Hi's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The next Thursday, Hi carried the warm box up the path and slowed. The husband stood in the yard, coiling a garden hose. He watched Hi with a flat, careful look. Hi had seen that look before. It was the look a man gives a stranger who stands too close to his door. Hi's tail dropped. One friendly visit too many and he'd be the odd fox who lingered. Then he'd be shut out for good, and the ten seconds he'd fought so hard to grow would shrink to nothing. So Hi did not linger. He met the man's eyes and stopped a polite distance away. "Delivery," he said. He held the box out with both hands, plain and businesslike. The husband set down the hose and came over. He looked at the rounded cottage, then back at Hi. "You're the one who lent her the umbrella." "That's me." Hi kept his voice easy. "She was going to walk into the storm without one." The man's jaw stayed tight. "She's due any week now. I don't like people I don't know hanging around." Hi's chest went cold. This was the moment. He could shrink, mumble, and become the stranger the man feared. Or he could give the man a reason to trust him. "I'd worry too," Hi said. "That's why I knocked in the rain. I didn't want her carrying that belly across a wet yard with no cover." He nodded at the swelling front of the cottage, the way it curved like the woman herself. "You've got a lot to guard in there." The husband blinked. Something in his shoulders loosened. The door opened behind him. The woman stepped out, one hand on her round belly, Lily Rose gripping her leg. "Oh good, you two met," she said. She smiled at Hi. "This is the one I told you about. He's the reason I stayed dry last week." The husband glanced at his wife, then at the box in Hi's hands. He reached out and took it himself. "Still warm," he said. It wasn't quite a thank you. It was close. "Every Thursday, noon," Hi said. "If it storms, I'll bring the umbrella again." The husband almost smiled. "Do that." He turned and carried the box inside. Lily Rose waved at Hi with both hands before her mother scooped her up. The woman lingered in the doorway a second longer. "He's been jumpy lately," she said softly. "The baby. Thank you for being kind about it." Then she went in too, and the door closed. Hi walked back down the path. He was no longer the stranger in the yard. He was the delivery fox the husband knew by name, welcome at noon on Thursdays. But that was the trap of it. He was welcome now only as a friend of the family, the safe one, the harmless one. And the woman would soon have a newborn and a grateful husband filling every corner of that house.