The tap

Milo stopped chasing mice and his numbers went up.

Ingrid worked it out over the summer. He sat by the gap under the skirting where the pipe went through, front feet together, and did nothing at all for forty minutes, and then there was a mouse on the doormat. In his young days he had gone at them across the room with his ears flat and got one in ten. Now he got most of them and never hurried once.

She left the bathroom tap running a thread of water because he preferred it to the bowl. It cost about one dollar a year, she had calculated, and she told the meter reader so before he could ask.

The house was too big and she only used four rooms of it. The others held furniture with sheets over it, which she had meant to be temporary years ago, and one summer she noticed she liked the shapes.

In June the pump on the floor heating started making a noise like a wasp in a jar. She found the number her late husband had taped to the water heater, and the man who came was called Tom and did not want to be there. He said the pump was original and would fail. He said it in the voice they use for things they have said forty times that week.

She asked what original meant and he said 1996.

She said that was thirty years of a thing doing what it was for, and Tom looked at her the way you look at someone who has misunderstood the terms, and then he laughed, once, through his nose, and put in the new one anyway.

Kristin rang in August, worried, because a friend of hers had had a mother who fell and lay there two days. She wanted to talk about alarms you wear round the neck.

Ingrid said she would think about it. What she thought about, after, was that she had not been frightened by the story. If she fell in the hall by the shoe rack and that was that, then that was that. She had wintered here alone fourteen times and knew where the stopcock and the manuals were. There was no unfinished thing.

She did not say this to Kristin, who would have heard it as something else entirely.

Milo drank from the tap in the evening, a long time, then sat in the bath and looked at the drain. Then he went to the skirting board and sat down with his feet together and waited, and Ingrid turned off the lamp and left him to it, and in the morning there was a mouse on the doormat, and the tap was still running its thread.