The boss was four hours late, and he didn’t pull in driving his own truck. He climbed down out of the cab of a tow truck.
His jeans were caked to the knee in red clay. His jacket was a wrinkled mess, and there was a red crease on his cheek from sleeping against a car seat. And poking out of his jacket pocket was a tiny striped face with a white bib.
Cheryl Banks, who had handled every piece of paper at Mattson Concrete Products for nine years, saw all of this from the front office window and slowly set down the phone. She’d long ago learned to read Greg Mattson’s mood from the parking lot. If Greg was late, nothing good was coming. And today he was four hours late.
“Get everybody in the break room,” he said from the doorway. “Everybody. The yard too.”
“Right now? We’ve got a truck waiting to load…”
“Right now.”
Ten minutes later, nearly fifty people were packed into the break room, which always smelled like vending-machine coffee and wet cement. Machine operators, drivers, the yard foreman, two bookkeepers, and Miss Dolores from cleaning, still holding her rag. The plant made pavers and curbing for half the county, and every person in that room knew exactly what Greg’s voice sounded like when something had gone wrong.
“Bet it’s that load that got sent back,” somebody whispered.
“Long as it’s not about me,” came the answer.
Most of them just looked at the floor. Everybody there knew how to wait out a bad day.
Greg stood by the window, stroking the kitten in his pocket with one finger, trying to figure out where to start. Because it really started yesterday.
* * *
At three the afternoon before, his shift supervisor had called. The line was down, and a customer was expecting a thousand square feet of pavers by morning. Greg was on his way back from a rough round of negotiations two hours away, already rehearsing what he’d say to everybody who’d “dropped the ball again.”
The highway was the normal way to the plant. But there was a shortcut, out through the farm fields along a line of trees. The first stretch was patched blacktop, then it turned to dirt. After the rain the night before, that dirt road shone like it had been greased. Locals wouldn’t touch it. Greg turned onto it anyway, because it saved him eight miles. He had to crawl, there was no other way to drive it, and that made him even madder.
* * *
The kitten didn’t know anything about Greg. It didn’t know much about the world at all, having been in it for about six weeks. There was a warm box in a barn on the farm past the tree line. There was a mother who smelled like hay and milk. There were three brothers who never stopped shoving. And that morning, a grasshopper had hopped in through the gap under the barn door.
It was green and ridiculous and it jumped like it had springs for legs. The kitten went after it. The grasshopper went into the grass, and the kitten went in after it. Then there was another grasshopper, and another. The grass was taller than the kitten and smelled like dust and clover, and something in it was always rustling, buzzing, calling it a little farther.
When it finally sat down to rest, the barn was nowhere in sight. But the kitten wasn’t scared. Mama always found the ones who wandered off. You just had to wait a bit. And in the meantime, there was more hunting to do.
That’s how it came tumbling out onto the road, chasing one more grasshopper it didn’t catch.
* * *
Greg saw it at the last second: a little gray ball sitting right in the tire rut. His foot hit the brake on its own. The tires slid on the wet clay, the truck swung left, slow and almost gentle, and its back end slid off into the ditch. It settled on its frame in the red mud and stopped.
The engine died. Everything went very quiet.
“Oh, come on,” Greg breathed.
He climbed out and walked around the truck. The front tire was hanging over the ditch. The back ones were sunk in clay up to the rims. He tried reverse, and the wheels just threw mud. Drive, same thing. The truck might as well have grown roots.
His phone showed one bar, and a minute later not even that. He held it up over his head, the way everybody does in the middle of nowhere, and walked along the ditch. Nothing.
Only then did he spot the one responsible.
The kitten was sitting on a dry little hump at the edge of the road, watching him. Gray tabby, white paws, small enough to fit in a coffee mug. It looked at him calmly, like it was asking, So, you lost too?
“Why, you little…” Greg started, and didn’t finish.
The kitten gave a thin little mew, ran at him, tripped over a clod of mud, picked itself up and immediately started climbing his jeans. Its claws hooked into the denim like burrs.
“Where do you think you’re going, huh? Where?” Greg muttered, unhooking it from his knee.
In his palm it weighed almost nothing. Warm, more fluff than fur. It rubbed its face against his thumb and started purring so loud Greg was honestly surprised. Where does something that small keep that much noise?
“So what am I supposed to do with you now?”
The kitten didn’t know. But judging by the way it settled into his hand like it owned the place, it had decided they were in this together.
* * *
The highway was about two miles back. Greg walked it, figuring there’d be traffic there and maybe a signal. Even at the crossroads there was no signal. He stood on the shoulder and waited.
It was one of those last warm evenings of September. The sun went down behind the tree line, and the cut cornfield turned copper, then gray-blue. Cars went by. Greg raised his hand. Some flew past without looking. Some slowed down, took in his muddy jeans, and drove on.
