Boy O'Boy by Brian Doyle

going right home…”
    “Your mother’s going to be worried.. .you look like you just lost your best friend…” She turns and moves away. “Straight home now,” she calls back.
    I pretend to go into the store but I don’t.
    After a while I go down Cobourg and to my house at 3 Papineau. I stand at the door. I don’t want to cry. I’ll show my mother my knee but I won’t cry. I’ll tell her about fighting after choir. She’ll see my knee and take care of it.
    I open the door. The door to the house where I don’t want to live.
    Please, somebody. Take care of me. Love me.

18
The Riddle and a Letter
    W E’RE EATING bacon for breakfast this morning. My fathers late for work so he’s eating the bacon standing up. The bacon is a bit burnt. My mother and father just had a big fight about it. My mothers gone back upstairs with Phil. Phil howled all the way up. He always howls when my parents fight.
    He’s howling now. Lenny Lipshitz can probably hear him all the way down at number nine.
    “You know,” my father says, “your mother once went to the doctor to have her head examined but they couldn’t find anything.”
    It’s an old joke. I’ve heard it many times.
    I give Cheap a piece of bacon under the table.
    “Don’t feed that cat bacon. It’s expensive,” my father says.
    I look in my father’s face. I don’t say what I’m thinking.
    “He doesn’t care about you, you know,” my father says. “He only cares about food.”
    “Cheap likes me, I can tell,” I say.
    “Animals aren’t like people. Cats don’t act like people. People like you or they don’t like you. Cats just care about food.”
    “I think Cheap loves me,” I say. “The way he looks at me. With his ripped-out ear like that.”
    “Are you the one who feeds him?” my father says.
    “When I eat, he eats. I feed him off my plate. Nobody else feeds him but me. He’s my cat. He gets what I get.”
    Cheap’s looking out from under the table up at my father. Cheap doesn’t like my father. You can tell the way he puts his good ear down. And his eyes wide open. He’s waiting to see if my father’s going to kick something. His legs are ready to get himself out of the way. A flying basin goes bouncing one way, Cheap will head the other way.
    And when Old Faithful gushes, Cheap is already gone.
    “He only cares about you because you’re the one who feeds him,” my father says, putting on his hat to go to work.
    No, that’s not true. He loves me. I can tell when I talk to him and he closes his eyes. Squeezes them shut. Like he’s having a good time.
    “Cheap is a joke for a cat. As far as I’m concerned, this cat is just a waste of fur. And don’t feed him bacon. Bacon is expensive!”
    My father slams out the door.
    He didn’t even notice my slashed knee.
    Cheap is staring up at me.
    I pick him up and he gives me a little purr.
    “You’re not a joke,” I say to him and give him some more bacon.
    “And you’re not a waste of fur. Maybe somebody we know is a waste of skin! What do you think of that?”
    Cheap agrees.
    I’m sitting on our front step with my wool sweater pulled around me. Cheap sits with me.
    Cheap saw what happened last night.
    Last night Phil got his arm caught in the wringer.
    Soon as I got in the house to show my mother my slashed knee I heard Phil starting to howl. I ran in the kitchen and bumped into my mother’s belly. Phil’s hand was coming out of the other side of the wringer. The lips eating Phil. My mother started pounding the safety bar. The safety bar on top of the wringer to release Phil. Phil being gobbled up.
    Hit the safety bar hard! We were hitting it, my mother and me.
    “Hit it! Hit it!” my mother was screaming. Phil was making choking noises and biting his tongue, chewing on his tongue. Phil’s arm was halfway through when the wringer snapped open and Phil fell back and his arm slid out like a piece of raw meat.
    Then we held Phil while my mother ran cold water over his arm and