need to look around. Need to try to understand why a man would do such a heinous thing to two innocent children.
Two innocent children he’d fathered, no less.
Too much.
Too much all at once.
Ashley catapulted into my life, awakening the dormant emotion within me, threatening to unbury something I never let myself think about. Slowly it’s creeping to the surface. Floyd’s confession brought it closer, and the fire marshal’s call…
So much I’ve fucked up.
I’ll never be free.
I don’t deserve to be free.
The house is a mess.
“Meow!” a cat squalls.
Floyd’s cat. What was its name? Puzzles? Poozles?
It must be starving. Though there’s probably a surplus of rats in this mess of a home.
“Here, kitty,” I say. “Come here. You hungry?”
I head into the kitchen. The cat bowl is empty, of course. God knows when she was last fed. I’m not a cat person, but I sure don’t want to see an animal starve. I quickly find the cat food and fill up the bowl. What about water? Do cats drink water? On TV, they always seem to be drinking milk. I grab a bowl out of a cupboard and fill it with water, setting it next to the food. Then I open the refrigerator. Sure enough, a carton of milk sits on the top shelf. I pull it out, open it, and—
“Gyahhh!”
Rotten. Smells like sour milk, literally.
“Sorry, kitty. No milk today. You’ll have to make do with water.”
For God’s sake. I’m talking to a cat.
I leave the kitchen, and within a few seconds, the cat scurries past me and starts chowing down.
Yeah, she’s hungry. I’ll have to take her to a shelter. Damn.
I walk around the house, searching.
For what? I’m not sure. Just some tiny clue about who this man was. This man from whom I got half my DNA.
Does he have any photos? Any books? Anything that might tell me something about how a man can father two boys, abandon them, and then sell them into slavery for five grand?
His furniture is tattered brocade, and his kitchen table is a card table. The sour milk in the fridge is joined only by some pimento loaf and a box of baking soda. A loaf of molded bread sits on the counter, along with what’s left of a case of cheap beer.
That’s it.
That’s what my birth father had in his house when my real father, Talon Steel, came and offered him the chance for rehab.
Did he really go into rehab and just leave his cat here unattended?
Really?
If possible, the man just disgusted me more. I can’t abide abuse to animals. Like children, they can’t protect themselves from human cruelty.
How I know that better than most.
But I can’t take Floyd’s cat home with me. I just can’t. Not because I’m not a cat person. No. I could deal if it were just that.
It’s because I’d think of the bastard—and what Donny and I went through because of him—every time I looked at the cat.
I can’t put myself through that. The cat deserves better.
I sigh. I hate shelters, but I have no choice. Ava likes cats, but then I’d see the damned thing anytime I visited her.
No. No choice. But maybe I could at least find a home for her. The idea of a shelter makes me want to vomit.
And I already want to vomit big time just being in this house.
I walk around briskly, opening and shutting drawers, looking for something—anything—to make me see that Floyd Jolly was slightly human.
I find nothing.
The man abandoned his cat.
Of course, that was nothing after abandoning two sons.
All I find is a tattered book of poems. A turned-down page marks a poem by Robert Frost.
* * *
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
* * *
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
* * *
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
* * *
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The words are slightly familiar. I probably read this poem in high