Bus keeps the front window at Open Ticket Repair. He has three legs. He turned up at the shop years ago shut inside a wardrobe that had come in as a donation, asleep, and once he woke he made the window his and never gave it up. All day he sits in it and watches the street. When the door is locked at night and everyone has gone home, the shop is his.
This was the first week of May, the long rain finally thinning, the days warm enough to prop the back door and the nights still cold. A wardrobe stood near the front of the shop that week, plain and empty, waiting on a mended foot before it went on to a new home, its two doors open to air the inside. Connie had a lamp apart on the bench, the small pieces laid out in a row in the order they had come off it. Vernon had an instrument in pieces at his bench in back. On the counter by the window sat the loose things of the day, a card of buttons, a spool of wire, the sign-in sheet.
The sparrow came in that afternoon through the propped door and would not go back out. It went up into the rafters over the back and stayed there, a rustle now and then in the high dark, and by five it had not come down. Connie left it. A bird that flew in would fly out, and the door would be open again in the morning.
She closed up the same as any night. She banked the stove and put the guard across the front of it, went around the room turning the lights off, and locked the door to the street. The shop went dark and still, and Bus was up in the window where he always was by then.
The sparrow came down not long after. With the lights gone and nobody moving, it left the rafters and flew straight at the last light there was, the grey street through the front glass, and it hit the window and dropped and came up and hit it again. It went the length of the shop and back, off the glass and off the wall, over the bench and away before it touched anything there, and on one pass it caught the card of buttons and the spool of wire and knocked them off the counter and across the floor. It was a small bird and it broke nothing, but it was loose in a room full of other people's fragile things and it struck whatever it came to. At last it dropped onto the front window ledge and stayed, worn out, its sides going fast, in the one spot in the whole shop that was the cat's.
Bus was on the ledge. He is a cat. There was a sparrow in his window, worn out and close, and no one in the building but him.
He came down off the ledge to the floor. He went at the bird low and slow, his shoulder working, the three legs even under him. The sparrow came up off the ledge, but he was under it now and behind it, and it did not go up into the dark room. It went the other way, low along the floor, and the only other way open was the wardrobe by the front, its doors wide and the inside of it black. Maybe he drove it in and maybe it only ran from him. Either way the sparrow went into the dark of the wardrobe and did not come out.
Bus followed it over. He leaned his weight on one open door until it swung to, and then on the other, and the bird was shut in. With no light and no way out, the sparrow went still and stayed still. He lay down on the floor with his side along the closed doors and did not get up off them again. He did not take it. He had the bird to himself the whole night, and the whole shop with nobody in it, and he kept the doors shut and let the night pass.
Connie unlocked in the morning to a cool bright day, the sun already on the wet street. She read the room from the doormat. The buttons and the spool were scattered across the floor by the counter. The lamp pieces were in their row where she had left them, the instrument in back was as Vernon had left it, and nothing on the bench was down or broken. Bus was on the floor against the wardrobe, awake, his side along the shut doors.
She looked at that a moment. Then she swung the street door wide and stood it open, and she came back and opened the wardrobe. The sparrow was down in a dark corner of it. It held there a second in the light, and then it went, up out of the wardrobe and across the shop and out through the open door into the morning, and it was gone before she reached the glass.
Bus got up from the floor. He went to the window, up onto the ledge, and turned himself around and lay down facing out. Connie shut the door and got the stove going, and she gathered the buttons and the spool up off the floor and put them back on the counter. Bus lay in his window with the morning sun coming in on him, and the shop's small work stood along the bench where she had left it the evening before.