn’t like that. In the afternoon, when the boy’s mother is at work, Marvin’s friends come over to the apartment. The boy isn’t sure what they do there, though from the sweetish smoke-smell that lingers after they have left, he can guess at some of it. In any case, he is playing alone in a field overgrown with brambles because there aren’t any kids his age who live around here. If there were, they probably wouldn’t be friends with him, like the children at school who sometimes make fun of his name or shove him around during recess when the teacher on duty isn’t watching but mostly just ignore him.
The boy pretends he’s Robinson Crusoe, alone on his island except for the cannibals who are after him. From behind an abandoned freezer, he trains his binoculars on them, watching them laugh with their pointy cannibal teeth. But they won’t get him; he knows his way around the entire island, the caves and mountain passes where people must travel single file. He has his M1 semiautomatic and one hundred clips of ammo, and he knows how to move quiet as death. He raises his rifle and takes a step forward, then jumps back with a yelp because something furry has just brushed against his shins. It is a kitten.
The kitten is small and scrawny and meows loudly, opening its mouth wide and displaying tiny cannibal-sharp teeth and a very pink tongue. It skitters away when the boy reaches for it, but then lets itself be picked up. Its claws are sharp, too, but the boy doesn’t mind. He thinks it looks like a miniature tiger, and he holds it and strokes its back while the kitten squirms in an attempt to get away. The boy remembers something he read in a book. He sets it down, breaks off a bramble branch, and bobs it up and down. The kitten swipes at it, entranced. They play like this for a while, but then the kitten starts mewing again-with hunger, the boy is sure. So he tucks it inside his shirt-he is afraid he’ll lose it if he leaves it out here-and goes to the apartment. Inside, Marvin’s friends, who scare him, observe him through a haze of smoke. One of them beckons him, asking if he wants a beer. The boy’s face goes hot. Marvin’s friends laugh. He almost backs out. Then he feels the kitten trying to climb up the inside of his shirt. Its tail tickles his chest. He tightens his shoulders and strides past their stares to the fridge-it is his fridge, he reminds himself. His apartment. He pours milk into a bowl. His hand shakes and milk spills on the sticky counter, but only a little. He carries the bowl out to the field.
The kitten laps up the milk and licks the boy’s fingers. Its tongue is sandpaper-rough against his knuckles, and the boy shivers with pleasure. They play some more with the branch, the boy pulling it backward and the kitten pouncing on it so fiercely that right then and there he names it Shere Khan, after the character in The Jungle Book. They play this game for hours, even after the sun sets and the boy shivers in his too-small jacket. Finally he hears the sound he’s been waiting for, the roar of trucks. Marvin’s friends are leaving, and when the boy peers around the edge of the apartment building, he sees to his delight that Marvin is going with them.
It’s simple enough, after that, to carry into the apartment the discarded kitchen drawer that he has already picked out, to hide it behind the couch where he sleeps nowadays, beside the cardboard boxes that hold his clothes and books. He lines the drawer with an old shirt and places the kitten in it, admonishing it to stay put while he does his homework. The kitten promptly climbs out, scampers to his chair, and clambers up his jeans leg onto his lap. That’s how he does his homework, with the kitten curled into a ball of warmth against his stomach and him not daring to move because he doesn’t want to disturb its sleep.
He has never loved anyone in the world as much as he loves this kitten. He will never love anyone this way again, with nothing held back.
When he hears the key rattle in the door, he squeezes his eyes shut and prays it’s his mother, and, miracle of miracles, it is. He stuffs the kitten into his shirt and fetches her a soda pop, and when she puts out a tired hand to rumple his hair, he tells her about it in a rush, because he knows he has only a little time before Marvin returns.
“Can I keep it, please, please? I’ll take care of it. It won’t cost you anything.”