What We Keep

The vitamin bottle sat on her father's nightstand, orange plastic with a child-proof cap that had defeated his arthritic hands for weeks. Sarah picked it up, the pills rattling like dry bones inside. 'You haven't been taking these,' she said, not a question.

Her father, once the man who'd taught her to ride a bike and parallel park and tell a joke that could make a room full of strangers laugh, stared at his hands. 'They make me feel like I'm already gone.'

Outside, the neighbor's dog barked at something invisible—a squirrel, a wind gust, the haunting of its own boredom. Sarah had walked that dog twice a week since the accident, a small kindness that felt like penance. The golden retriever had stopped waiting by the door for David's return months ago, but still, Sarah checked the leash every time she visited, expecting to see it hanging there.

'I talked to the lawyer about the house,' Sarah said, her voice thin. 'There's no reason to keep it if you're not coming back.'

Her father lifted his head slowly. 'The cat needs somewhere to live.'

'The cat' was a scrawny tabby that appeared on the back porch like clockwork every evening, fed by the old man who forgot his own medication but never forgot to put out food. David had named it Barnaby despite Sarah's insistence that it certainly belonged to someone else. 'Everything belongs to someone,' he'd said, 'until it doesn't.'

Now the cat scratched at the screen door, and Sarah's father reached for his cane with the agonizing precision of someone rehearsing a performance he could no longer sell to any audience.

'I could take it,' Sarah heard herself say. 'To the apartment.' The words felt like surrender. She was thirty-five years old, widowed for seven months, negotiating over a feral cat with a man who could no longer remember which daughter she was half the time.

Her father smiled—a small, genuine thing that cracked the drought of his face. 'He likes you,' he said. 'Even if he won't admit it.'

The dog barked again, closer this time. Sarah opened the door and the cat slipped inside, tail twitching. Her father's hand shook as he reached for the vitamin bottle again.

'I'll take them,' she said, pouring two pills into his palm. 'Both of them.'