been sitting at the corner table in the diner reading the paper & nursing one small black coffee for FOUR HOURS. I think he's a spy.
Sometimes it was something more serious ... more or less:
Mina drew all over herself and the floor with markers. That comes off, right?
Use baby oil. Or any kitchen oil will work. She's quite the artist, sounds like.
Yeah, he texted back, if the canvas is herself or the walls or one of the cats.
Hey I bet painting on cats is a great gimmick. A big gallery in New York will probably give her a solo show.
And sometimes it was quietly wistful.
Go outside, she texted him late one evening.
He was, for a change, by himself. The Rugers were watching TV in the living room. He had retreated to his room to have a little alone time, where he was lying on the bed, reading a mystery novel off their bookshelves. A heavy reading habit was something he'd picked up in the Army and had let lapse since he got out, but he had picked it back up again since he had come to stay at the Ruger farm. The isolated location and their groaning, overloaded bookshelves had made it easy to pick the habit back up as if he'd never stopped.
He didn't usually get texts from Paula this late. She went to bed early, and evening was also her dedicated kid-time, which he tried not to interrupt.
He rolled over and texted back, Is this the start of another of Lissy's joke?
No, I'm serious. Go outside.
He hesitated. He was very comfortable, enjoying the temporary solitude, and didn't really want to either interrupt the Rugers' family evening, or get the kids' attention.
But Paula hardly ever asked for anything.
He could have just asked why, but he decided to play along with the mystery. He got up, tucked his phone into his pocket, and quietly went through the house. Getting to his coat would have meant going through the living room and potentially resulting in everyone asking him where he was going, so instead he went to the back door and shoved his feet into a slightly too big pair of Derek's shoes.
He stepped outside into the chill night.
It was very cold, especially in a thin shirt. He wasn't wearing his arm, and hadn't bothered pinning up the sleeve just for lounging around in his bedroom, so the loose fabric hung limp against his side.
Being outside at night really made him aware of how far out of town the Rugers lived. From the front porch you could see some of the neighbors' lights through the bare trees, but back here there was nothing but darkness behind the house. The moon either hadn't risen yet, or was at its darkest phase, but the snow was faintly luminous in the starlight, enough to pick out the slender trunks of the trees against a white backdrop.
His bear stirred in him, restlessly straining with the pull of the night. It was a silent, wordless yearning, a primal urge to shift and run.
Resisting his shifts was something he'd grown used to, but it was harder tonight. He had to push his animal back into place by force.
Run, his bear said plaintively. Hunt. Free.
Not tonight.
One of these days he was going to have to figure out what it was like being a four-legged animal with only three legs. You couldn't keep your shift animal suppressed forever. No one could.
But this night, despite his bear's restlessness, he felt a still clarity, a sense of contentment that he didn't want to ruin by disturbing his carefully sought-after mental equilibrium.
There was a sharp burr from the phone in his pocket. He pulled it out. In the timeless stillness of the night, he had, for a moment, actually forgotten why he'd come out in the first place.
Are you outside? the text read.
Yes, he texted back. Why?
Look up.
He did.
The sky was clear like he hadn't seen it in years. Not since deployment. In desert places, sometimes the sky was like this. He had never realized, or perhaps he had forgotten, that this many stars existed.
Are you looking?
I'm looking, he texted. Wow.
See that sort of blotchy stripe down the middle of the sky?
Yeah?
That's the Milky Way, Paula texted. You can't see it all that often. The sky has to be really, really clear.
Are you looking at it now? he asked.
Yes.
It was strange, the kinship of doing the same thing at the same time in different places. He could almost feel her there beside