Two stopped. First a young guy in a delivery van, late for his shift, who could only promise to “call somebody once I get a signal.” Then an old green pickup with a gray-mustached man at the wheel, his wife in the passenger seat, and a bushel of apples in the bed.
“Stuck?” The old man nodded toward the dirt road.
“Stuck. Up to the frame.”
“After a rain, that road’s tractor-only. We’d give you a lift, but we’re headed the other way, and you can’t just leave your truck out there. I get a signal back at the house. I’ll call you a tow. Where exactly are you?”
“First turn onto the dirt road past the crossroads. By the tree line, a few hundred yards in.”
“You got it.” The old man glanced at the kitten in Greg’s hand and smiled under his mustache. “Well, look at that. You’re not alone. All the more reason.”
When it got fully dark and the tow truck still hadn’t come, Greg walked back to his truck. Standing on a highway at night was worse than sitting in a ditch.
* * *
In the truck he found a sausage biscuit he’d bought at a gas station that morning, and a bottle of water. He split the biscuit. He ate the bread himself, crumbled the sausage up fine with his fingers and held it out on his palm. He poured water into the bottle cap.
The kitten ate so fast it sneezed twice. Then it licked the cap clean and looked up at Greg. Any more?
“That’s it, little girl. All gone. There’ll be more tomorrow,” he said, and his own voice surprised him, it came out so soft. “Well, at least one of us ate.”
September nights out in the fields get cold. Greg climbed into the back seat, dug out the blanket that had been riding in the truck since a summer picnic, wrapped himself up in it, jacket and all, and set the kitten on his chest. It turned around a couple of times, found a spot under his chin, and fell asleep.
Greg couldn’t sleep. He lay there listening to the kitten snuffle against his neck, running through all the cars that had gone by. Twenty? Thirty? People saw a man waving on the side of the road and didn’t stop. And the two who had stopped were probably home by now, eating dinner, and had forgotten all about him.
Nobody cares about anybody, he thought.
And somewhere deep down, in a place Greg didn’t usually look, an uncomfortable question turned over. Did he care about anybody?
He thought about Luis, his shift supervisor, whom he’d never called back. He realized he didn’t even know how many kids Luis had. He thought about Miss Dolores, who said “Good morning, Mr. Mattson” every single day, and he had never once said it back. Just walked past, eyes on his phone.
Somewhere around three, he finally dozed off.
* * *
A horn woke him. One long, two short, one long again. Somebody was crawling down the dirt road honking, like they were calling cows in from the pasture.
Greg sat up, banged his head on the roof, tucked the kitten into his jacket pocket and scrambled up the side of the ditch. The bank hadn’t dried out overnight. He slid back down twice and scraped his palm on the corn stubble, but he made it.
Coming down the road through the gray dawn fog was a yellow flatbed tow truck.
Greg stood on the shoulder and waved both arms. The kitten in his pocket squeaked in protest.
“Easy, little girl, easy. That’s it. They found us.”
The tow truck stopped. A mustached man of about fifty in a sweater with stretched-out elbows leaned out of the cab.
“Well, finally! I’ve been hunting for you for half an hour. Dark, foggy, can’t see a thing out in these fields. Figured I’d go slow and lean on the horn. Maybe you’d hear it.”
“I heard it.”
“I can see that.” The driver looked him over, from the clay on his knees to the straw in his hair. “Listen. That old fella who called me for you? He didn’t let me sleep all night. Called every hour. ‘Did you get the man yet? Why not? When?’ And wouldn’t you know it, my hydraulics sprang a leak. I was in the garage till two in the morning. Soon as I fixed it, I came straight here.”
The phone in his hand buzzed again.
“There he is now. Here, you talk to him, or I’ll never hear the end of it.”
Greg took the phone. The voice was hoarse and worried.
“Hello? That you, son? You okay out there? Because if that tow truck still hasn’t shown up, I’m coming out to get you myself. I’m not far. We’ll pull you out with a chain somehow!”
Greg stood on the dirt road with the phone to his ear and couldn’t say a word. A few hours ago he’d been sure this man had forgotten all about him.
“I’m okay,” he finally said. “Thank you. You hear me? Thank you so much. Everything’s fine. They found me. You don’t have to come anywhere.”
“Well, good! That’s just fine!” The old man laughed with relief. “My wife keeps telling me, go to sleep already, you old fool. But I couldn’t. How’s a man supposed to snore in a warm bed while somebody’s spending the night in a field?”
* * *
Once the truck was out of the ditch and chained down on the flatbed, Greg pulled out his wallet, took out every bill in it and held them out to the driver.
“Here.”
The man didn’t even lift a hand.
