"Hungry, are we?" Oliver bent over and
stroked him from head to tail. "Yes, very large and very fierce is
Verdi. Very fierce." Verdi was brown and black, heavyset, with a large
tomcat's head and yellow eyes. He padded deliberately over to the
lengths of walnut leaning upright in one corner of the room and
scratched luxuriously, stretching full length, as though he had been
waiting to do this for some time. "Aieee! Swell, Verdi." Oliver hung
his coat on a peg and gathered up the boards. For the moment, he laid
them on the table. The cat was irritated. "How about some nice pine,"
Oliver said. "Much better than walnut. I'll get you a nice soft piece
of pine. In the meantime . . ." He opened a can of salmon Friskies.
Verdi ate, and Oliver refilled his water dish. The boards were
beautiful. He'd been right about the color of Francesca's eyes. There
was an actual black walnut, a large one, at the edge of the parking
area behind his building. It shaded his kitchen window during the
summer and dropped hundreds of furry green walnuts that were gathered
by squirrels each fall. Oliver had planted six walnuts in yogurt
containers. He'd let them freeze first, done everything right, but none
of them came up.
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