Chapter Two
Lark Phillips flipped through the magazine as she listened to her pint-sized niece tell the stylist about their upcoming trip to the Amazing Adventures Safari Park.
“So when are you going?” the woman asked as she trimmed Rayanne’s long blonde hair.
“Next weekend,” Rayanne said. “Mom and Dad can’t take me, and I absolutely need to see the eagle they have in the aviary.”
“Oh, you do?” the woman asked with a smile.
“Yes! He was injured and they rescued him and now he lives there. I’m not allowed to have social media, but Mom lets me use hers to get the daily video updates from the zookeepers. They only let people into the part of the exhibit where he is a few times a month, and Saturday is one of those times. I’m so excited.”
Lark chuckled. “In case you couldn’t tell.”
“Do you want to be a vet when you grow up?” the woman asked.
“I don’t know, maybe. Or an ornithologist. I’ll have to talk to the keepers there. Their names are Auden and Jess, and she’s so pretty! And Lark says he’s a cutie-patootie.”
“Oh, my gosh,” Lark said, her cheeks heating. “I said that one time, and you haven’t let me live it down.”
“They’re married anyway, I saw a ring on her finger, and he gives her goo-goo eyes,” Rayanne said, her voice dropping low with seriousness. “But maybe we can say hi to them, and maybe he has a cute brother.”
“Stop trying to fix me up with people, girl, I’m perfectly happy the way I am,” Lark said.
“Mom says different.”
“Tell your mom—” Lark stopped before she said something she couldn’t take back. Rayanne was a sweetheart, but she could not hold onto a secret for any amount of money. The girl was a human colander. “Tell her I’m happy.”
“I will. But she won’t believe me. Anyway, about the eagle…” Rayanne switched gears back to her favorite subject, talking the stylist’s ear off until she’d finished the cut and left to grab a hair dryer from another station.
Rayanne swiveled in the seat. “Do you think he’s lonely?”
“Who?”
“The eagle. He’s all by himself.”
“Maybe. Do birds get lonely?”
“Well, I read that some birds can die of loneliness when their mates die.”
“He’s doing okay, though. Maybe he didn’t have a girlfriend so he’s not really lonely. But you can ask the zookeepers if we get a chance to talk to them.”
Somehow, Lark was sure that her sister, Dove, and her husband, Lance, hadn’t actually been too busy to take Rayanne to the zoo next Saturday and had simply not wanted to spend a day listening to their daughter go on and on about the eagle. Lark didn’t mind, though. It wasn’t like she had a busy social calendar. She just had a nine-to-five at the township’s main office answering questions about the recycling program, selling pet licenses, and taking care of the other minutia of small-town living. She’d gotten the job in high school and really liked it. Small-town office stuff was her jam. And it left her weekends free to hang out with her favorite, and only, niece.
When Rayanne’s hair was done, the long blonde tresses lightly curled, they left the salon and walked along the strip mall to the ice cream place that had Lark’s favorite butter pecan and freshly made waffle cones.
“So, do you want to be a vet or an ornithologist? I’ve never heard you say vet before.”
Rayanne dug her spoon into the cup of cookie dough ice cream topped with hot fudge and marshmallow sauce. “I was just being nice. The lady didn’t know that bird doctors are called ornithologists.”
“Ah, gotcha. Bird Doctor Rayanne sounds good.”
“Obviously it would be Doctor Messner. I’m going to be a very important ornithologist, like Gustav Beretti, and people will be so excited to meet me because I’ll be an expert on eagles.”
Her niece was one determined eight-year-old. “I know you’re going to be an awesome ornithologist. And I’ll get to say I knew you when you were little.”
While they finished their ice cream, they talked about the park and the aviary until Lark thought she’d heard every single thing about the aviary three times over.
When they left the ice cream shop, Rayanne said, “I wish Mom had given me a bird name like you two have.”
“Well, our mom really loved birds, and your mom hated her name growing up. She swore she was going to change it as soon as she was eighteen, but she ended up sticking with it. I like our names because they’re unique. If you could have a bird name, what would you pick?”
Rayanne’s face scrunched up adorably, and then she said, “Raven. Or maybe Wren. Raven sounds like a villain, though.”
“True. But not all villains have dark-sounding names. Remember the book we read last year where the villain was named Beauty and the heroine was named Geraldine? And the point was that Beauty was a lovely name, but the girl was all evil on the inside, a classic ‘don’t judge a book by its cover,’ or rather, ‘don’t judge a person by their name.’”
“True. I’ll have a lot of kids when I grow up, and I’ll name them all after birds. Even the boys—Falcon, Hawk, and Eagle.”
She snorted. “You’re going to name one of your sons Eagle?”
“Yep, and he’ll love it.”
“If you say so. I’ll love all your kids, weird bird names or not. And I’ll be the best great-aunt ever.”
“I know you will, because you’re a great aunt to me.”
“Aw.” Her niece was a handful, but she was amazing too.
After dropping Rayanne off at a friend’s house to hang out for the afternoon, Lark headed to her own place—an apartment over a barbershop in one of the historic buildings on Main Street. She loved the vintage vibe of the buildings on Main, and when she’d been looking for a place, the spacious one-bedroom on the second floor of the brick building built in the 1800s had caught her eye immediately. The building was owned by the barber—an older gentleman named Frank—and his wife. They owned the barbershop and a salon down the street and were the best landlords she’d ever had; he acted more like a grandpa, and his wife often sent leftovers to her for dinner and invited her over frequently for meals.
Lark climbed the outside metal steps that led to her place and thought about the night that yawned ahead of her. She had laundry to do and could run the vacuum around, but what she really wanted to do was veg out and find something to binge-watch on TV. The laundry would be there tomorrow; it always was.
The only thing really missing from her life was—as her precocious niece pointed out—her lack of a boyfriend. Maybe she’d get lucky and meet the man of her dreams at the park while looking at birds and listening to Rayanne chat a mile a minute about them.
But probably, she’d leave with no new phone numbers and no romantic interests on the horizon. She wasn’t a fatalist, but she sure didn’t feel any romantic luck coming on.