The cats around the place had been her brother’s, and she seemed to disdain them. They had found or made their way under the eaves and out above Falin’s ceiling, where they hunted mice or the little flying squirrels that nested there, and down through another gap into his kitchen, dropping to the top of the refrigerator and to the counter and the floor, where Falin fed them.

“I will be gone a day and a night,” he said to Kit as he filled the cats’ cracked saucers. He was going to the state capital, where the offices of the Case Columbia Foundation were, a couple of hours’ drive away, where he would stay the night; she was to come to feed the cats, and after sundown water the garden. “It won’t be too much trouble?” he asked. “You have too much work?”

“It won’t be any trouble.”

He seemed harried or distracted, as though embarking on a long journey unprepared. The Case Columbia Foundation, according to Jackie, had been responsible for getting him the job he now held; had paid him a salary while he awaited an appointment, and helped him in other ways maybe too. He avoided Kit’s questions about why he was driving so far to talk to them.

He was already gone when next day she came to his house after her classes. His house was empty, and almost all that had made it his was gone with him—including the poems and manuscripts that had accumulated on the card table.

Empty. Kit sat on the couch; her couch. His absence was rich around her. She took her spiral notebook and a pencil from her bag. Since morning she had been thinking of a poem, or some verses anyway; for the first time in months, toying with lines and trying to perfect them. The idea arose as she studied her Russian, practicing her pronouns, her familiar and respectful forms, lost for so long to English. In our language, we have no thou.

She shed her shoes and tucked her feet beneath her. The blinds were drawn, the house dim and hot.

In our tongue now

We have no Thou

And must make do

With only You.

What people didn’t realize about their old thou and thee was that those were actually the familiar forms, the intimate ones; now they had that air of long-ago politeness and formality, but it was really the other way around.

Thou wert my son

My childhood chum

This cat; that bum;

Wert my loved one.

She liked the way this all hovered between a sort of language lesson and a sort of declaration of something to somebody. As though she hovered too. Thou wert my son.

Yet Thou wert God

Incarnate Word

Immortal Bird

Death never trod.

She’d maybe have to explain that to Falin; Keats’s nightingale. Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down. Wasn’t “tread” the word for what roosters did to hens, what male birds did to female? She saw she’d changed the rhyme scheme, and went back and altered the first stanza to match it, and liked it better:

In our tongue now

We must make do

With only You:

We have no Thou.

She lifted her head from her page: a car might have come into the drive in front. Not him though: she could tell. One of Miss Petroski’s church friends maybe.

Who is it wipes

My muddied brow?

Is it Thou?

Is it You?

Was it okay that the first line of this quatrain rhymed with nothing? She hadn’t known whom these lines spoke to—to no one, she had thought—and now a thickness came into her throat to read what she had written.

Art Thou so low

Or art so high?

I am but I

And then there must be a last line, ending in O; it seemed to exist already—the words of it surely existed, and they were gathering, self-selected, waiting for her to notice them; what she wanted to say to him, but not to him alone. She felt at her tongue’s root the sounds the last line must make; she felt the small solemn pause the reader’s eye or voice ought to take as it crossed the words, and where it would fall; but she couldn’t hear the words themselves.

Well it was just a joke, really, a trick, it was nothing at all. She looked up. There was a man in the garden.

She stood, the notebook slipping from her lap. It was a big man, more fat than tall, and he wore a narrow-brimmed straw fedora and a pale suit; his arms didn’t quite hang at his sides, like some big men he seemed to be holding a suitcase or something in each hand as he walked. He looked around at the growing plants, the wheelbarrow, kicked at something lying in the dirt; then he stepped up to the door and came in without knocking. He was all the way through the windowed porch before he saw Kit.

“Hi there,” he said.

He had a deep plummy voice, a nice smile, and bright small eyes. Kit nodded and waited for explanation.

“Didn’t think anyone was here,” he said.

“Then why did you come in?”

He took a few more steps within, looking around himself. “You’re a friend of Mr. Falin’s?”

“Um yes.”

“Hi.” He put out a plump hand to her and without wanting to she came to take it. “My name’s Bluhdorn. Milton Bluhdorn. I knocked on the front door, and I think someone’s inside, but no one answered.”

“Yes. That’s Miss Petroski.”

“Anna Petroski,” he said, looking at her with intense interest, as he had been doing since he came in.

“Yes. She’s…she can’t move very much and sometimes she just doesn’t answer. I could go get her.”

“And Mr. Falin’s not in.” He said it the way most people did who didn’t know him: fallen.

“No.”

“And you are…”

“I’m—feeding the cats. He’s gone for the whole day. Till tomorrow.”

“You a student?”

“Yes.”

His smile hadn’t altered, but seemed to have become less a smile and more an instrument, a tool of inquiry, like a lockpick.

“You’re a student of his? He isn’t teaching this summer.”

“I was a student of his last semester. This summer I’m studying Russian.”

“What, he’s giving you some tutoring?”

“Not really.”

“Is that allowed? It would be quite a privilege. You interested in poetry? What Russian are you taking?” As he asked this he went around the room, looking at the anonymous furniture, the library books, the Russian typewriter. “Conversation? You doing conversational Russian?”

Kit had decided to stop answering. The blood beat steadily and painfully against her throat. Milton Bluhdorn seemed to take no notice of her silence. The gray cat had come down its path from the ceiling and appeared beside him, rubbing against the leg of his suit.

“He’s a remarkable man,” he said to the cat. “If you were interested in poetry and he took a liking to you, well.” He put his hands in his pockets. “Took, you know, a shine to you.” The lap of his pants was disgustingly wrinkled, the way fat men’s pants in summer get. She wouldn’t forget that. “I like poetry,” he said. “I liked it in college. ‘We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men, leaning together, headpiece full of straw.’” His smile broadened, and he shook his head, as though marveling at himself or the world long ago. “Listen,” he said. “You need a ride back to town? I can give you a ride.”