Heart with Joy

A Novel by

Steve Cushman

Published by Canterbury House Publishing, Ltd.

www.canterburyhousepublishing.com

at Smashwords

Book design by Aaron Burleson

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cushman, Steve, 1969-

Heart with joy / by Steve Cushman.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-9825396-3-7

1. Teenage boys--Fiction. 2. Fathers and sons--Fiction. 3. Mothers and

sons--Fiction. 4. Maturation (Psychology)--Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction.

I. Title.

PS3603.U84H43 2010

813’.6--dc22

2010019846

For Juliet and Trevor

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following for help, guidance, and friendship along the way: Joyce and Chuck Snyder, Valerie and Mike Hale, Roger and Gwen Hart, Barbara Hughes, Amy Rogers, Frye Gailliard, Judy Davis, Sonja Boles, Debra Coble, and Wendy Dingwall. And Juliet and Trevor, once again, I can’t say thank you enough.

The year I turned fifteen two things happened that took me by surprise: my mother moved out and my father decided to run a marathon. My mother left first. On February 8th, I came home from school and found Mom packing two suitcases: one with clothes, the other with her old typewriter and drafts of the novel she’d been working on for years. She told me she was going to Venice, Florida to help run her parents’ motel and to try and finish her novel.

Of course, I wanted to go with her, but she said she wouldn’t be gone too long, that she was only staying down there until her father hired a manager. Mom told me I should finish the school year here in North Carolina and if she was still living in Florida at the beginning of summer I could come spend time with her there. Part of me wanted to believe she moved down there because of the reasons she had said. But the other part of me, the part I tried not to listen to, knew this was a separation of sorts between my Mom and Dad. While I had never seen them fighting or yelling at each other, which is how I thought unhappily married people acted I rarely saw them do much together in the year or two before she left.

Dad worked fifty to sixty hours a week as a nurse so Mom could stay home and take care of me and work on her writing. I spent most of my time with her, cooking or walking or talking. She liked to talk about her novel and I liked to listen to her, particularly after she’d been drinking and the words seemed to slide out of her mouth, her soft southern accent rising to the surface.

Six weeks after Mom left, at the beginning of April, my father came home from work one night, and without a word to me, changed out of his light blue nurse’s scrubs into sweat pants and a long sleeved T-shirt. He stretched for five minutes on the porch steps, then ran out of our front yard.

It occurred to me as I lost sight of him, that he might not come back at all. And I thought if he didn’t come back Mom would be forced to either return home or let me live with her in Florida. Either way, we would be together again. But that first night, he made it home in about thirty minutes. He stood out on the porch, hands on hips, covered in sweat, breathing like a man taking his last few breaths. When he came inside, Dad poured himself a tall glass of water and drank it in one mouthful. “I needed that,” he said. I wasn’t sure if he meant the exercise or the water.

For dinner I had made meatloaf and corn. I didn’t think my cooking was anything special, but my father never complained about it. The first few weeks after Mom left, he would bring home pizza or maybe a box of chicken from KFC. He’d even forgotten about dinner a couple times. When this happened, I would knock on his bedroom door and ask, “Dad, what’s for dinner?”

After a long silence, he’d say, “I could go get something.” I would tell him not to bother and go make grilled cheese sandwiches or hot dogs or hamburgers again.

These foods might sound like a teenage boy’s idea of a perfect meal, but I missed my mother’s nightly servings of vegetables and chicken or fish. Mom loved to drink wine and listen to music, especially Van Morrison, and dance around the kitchen when she cooked. She’d showed me everything I knew about cooking, the important parts of any recipe and she told me to never cook chicken on high, but to always cook steak on high. So once it became clear that my father would not be taking over the nightly cooking chores, I found Mom’s old cookbooks, her little box of recipes, and started cooking for my father and me.

After his shower that first night of running, Dad picked at the meatloaf I’d made and said, “Julian, I’d like to run a marathon.” His face was still pink and his dark hair was wet in spots.

“A marathon?” My first thought was that he’d gone a little crazy. He had no right to think he could run twenty-six miles. It wasn’t that he was incredibly out of shape, or fat, but he was soft and looked nothing like the few joggers I’d seen in our neighborhood. The closest thing to exercise he’d done in the last few years was mow the yard.

