Destiny
He was lonely but he'd stopped thinking about that a long time ago. It was now just a familiar niggling at the back of his mind he never looked directly at anymore.
He put his head down, did his work, kept plowing forward into the unknown.
There had been a time when he wondered at the seeming pointlessness of it. But there was nothing to be done about it. What do you do but keep going?
And people counted on him. There were plenty who knew him by name, smiled, tipped a hat brim, glad to see him there. They were always happy to see him because, when he was there, things got done.
He had an uncanny ability to look at anything with electrical wiring and know exactly what was wrong. And, more importantly, how to fix it. Sometimes, just by the very nature of him standing beside the equipment or machine, it began working again.
They called him the Magic Man. He had strong, good hands. He might not have loved them to look at them, but they were uniquely shaped and sized to get into the tight places where dexterity was more important than the right sized tools. Which he also had. In spades. But, if he were honest, often it simply came down to a toothbrush and some goo begone of some sort or other.
He secretly loved being the person they called. He'd fixed everything from a Wurlitzer jukebox to a grain silo conveyor motor. From ancient fuse boxes with rusted pennies in places they didn't belong to high-tech milking robots he'd never seen before.
There wasn't much he hadn't seen anymore, and somehow, every broken thing seemed to trust him. Machines cooperated with him like they knew he wasn't just there to fix them. He respected them; treated them like something more than parts and wires. He'd never say it aloud, but sometimes he thought maybe they responded to that.
Similarly, though it was odd to him, the same could be said for animals. Especially cats. They had an instinctual draw to him as though something about his very core emanated quiet and safety that they craved.
There were several cats along his daily route into town to his workshop. Most followed along from within their fence lines. He sometimes took the time, if he had some extra, to stick his fingers through the slats and give their ears a scratch. Others danced through the grass onto the sidewalk to meow and roll over, exposing their white or spotted bellies. He honored their vulnerability with a polite rub of the chin or ears. Then he was on his way.
Then there was Destiny.
The first time he'd seen her, she'd been almost nothing more than a lithe black shadow in the afternoon sun. Panther-like and sleek, she'd stalked his movements until he saw her out of the corner of his eye. He watched her, mutual interest and curiosity slowly sliding into rapport. She had bright orange eyes and roamed free. Right alongside him into his workshop.
Destiny never stayed. She left when he left the workshop at the end of the day, walked him as far as her stop and was always there promptly in the morning when he came by again. During the day she lay in the sun on his work desk, rolling sometimes across plans, diagrams, and occasionally into his mug of coffee. Nothing in the workshop was irreparable. No permanent damage ever was done. He felt less lonely when Destiny stalked through the rows of shelves of machine parts and wires.
And so it went for longer than he could remember. He drank beers alone on his porch to watch the sunset on at least three birthdays. Thirty-five was thirty-six was thirty-seven. One day tumbling into the next endlessly. He sometimes looked at the second chair. Empty. Sometimes he didn't.
Lately, he wasn't even finishing the beer. Just holding it till it got warm. Sunsets felt more like endings than anything worth watching. The porch light had burned out awhile ago and he hadn't bothered to replace it.
Then one morning, Destiny wasn't there.
He waited a minute outside the shop, slower to unlock the door than usual. Looked around once, just to be sure. Nothing moved but a soda can skittering in the wind across the street.
He left a small dish of ham just outside the door. Habit, mostly. Just in case she was running late.
It was still there as he was leaving. He stepped over it without stopping.
A few more days went by like that. He caught himself glancing down alleys and under porches on his walk in, not looking exactly, just aware. She never did show. He cleaned up the ham and did not put out any more.
He told himself she was a cat. Cats vanish. People forget that until it happens. Maybe someone else had started feeding her. Maybe animal control had caught her. Maybe she'd been hit.
He didn't let himself picture it. Just filed the thought away with the rest before it became a pit in his stomach.
Work helped. It always had. He kept his head down and got things running that weren't running before. Fixed a refrigeration unit with a hairline crack in the control panel, the kind of thing you only find if you know what a hum sounds like when it's wrong.
People still called him the Magic Man. Still smiled when he showed up. He smiled back.
In the evenings, he didn't finish the beer. Just held it until it got warm. Then set it down and forgot it there. The porch light was still out.
He stopped looking for Destiny.
Weeks passed, but he couldn't have said how many. The days folded in on themselves and stacked like old receipts in a junk drawer.
Then one afternoon, walking back from a job on the far side of town, he cut through a narrow path behind the nursery. He liked the quiet there. The way the trees blocked the sound of traffic.
He heard a meow. Faint. Not in front of him, but off to the side.
He stopped. Waited. Heard it again.
He stepped off the path, moved through brush that reached his knees, hands steady as he pushed branches aside.
She was there. Destiny. Thinner, but not sick. Orange eyes watching him without blinking.
Three kittens huddled near her, unsteady and damp with sleep.
And beside them, crouched low in the grass with a half-open can of food in one hand, was a woman.
She looked up when she heard him. Didn't seem startled. Just studied him for a moment like she already knew who he was.
“You must be the one with the workshop,” she said, her eyes bluer than the sky and crinkled a bit at the corners as she smiled at him. “She kept walking me that way and then turning around like she couldn't quite let go of something.”
He nodded. Said nothing. Destiny stood and stretched, then wound around his ankles once, as if to say nothing had changed.
And maybe it hadn't. Or -
“I always felt so guilty leaving her home all day to go to work. S'why she was outside all the time.” The woman looked a little sheepish, pushing dark hair out of her face.
He felt the corners of his mouth tug upward, Destiny purring loud enough for them both to hear. “It was my pleasure,” he reassured her, almost saying how much he liked her sundress but bending down to give Destiny a rub along her ears.
- maybe everything had.