* * *
There was a quiet to the house when the dogs weren’t there that Jack hadn’t experienced in years. He didn’t like it.
Mayonnaise and Pickles snoozed on the easy chair and windowsill respectively, and Louis was in the bedroom, but cats had their own quiet.
Jack was intimately acquainted with quiet. He’d grown up with it. The quiet of long, snow-choked Wyoming winters, of long, sleepless nights. The quiet of parents who had little to say to one another; the quiet of their absence.
His menagerie had been an antidote to the silences he hadn’t chosen, and now that he was used to living with the soundtrack of their snuffles and thumps, their snores and yips and scuffles, the absence of sound echoed with deprivation.
It would be dark soon and Jack found himself hoping Simon would be back by then. He wasn’t afraid of the dark; he just...didn’t want to be alone in it. Not tonight.
Pickles’ small form oozed into a stretch that became a yawn, the black cat shifting from languid sleep to complete alertness in one graceful gesture.
“I know. I’m not actually alone,” he told her.
Finally, unable to lie on the couch for one more minute, Jack made his way slowly into the kitchen and rummaged through the cupboards for something he could throw together for dinner. With a sigh of resignation he texted Charlie to ask if he could drive him to the store tomorrow.
Right away his brother wrote back, Send me a list and I’ll deliver.
Annoyance burned in Jack’s stomach. It had been years since he’d felt like a burden to his brother and now, a single moment having rendered him infantile, here he was, once again depending on Charlie for everything.
Twenty minutes into laboriously cooking a horror of egg noodles, tuna, and cream soup (throughout which he had to stop every two minutes to catch his breath and give his armpits a break from the crutches) he heard the familiar sounds of his pack returning.
He’d told Simon not to bother ringing the bell anymore, so this time the sounds were just the happy yips of the animals’ return.
“In the kitchen,” he called, though it was hardly necessary since the dogs were already padding toward him. Toward their food bowls most likely, but still.
When Charlie had come over on his lunch break, he’d taken one look at the defiled floor and promised he’d solve the problem. He’d returned two hours later with a metal chute roughly welded, through which Jack could pour dog food and water into the bowls from a standing position without spilling anything. Charlie had always been a big one for solving problems.
Bernard barreled in and panted up at him, mouth open, and the others followed less patiently. All except Puddles.
A minute later, Simon stood in the door to the kitchen, Puddles tight at his side.
“Hey,” Jack said. “Go okay?”
Simon nodded jerkily, eyes on the animals. Mayonnaise shot past him and up onto the counter. Pickles had been there since he opened the tin of tuna. And, fine, he’d fed her a few bites of it.
“You eating here tonight?” he asked Mayonnaise. She rubbed her cheek on his fist, then darted out the window cat door. “Guess not.”
The pan on the stove bubbled threateningly and Jack turned the burner down, sniffing suspiciously.
“Ugh,” he declared, and slumped against the counter.
Simon picked his way across the kitchen as delicately as a cat and peered at the food.
He raised one eyebrow at Jack and the look managed to convey amusement, derision, and empathy all at once. With a gentle movement, he shouldered Jack aside.
Jack sank gratefully into a kitchen chair and watched as Simon stirred, salted, and stirred some more. His movements became more relaxed the longer he cooked.
He opened a few cupboards, pulled out a casserole dish, and poured the contents of the pans into it. Top sprinkled with cheese, salted, and peppered, he slid the dish into the oven.
“You know a lot about—” casseroles was what he’d begun to say but, awkward as this whole situation was, that wasn’t a sentence he could quite bring himself to utter “—cooking?”
Simon shook his head and shrugged, then nodded, as if he couldn’t quite decide which was true.
With a bit of distance between them, Jack realized again that Simon wasn’t particularly small. He seemed diminutive because of the way he stood—hunched shoulders and lowered head—and the way he moved, as if slinking silently from place to place might allow him to escape notice. But his shoulders were fairly broad and his hands sizable. Why did he make himself smaller?
Watching Simon at the stove, the night of empty boredom stretching in front of him, Jack asked, “Do you want to stay and have some?”
Simon snorted and shook his head quickly.
“It’s no trouble,” Jack said, losing hope.
Simon raised those startling blue eyes to Jack’s and made a face.