“Come on, now. We’ve got set rates. Bill it through the company, or your roadside assistance on your car insurance might cover it. I’ll give you an invoice.”
“Send the invoice. This isn’t for the tow.”
“Then what’s it for?”
Greg was quiet a moment. He didn’t usually choose his words. He was used to just saying it. This time he had to.
“For not leaving it till morning. And for him,” he nodded at the phone. “Last night I figured nobody cares about anybody. You two proved me wrong in one night.”
The driver scratched his mustache.
“Huh. Well. If that’s how it is, I’ll take it. Kids need new sneakers anyhow.”
* * *
And now here Greg was, standing in front of fifty people who were waiting to get yelled at.
He stepped up to the front of the room. Somebody coughed. Miss Dolores clutched the rag she hadn’t had a chance to put down.
“I want to apologize to you,” Greg said.
Nobody moved. Either they didn’t understand or they figured they’d heard wrong.
“I’m apologizing to you,” he said again, louder. “For yelling all the time. For blaming every one of you, even when it’s on me. Yesterday the line went down, and the first thing I thought was, ‘These people again.’ And it went down because for six months I wouldn’t sign off on the order for new bearings. I didn’t want to spend the money.”
Somebody let out a low whistle. Luis looked up at his boss like he was seeing him for the first time.
“And one more thing…”
Greg turned to Cheryl, who was standing by the door.
“Cheryl, when was the last time I gave anybody here a bonus?”
She was thrown. She took off her glasses and put them back on.
“Well… Mr. Mattson…”
“When?”
Cheryl honestly thought about it.
“Never.”
Greg nodded. For a second he looked somewhere over their heads, like he was counting years.
“Then we fix that. Everybody who works here gets a bonus. Two thousand dollars each. By the end of the week.”
It got so quiet you could hear the compressor humming through the wall.
“And don’t ask what it’s for. It’s not for anything. Just because. Because I want to. That’s all.”
What came next, you couldn’t really call applause. People jumped out of their seats. Somebody whistled, somebody laughed, and Darnell from the trucks wrapped Miss Dolores in a hug, rag and all. Greg just waved a hand and slipped out into the hallway before anybody could see his eyes were wet.
* * *
Cheryl caught up with him outside his office and stopped, studying him like she was trying to find where they’d swapped him out.
“What?” Greg asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Because I don’t recognize you.”
He smiled with one corner of his mouth.
“I don’t really recognize me today either.”
“So maybe you’ll tell me what happened?” She nodded toward her desk, where a thermos sat. “I’ve got chamomile tea. And apple pie, homemade.”
“Come on in.”
In his office Greg carefully moved the kitten onto the couch, onto his jacket. Then he opened the safe and took out a big box of Belgian chocolates tied with a gold ribbon.
Cheryl laughed. “You keep candy in the safe?”
“Been saving it for clients. Three years now.” Greg pulled off the ribbon. “The clients will live.”
They drank tea, and Greg told her everything. The shortcut he shouldn’t have taken. The little gray ball in the rut. The ditch, the biscuit split in half, the water in a bottle cap. The thirty cars that drove past, and the two that stopped. The old man in the green pickup who stayed up all night over a stranger.
By the time he finished, half the box was gone and Cheryl had forgotten about her tea.
“Last night I figured something out,” Greg said. “Everything can change in a second. Like that.” He snapped his fingers. “One second, and you’re sitting in the mud in the middle of a field, and all your ‘I know how it should be done’ isn’t worth a thing. And you’re waiting for some total stranger to remember you exist.”
“And somebody did.”
“Somebody did. And I haven’t remembered my own people in years.” He was quiet a moment. “I want to live so that people say something good about me at the dinner table. And so I’m not ashamed of the day I just had.”
Cheryl nodded. Then she glanced at the couch.
“And what did you name her?”
Greg raised his eyebrows, like it was a strange question.
“Peaches, obviously.”
“Why obviously?”
“My grandma had a Peaches on her farm. When I was a kid I’d sleep out on her porch daybed, and that cat would purr against my side all night long. Last night in the truck this one started purring exactly the same way, and I just knew what her name was.”
Cheryl raised her mug. “To Peaches, then.”
“No.” Greg raised his. “To people. To the old man in the green pickup. And to the tow truck driver.”
They clinked their mugs of tea.
And Peaches slept on the couch, curled up on a man’s jacket that smelled like fields and gasoline and a little bit like sausage biscuit. She dreamed about tall grass. Green grasshoppers were jumping in it, and she chased them without any fear of getting lost. Because somewhere close by there was a voice she knew. It was calling her. Looking for her. And then it found her, lifted her up off the ground with warm hands and held her against its chest.
Peaches stretched in her sleep, spread her little white toes, and purred.
Now she knew for sure. Someone would always come find her.
