Free The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats by Hesh Kestin

judgment—okay, not so good, medium, terrific. I asked for a description.”
    “You do this to all your patients?”
    “They should be so fucking lucky,” she said. “Take all the time to answer until we get to Seventy-Third.”
    I believed her about the patients. I would have believed her if she said she was Sandy Koufax and was just going off to pitch a perfect game. But we were walking at her pace: Seventy-Third was fast approaching—there was no time for evasion or, I realized, need. “It feels like shit,” I said. “It feels like I’m my own species, that whatever I do I’ll never find anyone who...”
    “Go ahead. Say it.”
    “Who cares about me and is worth caring for.”
    We were at Seventieth, at the corner. Waiting for the light to change.
    “Well, I can’t say you’re unable to articulate. That’s a big help.”
    “It’d be a bigger help if I had someone to articulate to.” I paused in speech just as the light changed and we continued to walk. “I’ve been reading since I was a little kid.”
    “Solace.”
    “No. Yes. Maybe,” I said. “But it was more like a search. You open a book you open a life. You try to see if there’s a... a model there. Something that makes sense for you. For me. You want to see if there’s a way. But there isn’t any. You know,
The Great Gatsby
, that’s my favorite book, but it’s not a road map. It’s like La Rochefoucauld—a sketchbook. You think your brother knows French, or he just learned the one phrase phonetically?”
    “You’re changing the subject.”
    “Maybe it’s the same subject,” I said. “I got kind of kidnapped into this with your brother. Shanghaied. Suddenly I wake up and I’m on a ship and it’s heading for some strange port and I’m signed on. There’s my signature. Whether it is or it isn’t, there’s not much I can do about it now. So I’m suddenly in someone else’s life and, you know what, it’s a hell of a lot better than my own. I mean, where was I going? Two days ago I called this guy, a professor at college, who is supposed to supervise my honors program. You know, we meet every month or so and he buys me lunch and we have a beer and bullshit about literature. So I tell him, Professor del Vecchio, I’m so sorry. I won’t be able to make it tomorrow. There’s a death in the family. And he says, Someone close? You know what I told him?”
    “Your mother,” Terri said.
    I stopped dead in the street, right there in mid-block in front of an estate-jewelry store and a florist. “How did you know?”
    “Maybe I’m not as stupid as I look.”
    “You don’t look stupid.”
    “No?”
    “You look wonderful. You look smart, direct, no-bullshit honest. You look like heaven in bed.”
    She smiled, the twin fish of her mouth moving in opposite directions so that the entire bottom of her face seemed to be opening, welcoming me in. “Right on all counts,” she said. “Tell me something, Russell. How do feel about vaginas?’
    “Vaginas?” We were standing still in the middle of the sidewalk, the entire Upper East Side flowing around us. From somewhere far away I heard a car horn sound, then fade. “Vaginas?”
    “You know,” she said, looking me in the eye. She wore heels, but still had to tilt her chin, almost as though offering her lips.
    I was close enough to see a tiny chip of lipstick coating the top of one of her bottom teeth. “I like them.”
    “Do you love them?”
    I shrugged, my smile deepening. “Guilty as charged,” I said. “Okay, I love them. I love vaginas.”
    “How do you love them?”
    “There’s more than one way?”
    “You love how they look, how they feel? How they smell? You like a nice hot smelly vagina, Russell?”
    “You know what Napoleon wrote to Josephine from Egypt? ‘Coming home—don’t wash.’”
    “You really feel that way?”
    I felt like the luckiest man alive. “Yeah. I do. I love vaginas.”
    Terri leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, holding her lips