Gray and Quiet tore around the kitchen. They were three months old now, long past the crate and long past any reasonable idea of staying in one place. Gray chased Quiet under the table. Quiet spun around and chased him back. Eleanor stepped over them and mopped the floor. She thought: they’ve become a pair. Inseparable, noisy, completely indivisible. She had asked Anthony about that three weeks earlier: can they be separated? Anthony had answered simply: better not, keep them together, they’re bonded now. They would go together. That was right.
Eleanor set the bucket by the door and went to make porridge. Took a package of meat trimmings from the refrigerator—Frank brought those regularly now. Measured out more grain than she needed for one person. She noticed only after she had already poured in the water. She set the pot on the stove anyway. Let it cook.
Anthony and Maggie arrived around 10:30 in a white SUV with the center’s logo on the doors. Both tall, both in matching jackets with patches, both smiling the way people smile when they actually like their work. Maggie came in first and immediately crouched down.
— Oh wow, they’re so big already! — she said, delighted, looking at Gray, who immediately ducked behind the cabinet and stared out suspiciously.
Quiet stayed in the middle of the kitchen floor and studied the visitors with the expression Eleanor had learned to read over three months as not decided yet. Anthony checked them both over—quick, professional, practiced hands. Then straightened up and nodded.
— They’re both healthy, — he told Eleanor. — Really healthy. You did a great job. Seriously. Not many people can do this from scratch.
— Forty years in the country, — Eleanor said. — I’ve raised all kinds of animals.
— Still, — Anthony said simply, and meant it.
The carrier was large, dark, with a metal grate on the door. Anthony set it on the floor and opened it. It took both of them to catch Gray. He darted between the cabinet and the fridge, hissed, and bit Anthony’s glove hard enough to make him whistle. Finally Maggie cornered him and picked him up—firm, skillful, while he growled and twisted. They lowered him into the carrier.
Quiet watched all of this from the middle of the kitchen. Then he stood, walked over to the carrier, and looked inside. Stood there a moment. Then stepped in on his own: slowly, carefully, the way you enter an unfamiliar place when you’re not sure about it but have made up your mind.
Anthony shut the door. Eleanor stood beside it. Quiet came up to the grate from inside. His eyes were no longer as cloudy as they had been in those first days. He looked at her. Eleanor laid her fingers against the grate. He touched his nose to them—warm, dry, alive. One second. Maybe two. Then she took her hand away.
— Go ahead, — she said…
