“Count them when they come out!”
I had twelve workers, a delivery deadline, and a ten-year-old in the upstairs apartment telling me how to do my job.
Thank goodness she was stubborn.
We had set the old steel staircase on supports behind the bakery. A mother cat shot out with two kittens bouncing after her. I thought we were clear.
The girl leaned so far toward the window that her father caught the back of her sweater.
“Four babies,” she said. “I watch them before school.”
A flashlight found number three curled against the wall. He came out when his mother called. The fourth, according to our supervisor upstairs, was orange and had a habit of squeezing through a cellar vent.
We knocked on the bakery door.
Mr. Vogel had spent three weeks complaining about cats in his delivery yard. I was braced for another argument when he opened the cellar with his elbow. Both hands held a dish towel.
A very small orange nose stuck out of it.
“He was cold,” he said.
The girl shouted, “That’s Pancake!”
Mr. Vogel looked startled. “I call him Ernest.”
It turned out he had been finding that kitten in the cellar every morning, warming a towel on the radiator and carrying him upstairs. He complained about the cats because he wanted somebody to repair the vent before one got trapped. Nobody had asked him to finish the sentence.
A local rescue arranged care for the mother and all four kittens together. We installed a proper cover after the cellar and stairwell were clear.
When the kittens were old enough, Mr. Vogel adopted the orange one. The girl visited on Saturdays. She kept calling him Pancake. He answered to both names, provided somebody had breakfast.
At the end of the job, my crew gave the girl a hard hat we had all signed. She put it on and surveyed the new stairs.
“Did you count your workers before you left?”
I counted for her. Twelve.
She nodded, satisfied, and went back upstairs.
For more stories where one small detail changes everything, follow an old mare’s return, a mysterious knock on opening night, and a search crew looking for the wrong boy.
