We’d been together since then, almost three months. Not every day. Some days he just isn’t around. I don’t know where he goes, and when I see him next he doesn’t say. I don’t figure it is any of my business. He doesn’t badger me when I come back from the soup kitchen to know the details of my life. I reckon I owe him the same courtesy. Living on the streets is hard and I can’t pretend that it ain’t. Wintertime can be especially rough, but you learn the tricks to survive. You know which churches will give you a warm place to stay and a nice meal with the minimum amount of preaching. You figure out which of your neighbors are just chatty crazy and which are more likely to stab you in the night if you don’t watch yourself

I guess I had life more or less figured out when he came along. I think that’s why we get along sowell. He doesn’t try to change me and I don’t try to change him. I tell him what I’m thinking, and he listens carefully with those big brown eyes. Sometimes he just isn’t interested and he’ll wander off right in the middle of one my stories, but that doesn’t happen often and I know I tend to blather on at times. By the time he comes back, all is forgiven and I usually share some of my food with him.

It’d probably be more interesting if I said he occasionally hunts down a rabbit and returns it to me so I can clean it and cook it up for the two of us. That’d be a lie, though. I doubt he knows how to hunt rabbits, and I sure as hell don’t know how to clean one. Lighting a fire is a good way to get the cops to come down hard on you.

I was just happy for a little companionship, and that he did just fine.