Free The Painted Ponies of Partequineus and The Summer of the Kittens by Peter H. Riddle Page B

staring after the car.  Then he turned around and started to walk back up to his porch, but suddenly he stopped, as if something across the street had caught his eye.
    â€œSon of a (you know, Diary)!” he said, really loud. He took three little steps back toward the street - it always bothered me to watch him walk, as if his legs hurt him real bad - and glared at the vacant lot. “Damned college kids.”
    Sorry for the swear word, Diary, but that’s what he said.
    I couldn’t see what he was so angry about. Jimmy pushed on the rims on his wheels and rolled himself forward, and Mr. Harding turned and attacked him with his eyes, dared him to come any closer. Jimmy eased up, and that was when I saw a cat sticking its head out from among the weeds at the edge of the vacant lot. It sort of slinked onto the sidewalk, low to the ground and with its ears bent back.
    It was an ordinary tabby, striped grey and black with a little bit of white on its chest, and a faint kind of orange tinge to the tips of its long fur, and it looked like it was somebody’s pet, not scruffy like a stray or skinny like cats get when all they have to eat is whatever they can catch, mice or birds or even bugs. It kept looking around as if it was scared, or confused maybe.
    â€œGo home, boy,” Mr. Harding said to Jimmy. “And stay away from that cat.  I don’t want it hanging around here.” He limped back up the path and disappeared inside his house, banging the door shut behind him.
    Jimmy was looking at the cat. “Where’d that come from?”
    â€œThe car, I think,” I told him. I was already halfway down the tree, and lost my grip on one of the boards and sprawled on the ground.  Jimmy spun his chair around and rolled over to me.
    â€œYou okay?” He was staring at me, and I realized my skirt had scootched up when I fell out of the tree.
    â€œGetting a good look?” I said, annoyed mostly at myself for being so clumsy.
    â€œI thought maybe you were hurt.”
    â€œYeah, right!” I tried to sound angry, but I wasn’t really. I stood up and smoothed my skirt down and brushed off the grass clippings that stuck to it. My mother had cut the lawn that morning. Dad used to do it, but he almost never does any more. Or much of anything else.
    We have a great looking yard. Mom put in a big flower garden last year, right after she found out about Dad and that woman he was hanging around with at the university. It was like she was always looking for something to do, something that said the world was still a beautiful place, even though for her it wasn’t. She planted roses and peonies and a whole bunch of other stuff I don’t know the names of, and almost every day she’s out raking and weeding and pruning and putting in new kinds of shrubs.
    It was really warm and there was a lot of rain last night, so you could almost see the new leaves uncurl as they grew.
    I looked across the street.  “Where’s the cat?” I said.
    Jimmy turned his chair and looked, too. “I guess it went back in the weeds.”
    I saw movement down by the tracks. “No, there it is. It’s gonna go out on the dykes. Let’s go see if it’s friendly.”
    I took hold of the handgrips on the back of Jimmy’s chair and started pushing him down the sidewalk, past Mr. Harding’s house and onto the gravel where the asphalt ended. Jimmy doesn’t like to be pushed, ’cause he says he has to do everything for himself, in case some day there’s nobody around to help him. He used to talk like that a lot, about how when his Mom and Dad get old and die he’ll be all on his own, and how that was okay, because he wasn’t going to be a cripple forever. He was going to fly.
    Only today he let me push him, because I can make his chair go faster than he can on his own, especially where the ground is bumpy. The cat was already across the tracks and