“There’s one in six months, over in Charlotte. I think I can do it. It’ll be a lot of work.” He rolled a forkful of meatloaf around in his ketchup. “I’ve got to do this.” His eyes were bright, brighter than I had seen them in a long time.

He ate the rest of the meal quickly, like a starving man, then walked back to his room. His nightly routine, since Mom left, was to take a shower as soon as he got home from work, then eat a silent dinner with me before disappearing into his bedroom where he listened to Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue,” CD until he fell asleep.

Alone in the kitchen, washing the pan I’d used for the meatloaf, I realized that was the longest conversations we’d had since our big fight two weeks earlier. I can’t say why I picked that particular morning to confront him about her leaving since she’d already been gone a month by then. But as I listened to the shower running that morning, I grew angrier. I thought if there was someone to blame for Mom’s leaving it was my father. I had to find out what was going on. When I’d asked before, he said to ask her, but I wasn’t going to let him get away with that this time.

He walked out of the bathroom with the towel wrapped around his waist and seemed surprised to see me standing there in the hall. “Morning,” he said.

“What’s going on?” I asked, trying to stay calm.

“What do you mean?”

“With you and Mom.”

“Julian, I don’t want to talk about this now. I’ve got to get to work.”

“You always have to go to work. That’s the problem. That’s why she left.”

His eyes narrowed and for a moment I thought he might hit me, though I couldn’t remember the last time he’d spanked or even touched me. ”Did she tell you that?” Dad asked.

“No. She didn’t have to. I’m not stupid. We never did anything together as a family.”

“What do you want me to say?” he asked, closing his eyes, starting to lose patience.

“Admit it’s your fault.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “If you want to believe it’s my fault she left, then fine believe that.” He shook his head and walked in his room to get dressed for work.

I went outside, shaking with anger. I paced back and forth, cold and barefoot in the backyard. When I heard his truck pull out of the driveway, I went back inside and grabbed the first thing of his I saw. On the living room mantel was an empty white ceramic pot, about a foot tall. It was wide at the bottom, but tapered toward the top where there were painted purple and yellow flowers. And about half-way up there were a pair of blue lines, like racing stripes, circling the pot.

This piece of pottery had been there for as long as I could remember and I’d been told more than once by my mother not to touch it, that it was my father’s. But at that moment, what I wanted was to destroy something of his, to make him feel as bad as I did. I lifted the pot high above my head and threw it at the wall. It shattered. Take that, I thought, you deserve it.

When I returned home that afternoon, I swept all the pieces of the pot into a dustpan and threw them in the garbage. My father didn’t seem to notice the pot was missing because he didn’t mention it, or the fight and my accusations of blame, and neither did I.

The morning after my father announced his plans to run a marathon, I was sitting in a chair on our back porch, eating a bowl of corn flakes. I liked to sit out there all alone, in the mornings, particularly since it was the beginning of April and in the fifties, cool but not freezing.

“Young man.”

It was a woman’s voice. My first thought was that it might be something on TV, but neither my father nor I watched TV in the mornings and he’d been gone for almost an hour already. He usually left for work by six. Then I heard the voice again, “Young man, I could use a little help here.”

It was coming from my neighbor’s backyard. Old Lady Peters lived alone in the two-story white house next door and the fence between our yards was so overgrown with shrubs that I couldn’t see anything over there except for the tree tops and her porch’s roof. I rarely saw her outside and the only time I had ever stood face to face with the woman was the day she ran over my right leg, back when I was ten years old.

I wanted to open the sliding glass door and step inside and pretend I hadn’t heard her but knew I couldn’t. Maybe she’d fallen and was injured. Mr. Taylor, my social studies teacher, was always talking about the importance of making the right choice in moral decisions, and here I was faced with one. I wished my father was still home, so he could go and check on her, but of course he wasn’t.

I cleared my throat and started down the steps. Her yard was surrounded by a six-foot, wooden fence and her shrubs extended a couple feet higher. My heart beat fast as I walked to the gate between our two houses. What did she want with me? I lifted the handle and took a deep breath.

After she ran over my leg, my parents told me not to go in her yard again. Not that I had had any desire to go in some old lady’s backyard. Last year, I accidentally threw a Frisbee over the fence but didn’t bother going after it. The next day, I found the Frisbee in the middle of my backyard.

