Bus is the shop cat at Open Ticket Repair. He came to Connie in the shop's first months, asleep inside a donated wardrobe, and when the wardrobe went off to the house that had asked for it, Bus was not in it and never left. He has three legs, and he has never once behaved as though the fourth were missed. He spends the day in the front window, on the wide sill where the morning sun lands, and the work of the shop goes on around him.
The carrier lives on a shelf in the storeroom, and every time it comes down the shop learns over again how fast that cat can move. It is a wicker basket with a wire door, and it spends the rest of the year out of sight. On a cool morning near the end of March, with the stove lit low against the chill, Connie carried the basket out to the middle of the floor at nine for the trip to the vet and set it down with the door open, and by the time she straightened up the sill was empty.
They knew he had places in that building nobody else had found the ends of. None of them said out loud that they were looking for him. Saying it would have made it a chase, and the shop had never chased that cat.
Connie is a woman who solves a problem by taking it apart in order, and that is how she went at the empty shop. She checked the high shelf over the bench, and the space behind the ticket board, and the storeroom the basket had come from, and the floor under the counter, ruling each one out and moving to the next without hurry, as though she were only making her morning walk-through a second time. She did not check behind the stove. The narrow dark between the iron and the wall was the warmest place in the building on a cold day, and to her mind that made it a place to keep clear of, not a place to go.
Vernon put his work down and did the opposite of searching. He stood where he could see the most of the room at once, and he went still, and he waited for the cat to give himself away by moving first. Finding a bad seam in a fiddle is a matter of tapping the wood and listening for the note that has gone dead, and a man who can hear a crack he cannot see can usually outwait anything that breathes. He waited a long while. The shop made all its small sounds and not one of them was a cat. After that he went back to his bench and took up the fiddle again, which from Vernon meant he was beaten.
Around ten a man came in for a kitchen radio that had been fixed, and he found the three of them arranged around a shop with every appearance of ordinary business and no cat in it anywhere. Connie took his money and said nothing about the open basket on the floor. Dot told him the radio had only needed a new tube and a good cleaning, and asked after his mother, and did not once look at the stove she had begun to think about. He took his radio and went, and the pretense held right up until the door swung shut behind him.
Then Dot dried her hands on her apron. "It's a cold morning, dear," she said, "and a scared thing goes where it's warm before it goes anywhere smart." She did not get down on the floor and hunt. She crossed to the stove and leaned around the warm side of it, into the narrow dark between the iron and the wall, and there he was, folded into the hottest, blackest corner of the shop with his one back foot braced against the elbow of the pipe.
She straightened up. "He's wedged in past the pipe, dear, and he won't come out with all of us standing here watching. You won't get him out of there without taking hold." It was the same voice she used for good morning, and that was what made it land, because taking hold of Bus was a thing that had never once been done at Open Ticket Repair. Nothing in that shop was ever grabbed or forced, the cat included, and he had lived inside that habit so long that no one had thought to test it.
It was twenty past ten, and the vet was expecting them at half past. Connie stood over the stove and looked in behind the iron and did not put her hand in after him. She had never taken hold of that cat against his will, and the shop had never been a place he could be taken from. A minute's work would get him out and get them to the appointment on time. She stood there and did not do it.
She went to the telephone on the counter and called the vet's office and said they would be late, or would not come at all, depending on the cat. The woman who answered kept a shop cat of her own and told her to come when they came. Connie carried the open basket to the middle of the floor near the window, set it down, and told the room to leave him and mean it. Get back to your work, she said, all of you, and stop watching the stove.
So they did. Vernon glued his seam. Dot took the broom to the boards she had knelt on. Connie wrote up the next ticket and kept her eyes off the window. The stove ticked as it settled. For the first time since nine the morning went back to being an ordinary morning, and the basket sat open in the sun with no one's eyes on it.
Bus came out from behind the stove once the fuss had gone out of the room. He crossed the floor on his three legs at his own pace and went to the basket the same as he went to anything new in the shop, nose down, once around the outside, a long look in at the open door. Then he stepped up into the basket and settled inside it, because it was dark and warm and not one person was looking at it.
Dot saw him do it from the counter and said not a word. She caught Connie's eye and tipped her chin an inch toward the window. Connie crossed the floor without hurry and latched the wire door with the cat already curled behind it, and that was the whole of the capture. He had walked in on his own feet, in his own time, and nobody had put a hand on him.
The visit to the vet was a short one. She listened to his chest and looked in his ears and pressed along him for anything that had changed in a year, and at the end she went over the old healed place where the fourth leg had been, as she had the time before, and told Connie the same as then. The amputation was old. It had healed clean and complete a long time before he ever turned up asleep in that wardrobe, and there was nothing left in the bone to say what had taken the leg, or when. Medicine could date the healing and go no further than that. She knew no more than anyone what had happened to him before he came, and she said so, and put her stethoscope away.
They were back by four. The basket went up onto its shelf in the storeroom to wait out another year. Bus took his place in the front window for the last of the afternoon sun, his back to the room and his face to the street, and he stayed there while the town closed up around him for the night.