He got the portable heater and set it down by the garden chair on the covered porch. He took his sleeping bag and opened it up and put it over the heater and his legs as he sat in the dark and watched the car port.
It was hard to believe what he had been told. Florence across the street had said that Letitia was sneaking out at night to feed stray cats on his car port. He scarcely believed it. Letitia knew exactly how he felt about cats. He didn't just hate them, he feared them too. Their predatory faces, their sharp white teeth and their rasping, invasive tongues. And that was quite apart from his love of birds. He fed them all winter and sat half the day in his kitchen watching their coming and going. There was an albino red tail hawk who spent time at the top of a hemlock in his field. When rodents were few the hawk would swoop down on his friends the juncos, and this seemed quite natural. But when a thieving cat came twitching and sneaking into the yard with murder on its mind his rage was boundless.
It was a cold bright night and the chair was hard. He listened to the radio for a while but it soon started to irritate him. Surely Letitia didn't stay up past midnight. She had to go to work in the morning didn't she? He began to rehearse in his mind what he would say to her when she appeared with her cat food bag in hand. He could just see her, pale and shapeless, crouching and calling softly to her feline friends. He would confront her, loud and indignant. He would shout. She would shout back. Perhaps the police would be called to respond to a domestic dispute. Red and blues flashing and the neighbors at their unlit windows.
``What was going on last night?'' they'd ask.
``Letitia was feeding stray cats on my car port,'' he'd say, ``and I just won't have it.'' They'd think he'd called the cops on her...his thought drifted off into dreams and he slept a while and awoke to find he had fallen asleep with his lower lip between his teeth and it was bitten quite severely.
Then he saw Letitia. She sat quite still in the middle of his car port and she was surrounded by cats. Not just strays but also the smug domestic members of families nearby. Six or eight of them. He recoiled at the sight.
It was time for confrontation. He got up stiffly from the chair and pulled the sleeping bag away from the heater - he didn't want a fire. He opened the porch door and stepped across the driveway to the car port. Letitia sat quite calmly, her broad, sad face turned toward him. The cats scattered.
``Hello Miles,'' she said.
``Letitia I can't have this,'' he responded.
He knew the tragedies of her life. Knew she was alone and always would be.
``They just won't come to my house,'' she said, ``they just won't come near.''
For one fleeting moment he thought of saying that's alright. It would have been the decent thing. Instead he said ``I will put out poison if you encourage them!'' and went back to his house.