Once inside the gate, I saw a mulch trail bordered the shrubs, surrounding the entire yard. To my right, I could see a bricked patio with a wooden table in the middle of it, a flowering dogwood next to the patio and a screened-in porch. I took a couple tentative steps forward, still nervous about entering this yard that had been offlimits to me.

When I heard a loud meow, I looked down and spotted a cat. It was black except for a white patch on his underbelly. I was about to pet the cat when I heard her voice again: “You going to stand there or help?”

I turned back to the patio and saw her this time. For some reason, Old Lady Peters was on her knees, reaching into the house’s crawl space. Maybe she was stuck and needed me to pull her out.

I walked over and bent down beside her. She crawled out of the shallow crawl space.

“Just reach in there,” she said, wiping the dirt off her hands.

“See if you can grab it.”

It? What exactly was it? I slid down into the cool dirt that surrounded the house. Was it another cat? A snake or a spider? With no clue what I was looking for, I reached in deep, felt my hand brush something soft and small, but it moved. My first thought was that it might be a hamster or a gerbil. As I pulled my hand back, whatever it was bit down on the tip of my index finger. “Ouch,” I said, pulling my hand out, expecting to see blood, but instead there was only a tiny indention at the tip of my finger. Surprisingly, it didn’t hurt.

Old Lady Peters sat a foot away, on her knees. Under a pair of overalls, she had on a long sleeved white shirt. There was a yellow bandana around her neck and on the ground by her knees was a large brown gardening hat.

All the kids in our neighborhood had speculated about her age, and my closest friend at the time, Dennis Kindl, said he thought she was well over one hundred. This close to her I could see her face was so pale that the blue veins under the surface were traceable against her flesh. While I was no expert on guessing the age of old people I didn’t think she’d quite reached ninety.

“What are you waiting for?” she asked, setting the hat on her head.

“What is it?”

“A bird. He won’t hurt you,” she said.

This time I held on as the bird bit into the tip of my finger and pulled it out. It was no heavier than a store-bought egg.

“A house sparrow,” she said. “I put a bell on that cat’s collar and he still gets a couple birds a week.” She took the bird from me and curled it in her hands. A few feathers stuck to my palm.

Without saying anything else, she turned and headed up the steps that led to her porch and disappeared inside. I stood up, not quite sure what to do. The cat walked between my ankles, purring loudly, the silver bell jingling around his neck.

Turning away from the house, I saw what those shrubs had always hidden from me: her backyard. The yard itself wasn’t fancy, just a square of grass split in half by a brick path. On each side of the path was a birdfeeder and birdbath. Toward the back of the yard were a couple of tall leafless bushes with a bench between them. And those tall shrubs surrounded the whole yard, as if some sort of natural fencing from the outside world.

I stood there, expecting her to come out and say something to me. After a couple minutes, when she didn’t re-appear, I headed back out her gate, escorted by the cat, to finish getting ready for school.

I wasn’t good at sports, didn’t belong to any clubs or participate in extracurricular activities, so school was just something I did for eight hours a day, like a job I didn’t get paid for. Since Mom left, I usually daydreamed through much of the school day, thinking about whether or not she was coming home, and how if she didn’t, I was looking forward to spending the summer with her in Florida. And while I never mentioned it to either of my parents, how I planned to move down there and live with Mom for good if she wasn’t coming back.

But I’d spent a good part of this day thinking about what happened earlier with Old Lady Peters. I knew she lived alone and her son came by every Sunday morning. I assumed they went to church and the grocery store because she always wore a dress and when they returned he would carry bags of groceries inside for her. Before leaving, he’d set her garbage cans by the road. On Monday nights, he stopped by and put the garbage cans away.

Her son was tall and thin. He drove a grey Lexus and whenever I spotted him on Monday evenings he always wore a suit. I never saw him in a pair of shorts, even in the middle of the summer, pushing the mower around her yard.

On the day Old Lady Peters ran over my leg, Dennis and I were playing catch. I stood on the edge of her yard while he stood under the oak tree in my front yard, throwing an old baseball back and forth. Dennis threw the ball over my head and it rolled into Old Lady Peters’ driveway, under her car.

