Part 6 – The Seat That Stayed Empty
The bench felt different now.
Not just because Toby was gone—but because no one sat in his place.
Petal returned the next morning, waddling into the yard just after sunrise. She did her usual preening beside the rosemary bush, then circled the bench once, wings twitching like she was testing the air.
She didn’t sit.
Not where Toby had been.
Instead, she plopped herself down at the far right edge, two feet farther than normal, as if unwilling to touch the space that still held his shape.
Smokey came later that morning, unhaltered again. Pete didn’t stop him this time. He just leaned on the fence and gave Lorraine a tired nod.
The pony approached slowly, his ears flicking, breath puffing out like steam. He circled the bench once. Then stood behind it, close enough to touch it, but not quite ready to lie down again.
Lorraine sat on the porch with her coffee and the flannel scrap folded neatly in her lap.
Eli arrived not long after.
He walked through the gate like he had for years, though it had only been five days. Blue rode in the front pocket of his hoodie, eyes just peeking over the edge like two marbles floating in water.
“You didn’t have to come,” Lorraine said.
“I know,” Eli replied. “But it’s Tuesday.”
Lorraine smiled.
That had been their quiet agreement—Tuesdays and Saturdays, unless something important came up.
“I brought something,” the boy added.
He unzipped his backpack and pulled out a weathered paperback. Charlotte’s Web. Pages dog-eared, corners worn.
“He liked when I read,” Eli said. “I think.”
“I know he did.”
They sat on the bench together, side by side. Petal shifted slightly but didn’t protest. Smokey snorted, then settled behind them.
Eli read the first chapter aloud. Slowly. Softly.
The wind held its breath.
When he reached the part where Fern begs her father not to kill the runt pig, Lorraine blinked hard. Her eyes didn’t sting from wind this time.
She reached down and rested a hand on the flannel beside her.
It was strange. The weight of absence.
He wasn’t coming back. And yet, it felt like Toby was waiting just beyond the garden, just out of sight. She kept catching herself turning her head toward the porch as if expecting that slow, thumping tail against the wood.
“You miss him every hour,” she said aloud, not even realizing it.
Eli paused in his reading.
“Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”
—
That afternoon, Lorraine began to clean.
Not to erase him—she couldn’t bear that—but to honor the rhythm that Toby had left behind.
She washed his food bowls, dried them carefully, and placed them in a small wooden crate under the kitchen counter.
She folded his last blanket, the one not buried with him, and laid it gently at the bottom of an empty drawer.
She vacuumed up tufts of black fur from the corners of the hallway.
But when she reached for his collar—the one still hanging on the hook near the door—she froze.
Her hand hovered.
She couldn’t take it down.
Not yet.
Instead, she walked back outside, let the screen door slap shut behind her.
Eli was still at the bench, Blue curled in his lap. The kitten had grown bolder this week, venturing around the porch and even batting at Petal’s tail once, much to the duck’s dismay.
Lorraine sat beside him again.
“Do you think animals feel time the way we do?” she asked.
Eli shook his head. “I think they feel places. Not minutes.”
That sat with her a while.
She looked out across the backyard, the place that had become more than a yard—a sanctuary, a stage, a memory loop.
The trees at the edge still held their shape. The wind chimes above the porch still sang the same tired notes.
But without Toby, it felt like everything leaned a little differently.
Like the world had been tilted, ever so slightly, toward the empty spot beside the bench.
—
That night, it rained.
A soft, misty drizzle that soaked the grass without a sound. Lorraine left the porch light on just in case one of the animals returned.
She sat by the window, knitting the same scarf she’d started last fall and never finished. Her hands moved slowly now—less from age, more from memory. The thread felt familiar in her fingers, like something to hold onto.
She didn’t expect what she saw around midnight.
It wasn’t Petal.
Wasn’t Smokey.
It was a raccoon.
Old, ragged, slow-moving.
It climbed the fence without much grace, landed with a grunt, and padded toward the bench like it had done it a hundred times before.
Lorraine tensed—normally she would’ve clapped her hands, scared it off.
But this time, she watched.
The raccoon sniffed the legs of the bench.
Then it sat.
Right where Toby used to lie.
Lorraine blinked once, twice, unsure.
It didn’t look injured. Just old. And tired. Like it had come to the only place it remembered as quiet.
The rain fell harder.
The raccoon didn’t move.
She whispered through the glass: “You too?”
She let the porch light burn until morning.