I wanted to name him Fire-something, but Mother won. She wanted to make our home sound like a country-western cottage, even named it 'Sunset Ride', and decorated the house with 'Rustic Red' and 'Colonial Cream' latex paints and sheriff's stars and horse shoes and silver spurs, which she thought added a "homey touch". So we named him Rusty, and he hated this house. Mother wouldn't let him out without a "chaperone" (jailer), and at night he had to sleep in the bathroom, which smelled like Lysol and had newspaper all over the floor. She didn't like how I let him sit on the fence. Or how I didn't keep him on the porch with me. She didn't like a lot of things, now that I think about it. And then he ran away, to join the wild cats whose eyes I sometimes saw when I went on hikes, hikes in that beautiful green forest that already had signs celebrating the fact that it would be a highway soon. Sometimes I think if maybe we didn't name him Rusty he wouldn't have run off, save if we didn't make him sleep in the Lysol bathroom and feed him dried bunny poop pellets. Maybe if we named him the Fire-something, that something itching to bloom into a beautiful word that would explain his heart, his star inside that no one will ever extinguish for good, then he would have stayed, stayed and let me tell him about those wild cats in the forest who have a home deep in the forest, instead of going and seeing it for himself.