Her driveway was not paved like all the others in the neighborhood but lined with multi-colored stones. The stones were about the size of a quarter, beautiful and dusty—there were yellows, oranges, blues, pinks, greens, reds— every color you could imagine.

Sometimes on Sunday mornings when Old Lady Peters was at the grocery store, we would take some of the stones and throw them into Dennis’ pool and then dive under water, collecting as many as possible before coming up for air. That summer, Dennis had the record—sixteen.

As I headed toward her driveway, I wondered where the stones came from. Neither Dennis nor I knew the answer, but believed they must come from somewhere far away, maybe Florida or Hawaii, some place where they had palm trees. It didn’t seem possible they could be from North Carolina and especially not from Greensboro, which was one of those quiet towns people said was good for starting a family but not too exciting for a teenager.

As I crawled under the car, the stones dug into the back of my legs. I remember how the car’s undercarriage was covered in grease and what looked like clay from a baseball field. I tried to picture her spinning donuts in our little league field, but that didn’t make sense. When I turned back to Dennis again, he was staring up at something in the oak tree.

I couldn’t reach the ball, so I kicked it out the other side. Then I heard a loud strange sound, sort of like a train. It was the car starting above me. I crawled out as fast as I could. I had almost made it when the front wheel on the passenger side rolled over my right leg, just above the ankle. After I screamed, the car stopped and everything grew quiet. But here’s the strange thing: my leg didn’t hurt at all. It had been buried into the stones, into a leg-shaped crater that had somehow opened up in the ground.

When I looked up, Old Lady Peters stood above me. She wore a red dress with white polka dots and was pointing her finger at me. “Young man, what are you doing under my car?” she asked, more

annoyed than surprised to find me there.

I stood up, pushed past Old Lady Peters, and ran home with Dennis following behind. My mother was sitting out on the back porch, typing away on her old typewriter, a cigarette between her lips, an ashtray full of butts next to the typewriter. After calming me down, she drove me to the emergency room for X-rays. Thankfully nothing was broken, only a slight bruise on my calf that lasted a couple days.

The following weekend, my father and Old Lady Peters’ son stood out in her front yard and had a brief conversation, which ended with the two of them shaking hands and Dad coming inside and telling me not to go in her yard or talk to her again.

After school, on the day I’d pulled the sparrow from beneath Old Lady Peters’ house, I was walking up my driveway, passing her gate, when I heard her voice again: “The bird didn’t make it.”

I couldn’t see her and it was as if the fence and shrubs were talking to me.

“That’s the fifth one he’s killed this year.”

“Why?” I asked.

“He’s a cat. It’s what he does. I wish he wouldn’t kill them, but we all have to die when it’s our time. Nobody can stop that, not you or me.”

I leaned toward the shrubs, waiting for her to say something else. After a few minutes, I said, “See you later.”

When she didn’t say anything, I shook my head and went inside to watch the Food Network before getting started on dinner.

I was cutting carrots into finger-sized sticks when my father walked in the front door from his second night of running. “What’s on the menu?”

“Orange-glazed chicken and carrots,” I said.

“Sounds good, orange poop in the morning,” he said, then laughed and headed for the shower. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard him laugh.

I flipped the chicken. The first side had seared up nice. I stirred the orange glaze sauce in another pan and dropped the carrots into a pot of boiling water.

For me the greatest challenge of cooking was when you had three or four different things going at once and you had to work it so they were all ready at the same time. Mom always made it look easy, the way she sort of fluttered around the room, moving a pan this way or that, sipping on her wine, Van Morrison singing about some poor lost soul in a faraway land. And working with my mother, I discovered that I actually liked to cook and enjoyed the challenge of reading a recipe, placing all the ingredients on the counter and turning it into a complete meal. Not that I would confess this to anyone but her. If Dennis, or any of my classmates knew, I was pretty sure they’d give me a hard time about it.

As the sauce simmered, I walked out onto the back porch. I looked over at Old Lady Peters’ yard as sparrows flew in and out of her shrubs. Why was she so concerned about birds? They were everywhere.

When I heard the shower stop, I headed back inside and poured the sauce over the chicken, let it sizzle and pop for a few seconds and then set the chicken breasts on our plates and sprinkled some parsley over them.

