Lucy.

He didn't see the cat until the last possible second, and by then it was too late even for the usual swerve and screech of brakes, and he killed it.

No question about its death; he felt the left front tire catch the creature full-on, and then the back tire hit it, too.

It seemed to have sped up right at the last second, as if it wanted to be hit, he thought distractedly.

He pulled over and got out heavily.

It was Lucy, the neighbor girls' cat, the cat with the half of a tail where a coyote had made a run at it and gotten an appetizer.

What with his back the way it was, he couldn't even bend down or kneel down or squat to examine the body. Nor could he lift it off to the side of the road. A stick maybe, to push it off the pavement? But he couldn't bend to pick one up, nor was there anything of that sort in the car.

So he stood there staring.

It sure was dead. There was a good deal of blood--was there blood on the tire?

He was saddened and startled and regretful. It had been a sweet cat--young and foolish and exuberant, much taken with chasing up trees after the frantic, cursing squirrels and chasing after the children on their bicycles and bringing home the heads of birds it had killed. All in all, an entertaining and supple being he had rather liked finding on his picnic table, staring balefully at the splenetic squirrels.

Now there was nothing to be done but go tell his wife or the neighbors.

Already flies and a wasp had found the body and a crow floated over, and soon enough the crows would be yanking out entrails.

He got back in the car and thought for a moment.

Tell the neighbor girls himself?

He quailed.

Tell his daughter, and then she could tell them?

Cowardly. Unfair pressure on the child.

Tell his wife, and then she could tell them?

I'll ask her what's right, he thought. She'll know the way to play it. She knows the neighbors better than I do.

So he drove around the corner to their house and parked and got out of the car, checking the tire for blood. He couldn't see any in the gathering darkness, which for some reason made him feel better.

Cain and Abel, he thought.

But inside the house, after he worked his way slowly up the steps, he found chaos and hubbub. The dishes were still in the sink, his son was screaming, his daughter was in tears, and his wife, furious, was mopping milk off the floor. He was sucked right into cleaning and calming and punishments for fighting and the brushing of teeth and reading of stories and a glass of wine and a light late dinner with his lovely wife, and the cat slipped out of his mind altogether, as if it had never been hit, as if it had never existed at all.

The neighbor girl found the cat herself, the next morning, and there was a huge ruckus, as he heard when he got home the next night. The poor girl was heartbroken. All the children in the houses at their end of the street came over for the funeral. The cat was buried in a shoe box, and the children made a headstone out of cardboard. All the children except little Nathan from next door cried, and he would have cried if he could have figured out what was going on, said his wife, who was also at the funeral.

That night after dinner, as the children of the street rode their bikes up and down, some of the parents stood at the west end of the street, talking.

There was a lot of loose talk about the driver of the car who killed Lucy.

Must have been someone not from the neighborhood, said the mother of the girl. Someone from the neighborhood would have had the courage to come tell us.

Hit and run, said a father. Happens all the time.

Cat ran wild anyway, said another father cautiously.

Would have bet a dollar that she'd be hit eventually, said a mother.

We should try to get a speed bump again, said the girl's mother, which sent the conversation off onto city politics, and the icy woman who ran the Public Works, and the forms you had to fill out in fourplicate, and etc., and the death of the cat drifted away soundlessly. After a while it was too dark to see much, and they called the kids in for bed.

Next day at work he had meetings all day long, one of those wasted days where you just go from meeting to meeting, and the only way to feel productive is to make notes to yourself about things to do, and while making notes to himself about things to do he wrote CAT.

He went to Mass at lunch but it didn't help.

He didn't feel bad about killing the cat, he thought, sitting in church. He felt bad that he hadn't told the neighbor girl. Now it felt too late to tell her. He could see himself at their door, confessing that he killed the cat, and their faces staring at him.

He made dinner for everyone that night and then helped his daughter with her homework and helped get his boy to bed and folded the laundry. He and his wife sat on the couch for a while pretending to read the papers but actually telling stories and laughing. This was often the best part of his day, sitting on the couch talking to her; she was so entertaining and honest, so artlessly herself, that he always felt cleansed and refreshed by her company. Even after 15 years he still felt, nearly daily, the electric charge of affection and zest in their love affair, as if he'd met her yesterday and was smitten all over again today. It was a strange thing, he supposed, and he had wondered many times if other men felt this way, but he no longer cared about marital patterns as a whole, no longer was curious about the nature of love in the large sense, only the nature of love on this couch, in this house, in his heart.

But even so, he couldn't tell her about the cat.

The next morning he was up first, and on his way down their path to get the paper he found a dead bird, right under the mailbox.

Sparrow, looked like--what there was of it. Stubby brown body, some fluffy grayish down-feathers. Female, and a young one, too--probably just out of the nest, poor thing.

The bird's head was missing. He thought of Lucy, who left bird heads not only on her own family's porch but on his, as some sort of respectful gesture.

As he reached in the box for the paper, he saw Nathan, the little neighbor boy. Nathan was maybe 18 months old, he supposed, still a little wobbly on his fat legs, but here he was, three houses down from his home at dawn, with no mother or father in sight.

"Nathan, my man, what are you doing out here?" he asked.

As if in answer, the child sat down companionably by the mailbox. And suddenly with no warning the man was moved to kneel--an arduous process for him, which entailed holding onto the mailbox and very slowly lowering himself down one leg at a time, until he knelt, slouched, his back burning, by the headless bird.

Nathan watched without comment.

The man opened the bird's breast, torn open by its killer, and reached in with his forefinger for some blood and marked his own forehead with it. His glasses slid down his nose a bit, and he pushed them back up and got a little blood on the bridge of his glasses, too.

Nathan reached for the bird and got some blood from its chest and put it cheerfully on the end of his nose.

"Forgive me," said the man to the boy and not to the boy, "for a death, and for my silence."

Nathan stared without comment.

A car, whizzing down the hill behind them, slowed noticeably, then whizzed away.

The man slowly hauled himself back to his feet, using the mailbox, and extended a hand to Nathan, who hauled himself up creakily in imitation, grinning.

Tucking the paper under his arm, the man walked Nathan home. Nathan's mother was horrified to find them at the door. How did he get out, he must have pushed open the screen door, I didn't know he could do that, I didn't think he was strong enough yet, thank you so much, Nathan, you get in this house this minute, etc.

She didn't appear to notice the dot of blood on Nathan's nose, and the man didn't say anything about it.

The man walked up the path, his back burning, and by the time he got home his son was up, so they ate breakfast together, and then he set the boy to watch Sesame Street until his wife and daughter woke, and the man got in his car to go to work, and not until he reached up to adjust the rearview mirror did he notice that he still had blood on his brow and glasses. He wiped the blood off his brow and glasses with a piece of paper and carefully folded the paper and put it in his wallet.

He still has that piece of paper. It's between his library card and driver's license. Sometimes it falls out when he pulls out a card. He used to say a prayer when it fell out, but now he thinks the paper wafting through the air is itself a prayer and so he says nothing; he just kneels slowly, using whatever he can as a prop, and picks it up, and then hauls himself back up again.

BRIAN DOYLE is editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, Oregon. He is the author of Credo (St. Mary's Press).