The cat that wasn't ours kept coming back to the porch, and we kept not naming it, as though naming were the thing that made an animal yours and we weren't ready for anything else to be ours that year.
My brother fed it anyway. Said a name wasn't required for kindness, which was the kind of thing he said often that summer, usually about people too.
By August it slept in the gap between the porch rail and the wall, a soft animal-shaped silence that neither of us mentioned to our mother, who was, by then, sleeping in a similar gap of her own — between the woman she'd been and whoever she was going to have to become.
We never named the cat. It left in September, the way most soft things did that year, without ceremony, without a sound we noticed until after it was gone.