“I’m going to have to start paying you for meals like this,” Dad said, as he sat down at the table.

For some reason, he was trying to be Mr. Funny tonight. “Have a good run?”

He shook his head. “Got a long way to go. How was school?”

“Fine. Work?”

Dad shrugged. He didn’t normally talk about work. Mom had told me not to ask him about it. She said all those sick people took a lot out of him.

“It was okay except for this one patient of mine, Mr. Parker. He kept peeing in his garbage can.”

“Why?”

“When people get old, their mind starts to go. At least he didn’t pee on the floor.”

“Do you think that’s what’s wrong with the lady next door?”

“Mrs. Peters?”

I nodded.

“Why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering.” I could tell from the look on my father’s face that I shouldn’t have brought her up.

“Remember we told you to leave her alone.”

“I know, Dad.” I picked up my father’s empty plate and set it in the sink.

“Man, that was good.”

“Thanks.”

“You have homework?”

“Not too much.”

“Don’t stay up too late,” he said, then walked off to his room, limping a little.

After cleaning up, I decided to go for a walk. Mom and I used to go for walks two or three nights a week. Sometimes we would wait until Dad went to sleep and then just as I was tired and ready to go to bed myself, she would say, “Let’s go see what we can see.”

On those nights, sometimes as late as midnight, we would circle our block. The majority of the houses would be dark, lit by only a porch light. Mom always wanted to hold my hand. And while it embarrassed me as I got older, I never pulled away.

I was a mamma’s boy. There, I said it. She made me feel special because of the way she talked to me as if I were an adult like her, as if the things I said were important. She never talked down to me. I was comfortable with her in ways I never was with kids my own age or even my father. When my father and I were together it usually felt like one of us needed to say something and then when we did speak, it sounded forced.

Plus, I thought my mother was special. I didn’t know anyone else whose mother had written five novels, even if none of them had been published, or who would stand in her living room reading poetry out loud or belonged to a writer’s group that met once a month, on Saturday nights, at the local bookstore.

I walked passed Dennis’ house. Dennis and I had been friends, and gone to school together, since my family moved here when I was in the third grade. But the year my mother left, at the beginning of 10th grade, Dennis’ parents took him out of our school and sent him to Greensboro Day, a private prep school. Dennis played tennis, was actually really good, and his parents thought that Greensboro Day would give him a better chance of getting a tennis scholarship at a top college.

Dennis was a nice enough guy even if his major interests in life were girls and playing tennis—in that order. Sometimes I’d see Dennis every day for a week and then not for a solid two weeks. Whenever you were with Dennis, everything was about him, but I didn’t mind. He was the sort of friend I needed since I was shy by nature, preferring to let other people talk and have all the attention.

I considered going up and knocking on his door but knew he probably wasn’t home. He practiced with his private coach at least two hours a day. I wondered what he would think of me going into Old Lady Peters’ back yard. He was the one who started calling her that in the first place. Whenever he told the story of how she ran over my leg, he would call her Old Lady Peters and the name stuck.

When I turned the corner, a black dog charged at me. I flinched. At the edge of the yard the dog stopped, let out a squeal. It was Sam, the Sanborn’s shiny black lab. The Sanborns lived two doors down from Dennis. They had one of those invisible fences that shocked the dog if it tried to step out of the yard. Even though Sam had charged me and stopped a hundred times before, it still seemed possible for a moment that this would be the time he would break through and attack me.

“Sam, knock that off.”

I looked up and Lucy Sanborn was standing at her front door. She had on grey sweat pants and a blue T-shirt, tied into a knot, so that a couple inches of her stomach were exposed. She was holding a book, a paperback of some kind. She was sixteen, only one year ahead of me at school, but she seemed to be part of another world, way out of my league. Lucy drove a green Jeep Wrangler and as a freshman she had dated a senior named Zeke Cole who ended up going to UNC on a basketball scholarship.

The first time I ever saw Lucy was two days after we moved in the neighborhood. My mother and I were out on one our walks. The city had replaced a section of the sidewalk, and the cement was still wet. Up ahead, we spotted a girl with long hair squatting down, writing in the cement with a stick. When she saw us coming, she threw the stick down and ran away, as if we were the sidewalk police.

