laughed for a minute, and then, just that suddenly, swallowed and looked his professor in the eye. “I don't know, Dr. Schindler. It looks like you sort of adopted me too.”
Herbert Schindler's mouth turned ever so slightly. “I hope someone would do the same for one of my sons,” he said softly, and Jeff had nodded with a lump in his throat. He hoped so, too, with all his heart.
Anyone who did this much good in the world deserved to know his nearest and dearest were well taken care of.
He'd thought so even more two months after that, when Kevin's buddy, the only one who knew Kevin's big, gay secret, had called Jeff from a satellite phone to tell Jeff that Kevin was dead.
Jeff had shown up on Herbert's doorstep—literally, his home doorstep—at two in the morning and, after apologizing profusely, had sobbed his heart out for over an hour. He hadn't known whom else to turn to. All of his club friends had turned out to be just that—“club friends”—and as for his own family?
He'd shuddered when Herbert had suggested, delicately, that Jeff might want to have some family support. After that Herbert had simply sat on his couch as his wife brought him coffee and a pillow and cradled Jeff's head against his chest like the father he was while Jeff, funny Jeff, who was never without a smile and a quick story or a smart-assed remark, wished that AIDS happened quick, like a hand-grenade to the heart, because that would be a mercy killing. A mercy killing was, as Jeff tried miserably to joke, the only thing he could think of to live for. Over the next couple months he learned to find other things. Small things, it was true, but they worked.
A week after Kevin's funeral, which Jeff didn't attend, since A. it was in Georgia, and Jeff couldn't afford to go and B. Kevin hadn't been out to his family, and Jeff wouldn't out him when he wasn't alive to make the decision himself, Herbert's wife had shown up with soup and a kitten.
Jeff hadn't eaten in about a week—something his current drug cocktail was making easy—but if he'd thought that exempted him from Mrs. Schindler's matzo ball soup, he was wrong.
Unlike the visit, which Herbert had warned him about, the kitten was a surprise.
The kitten was a Scottish Fold—the kind with the weird folded ears and bug-eyed faces—and it threatened to be the size of a Labrador retriever when it grew up. Mrs. Schindler had pulled the steel-gray fuzzball out of a cat carrier and sat it in Jeff's arms while she heated the soup.
Jeff had looked at the creature, which was both pitifully cute and adorably ugly, and the cat had blinked slowly back. “Mrs. Doc Herbert, I hope you don't mind if I ask you what in the hell this is?”
“It's a cat,” she said, ruthlessly taking over his student efficiency apartment and setting his one pot up on the hotplate to heat up the soup.
She was a squat, mid-sized woman who favored polyester pantsuits worn over wide hips and had short, dyed black hair. She also had really kind, expressive brown eyes. When Jeff had fallen asleep on her couch the night he'd found out about Kevin, he'd woken up covered in a blanket with a box of tissues and two ibuprofen on the coffee table, and a cat purring on his hip with enough force to vibrate the windows. He liked cats. In fact, he liked this one, but, “They're not allowed in this dump,” he had to tell her, a little wistfully. The kitten had taken up a determined purring on his chest, and he found that, although his heart still felt empty, the purring was warming the empty place. Mrs. Doc Herbert had shrugged. “So find another place. Your internship is paid—you're no longer a starving student, and you are almost officially a grown-up. Get a house—”
“I hate yard work.”
She shrugged. “Get a condo with a pool, then. Just make sure it takes pets.”
Jeff looked at the purring thing on his chest again. It seemed like an awfully small deal for which to turn his life upside down. Then he looked around his