Homeless Read Free Page A

seeing the accident again. It must have been awful.
    “He won’t eat or drink anything. Don’t get too close!” he warns as I stretch out my hand to feel for the cat’s pulse. “He’s one of the wild cats. You can’t touch them, ever. They bite and scratch. The car knocked him out. I couldn’t have touched him if he was awake.”
    “We have to get him to the clinic,” I say.
    “I’ll call Gran,” Maggie says, getting to her feet. “My grandmother is the vet. She needs to come and get him. We can’t carry him back to the clinic, not in that shape.”
    “You can use the phone in our house. Katie will take you.”
    Katie takes Maggie’s hand.
    “Back in a second,” Maggie calls as she and Katie cross the tracks and head for the Fraziers’ house.
    “I don’t get it,” Brenna says. “Are these all your cats? What’s going on here?”
    Jamie stands up and pulls his shoulders back with pride. “They aren’t really ours, but we take care of them,” he says.
    “You feed them?” I ask.
    Jamie nods. “We use our allowance money. Our parents won’t let us take them into the house, so we play with them out here. The tame ones, that is. The wild cats bite.”
    “Look, Sunita,” Brenna interrupts. “We have to keep looking for Socrates. David and I will start knocking on doors to see if any of the neighbors have seen him. We’ll meet you back here in fifteen minutes.”
    “Good idea,” I reply.
    As they leave, Jamie asks me to describe the tuxedo cat again.
    “I’ve seen her. She’s around here all the time,” he says. “We call her Mittens.”
    Before I can ask any more questions about Mittens, Maggie and Katie return, led by a short, angry woman wearing a smiley face T-shirt. The cats in the clearing scatter again, as they did when the train came through.
    “Jamie Frazier, I told you to stay away from these cats,” the woman scolds. “And to keep your sister away from them, too. You know how dangerous they are.”
    As she gets closer, I can see that she’s not angry, she’s afraid. She stops in front of us and stares at the injured cat as if it were a snake about to bite her. The look on her face kind of reminds me of my mother.
    “Is Dr. Mac coming, Maggie?” I ask.
    “Gran said she’d be here soon.” Maggie pauses, then speaks slowly and opens her eyes wide, like she’s trying to send me a message. “This is Mrs. Frazier, Jamie and Katie’s mother. Mrs. Frazier, this is my friend Sunita.”
    “Pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Frazier,” I say politely. “You have nice kids. They really care about animals.”
    Mrs. Frazier doesn’t smile the way most mothers do when you compliment their children. Instead, she turns to her son. “Take Katie into the house, Jamie. We’ll talk about this later.”
    The brother and sister head for their house with sad faces. I don’t understand any of this.
    “They were just trying to help this cat.” I point to the cat, still panting on the baby blanket. “It was hit by a car. We need to take it to the vet.”
    Mrs. Frazier waits until her kids have walked far enough away that they won’t hear her.
    “I’m the head of the Chestnut Ridge Community Association,” she explains. “I started getting calls about these cats a few months ago. The people in the neighborhood are upset. They say the cats are using their gardens for a bathroom and digging in their garbage.”
    She glances at the injured cat.
    “There was an old man who used to live a few houses down from me. He’d leave out food for the cats. Well, he sold his house and moved, but the cats stayed around. At first I thought they were real cute, like you do.”
    She shakes her head. “Let me tell you something. One cat is cute. Two cats are fun. But you get a whole jungle of cats living in your backyard howling all night, and all of a sudden, it’s trouble.”
    “Did you call the animal shelter?” Maggie asks.
    “I tried calling everybody,” Mrs. Frazier says, throwing her hands in