She had drawn a little flower with her name, “Lucy,” beside it. My mother laughed, asked if I wanted to write something. I said no, I didn’t think I should. I didn’t like to draw attention to myself and with a name like Julian it would be clear who’d written in the sidewalk.

“Oh, Julian, live a little.”

But you weren’t supposed to write in wet cement. My mother bent over and added, with her index finger, a heart and the date below Lucy’s name and flower.

“Lucy,” she said. “That’s a good name for a girl. We need to find you a girlfriend.”

“You’re crazy, Mom.” I was only eight.

“Maybe,” she said.

I never felt comfortable around girls and doubted most guys my age did. I’d only had one real girlfriend, Heather Swinterbach. She had red hair and a forehead full of freckles. We’d dated the previous summer mostly because Dennis was dating Joannie, her best friend. Think of it as dating for convenience. It was fun for a while and we kissed a lot but never did end up doing it. The closest we ever came was one hot afternoon in August when we’d laid in her bed naked, running our hands across each others’ body, feeling for wetness and excitement. She even had freckles on the inside of her thighs and I’d taken great pleasure exploring them with my fingers like some scientist charting a constellation I was discovering for the first time.

But after the summer, Dennis and Joannie broke up and soon after Heather and I split up too. And then my mother left, and the thought of dating a girl was the furthest thing from my mind.

“Sorry about that,” Lucy said, referring to Sam, who was still pacing back and forth along the perimeter of his yard.

“It’s okay,” I said.

She waved to me, said, “Goodnight.”

I headed home, propelled by the cool spring air and the thrill of a black dog and an inch or two of Lucy Sanborn’s exposed stomach.

Mom called every Wednesday and Saturday night at seven o’clock sharp. I usually answered on the first ring. Dad and I had already eaten and he was in his bedroom when the phone started ringing.

“Hey, Julian.”

“Mom, how ya doing?”

“Good. Hot. Made it into the low nineties today.”

“Only sixty here,” I said. I didn’t care about the weather. I wanted to ask her the same question I always did: why did you really leave us? But, like every previous phone call, I chickened out.

She asked about school and if the trees were in full bloom yet. I told her school was okay and that everything was in bloom—the red buds, the cherry trees in the neighborhood, and the white dogwood in our backyard. Pollen was everywhere, like a yellow curtain covering our lives.

She started talking about her novel, how she might have finally figured out the best way to finish it. I listened but knew this ending probably wasn’t the right one either. She’d told me fifty other times how she’d figured out the ending, each different and the correct one. But she never let me read the thing. She said she wanted to wait until she was done, until it was really polished.

After she’d left, I found little notes everywhere—in drawers and cabinets, even in her recipe box—that didn’t make sense to me: Dean should be happy at the end. Make Carl cuter. Would Shelly really fall for a guy like Bob? What’s the conflict here? Why bother!!

When I asked my father about them, he said they were notes for her novels and the kind of things writers asked themselves about their characters.

As she talked about her novel, I wanted to tell her what had happened with Old Lady Peters. I thought she’d get a kick out of it. I knew she’d appreciate it more than Dad.

Then she asked what she always did toward the end of our conversations, “How’s your father holding up?”

“Good,” I said. “He’s decided to run a marathon.” I knew it was something he should probably tell her, but they didn’t talk much when she called. If they did talk, and this was usually on Saturdays, he’d get on the line and go out on the back porch to talk to her for a few minutes before handing me the phone, so I could say goodnight.

I heard her take a deep pull on her cigarette. “Is he really?”

“He started training a couple days ago.”

“Good for him,” she said. “Does he go by himself?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe you should go with him.”

That had never occurred to me. “I’m not much of a runner.”

“Neither is your father,” she said, which made me laugh. “Maybe you could ride beside him on your bike. Just in case he gets hurt or something. Keep him company.”

“He’s fine,” I said. But I liked that she was asking about him and even sounded concerned.

“Well, I better go.”

“All right then. Love you, Mom.”

“Love you more,” she said. Before she hung up, she walked outside and held the phone up to the Florida night. I could hear wind and imagined palm trees swaying gently and the swell of the ocean less than a mile from the motel. Imagine one of those sea shells you put up to your ear and hear the ocean. This was like that, only magnified and distorted through phone lines.

