Suspension by Richard E. Crabbe Page A

took the stairs to the second floor. She had been around hundreds of
men almost constantly since she had been assisting Wash. Every day she had been at the construction site, the only woman in a manly world. Emily knew just how unique that was. For Emily to be treated as an equal where men ruled was extraordinary indeed. She remembered how at first every man’s eye had been on her and how nervous she had been. The workers sometimes had stopped what they were doing to stare as she got out of her carriage. On occasion she felt that those stares had been not quite appropriate. She had gotten used to it, though, and to a lot more. Stares from strange men were not all that uncommon for her. Still …
    T om opened the door to his apartment. It creaked on its hinges in a familiar, homey sort of way. He knew he should put some oil on the thing, but the squeaking hinge was a kind of “welcome home” to him, and he never did seem to find the time to oil it. He went on in to the kitchen and put the small bag he carried down on the counter near the sink. The squeaking hinge did serve some purpose after all. Tom’s two cats, Grant and Lee, trotted into the kitchen with an urgency they usually reserved for catching mice or fighting. Lee rubbed against his leg, arching her back and straightening her tail. She purred as if he were a long-lost lover. Grant took a more direct approach, jumping up on the counter, mewing pitifully, as if he hadn’t been fed in weeks. Tom stroked Grant’s neck and rubbed him behind his ears. The big cat twisted his neck and closed his eyes, soaking up the attention. Tom’s thoughts started to drift to the woman he had seen across the street.
    Soon Grant reminded him of his real mission in life, which was to feed him. Making a direct frontal assault, he began attacking the brown paper bag Tom had put on the counter. Grant always had been the more direct of the two, and he chewed at the paper with determination. Tom took the bag away from him and put the chicken scraps it contained in a bowl. Grant was black and white, with a white face and a black chin and neck that reminded Tom of a beard. Lee was Confederate gray with stripes of butternut brown and black. Her hair sprang out in a mane on either side of her neck, and she owned a beautiful fluffy striped tail that she liked to drape over her face when she slept.
    Tom didn’t think of himself as a cat lover. In his way, though, he supposed that he loved Grant and Lee. He supposed he had to considering all the litters of kittens he’d found homes for over the years. They certainly seemed to love him, or maybe they just loved the chicken scraps he brought them in the little brown bag. That was only part of it, he knew. They showed their affection for him in their own ways. Grant would never deign to curl up in Tom’s bed at night the way Lee did. Tom imagined that he considered it beneath his dignity,
but he seemed to love nothing more than draping himself across Tom’s lap while he sat reading. Tom was catching up on the classics at the moment, feeling guilty about not reading enough of late. His library was modest but growing slowly. Dickens was his favorite, though he liked Mark Twain’s stories a lot. He also had a growing collection of autobiographies and memoirs of key military figures from the war. Having served, it interested him to read the generals’ views of the same events. It always astonished him how different those memories could be. Tonight, though, he was finishing up A Tale of Two Cities .
    The big red chair by the front window was Grant’s favorite. Tom hadn’t so much as cracked his book when Grant was settling himself in. Lee, on the other hand, warmed his bed every night. She would push herself into the curve behind his knees, kneading him like a plumped pillow, and when she finally arranged him just to her liking, she would purr them both to sleep. Some of Tom’s lady friends