After hanging up, I walked to my father’s door and considered knocking, telling him that Mom said hi and had asked about him, even confessing that I’d told her about his running. But the music had stopped and there was no light leaking under the door, so I figured he was probably asleep.

On Friday afternoon, walking up my driveway, I heard Old Lady Peters again, “Young man, come here.”

Had she been waiting for me to come home? Maybe another bird was trapped beneath her house. The cat greeted me again at the gate with a soft nip at my shoes.

Old Lady Peters sat at one end of a wooden table on the patio. A carton of milk, a silver tea pot and two coffee mugs were in the middle of the table. “Thirsty?”

I wasn’t but said sure as I sat at the opposite end of the table. Beside the milk, there were a half-dozen sugar cookies on a paper plate. I assumed she meant for me to take a cookie, so I did. It was funny, milk and cookies. Did she think I was five years old? I imagined telling my mother I’d had milk and cookies with Old Lady Peters.

“Tea?”

“No, thanks.”

She poured me some milk and a cup of tea for herself. As she sipped her tea, I drank the milk, not sure what I was supposed to do or say. A sparrow landed on the table between us. I jumped back. “Settle down,” she said. I didn’t know if she was talking to me or the bird. It took a couple steps towards Old Lady Peters. She broke one of the sugar cookies into four pieces and held one out for the bird. It took the cookie from her hand and flew away.

Because I could think of nothing else to say, I said, “My name is Julian Hale.”

She smiled. The blue lines across her face moved. “I know your name. I assume you know mine.”

For some reason, I was surprised she did know my name. Besides the day she ran over my leg, we’d probably said a dozen words to each other in the years we’d been neighbors. “Mrs. Peters.”

“Yes, it’s Evelyn, Evelyn Peters. You can call me Evelyn or Mrs. Peters. That little flea-infested, bird-killer is Lucky.”

The sparrow landed on the table again. It chattered, opened and closed its mouth, hopped this way and that, as if it were walking on hot coals. She held out another bit of cookie and the bird took it, flew away up into the dogwood above us. Old Lady Peters kept sipping her tea as if nothing out of the usual was happening.

“Can you do me a favor?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“I think I strained my back the other day, trying to get that bird out from under the house. Could you change my birdfeeders and the water in the birdbaths?”

I nodded.

“The bird seed is over there,” she said, pointing to a five-gallon bucket over by the porch steps.

I carried the bucket into the yard while she stayed at the table, sipping her tea. The feeders were cylinder-like green tubes about a foot long and almost empty. There was a small, plastic cup inside the bucket for scooping out the bird food, which was a combination of sunflower seeds and different types of nuts, even a few raisins.

By the time I filled the second feeder, a dozen of those sparrows had landed on the first one. Old Lady Peters stared off into the shrubs. After the feeders, I turned the hose on, rinsed out the dirty water in the birdbaths and filled them with fresh water. She didn’t say anything, so I assumed I’d done it right.

When I got back to the table, she said, “Look over there.”

“What?”

“The birdhouse.”

I noticed for the first time that in the wall of shrubs, which separated our two backyards, there was a birdhouse attached to the fence. There were two sparrows sitting atop the birdhouse. One would fly inside for a few seconds and then fly back out. Then the two birds would stand face to face, opening and closing their beaks as if talking.

“They’ve been at it a couple weeks now. The one with the black square under his chin is the father. Mom spends most of her time sitting on the eggs. He brings her food. In a couple weeks, the babies will hatch. Come on, let’s get a better look. Bring that bucket.”

I grabbed the bucket and followed her. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to bother the birds but I was curious. As we reached the birdhouse, I could see a feather sticking out.

We heard this shrieking sound and the father sparrow flew down, as if telling us to get away. “Well, maybe not today,” Old Lady Peters said, backing away from the birdhouse.

“Okay,” I said.

She turned to me. “Do you think you could help me out for a week or two, until my back feels better?”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

“I’ll pay you.”

“You don’t have to,” I said. “But what about your son?”

“What about him?”

“Won’t he want to do it when he comes over?” I was starting to not make sense, even to myself. “I don’t mind doing it, really. I just didn’t know if he would want to.”

“Trust me, young man, he won’t. I’d rather he not know I hurt my back. Simon says that the disarray of my garden is further evidence of my decreased mental capacity. I know he’s a lawyer, but is that any way to talk to your mother?”

I shook my head. His name was Simon? “Really, it’s no problem. I’d be glad to.”

“Thank you. Would you like to see the rest of my garden?”

“Sure,” I said, although I thought I could see it from where we were.

“Lucky, show us the way.”

Lucky headed down the brick path that split the yard, or garden as she called it, in half. The path ended at a pair of bushes at the back of the yard. “These are my butterfly bushes. They don’t look like much now but by the middle of summer they’ll be ten feet high and covered with little white and purple flowers.”

She was right; they looked like any old bush, about five feet high with green-leafed branches.

“They’ll attract butterflies, but the real reason I have them is for the hummingbirds.”

We stopped at a bench between the two butterfly bushes. “In a month or so I’ll sit out here and listen to them buzz all around me. For now, I have a hummingbird feeder to get their attention, in case they show up before the flowers come in.”

The hummingbird feeder was on the back side of the bushes. It looked pretty simple: a clear plastic tube filled with water. At the bottom of the tube was a red circular base with a half dozen holes.

“Do they drink water?” I asked.

“Four parts water to one part sugar. They like the sweet stuff.”

An alarm on Old Lady Peters’ black wrist watch started going off. “Time for The Price Is Right. I’ve got a date with Bob Barker.” I knew who Bob Barker was; I’d even watched the show a few times. But to set your alarm to it seemed strange.

“Young man, walk me to that door,” she said, holding her arm out. It was the sort of thing my mother would do. I held onto her left elbow. We walked back up the brick path without speaking. I opened the screen door and she went inside. In my opinion, she didn’t walk like someone whose back was hurt.

I walked out the gate, in a good mood, feeling like I’d discovered something. But when I looked up, Dennis was walking up my driveway, carrying his tennis bag, smirking. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Bullshit.” Dennis was blond and smiled a lot.

“I threw my Frisbee over there and went to get it.”

He looked down at my empty hands. “Where’s the Frisbee?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t find it. It must have landed in the shrubs or something.”

“Maybe the old bag stole it.”

“Shut up,” I said, afraid she’d hear us.

“Whatever. I gotta take a piss.” He started up my back porch steps without an invitation.

As Dennis used the bathroom, I drank a glass of water, hoping now that we were inside he’d forget about seeing me coming out of her backyard. I used the bathroom after he did. When I came out, he was sitting on my living room couch, leafing through one of my Rachael Ray cookbooks. “This chick is hot.”

“Give me that,” I said. “It’s my mother’s.” I took the book from him and set it on the kitchen table. I wasn’t going to tell him the book was mine. “No practice today?”

“Coach is sick, so I get the day off. Unless you want to play a set or two.” Dennis had no problem taking me to the tennis court and running me around for an hour. Once a year, or so, I’d agree to a game, forgetting the embarrassment of playing with someone who was worlds better than me. Afterwards, I’d promise myself never again.

“No thanks,” I said.

He’d turned the TV on. It was that Giada lady from the show

“Everyday Italian.” I’d left the TV on the Food Network last night. I usually watched Rachael Ray or Bobby Flay when I got home from school. But Rachael was my favorite. She made cooking look so easy, the way she juggled things back and forth and gave you the feeling you could cook anything. Plus, she was cute and funny.

“Damn, this chick is hot too. I bet you jerk off to her every night.”

“Would you shut up, Dennis?” But I did have to admit Giada was hot and wore ridiculously low cut shirts. We settled in to watch her make shrimp scampi. At least if he was distracted with her, he’d probably forget about Old Lady Peters.

When the show was over, I asked, “So where’s Anna?” Anna was his girlfriend. Like Dennis, she played tennis and was blond.

“I don’t know. I tried calling earlier but she didn’t answer.”

He pulled his cell phone out and dialed her number. When she didn’t answer, he texted her some message. He saw me looking at his phone. “You need to get a cell phone,” he said. He’d told me this about a hundred times.

“Naw, I don’t think so.”

No one in my family had one. Both my parents said they were a waste of time. It was safe to say we weren’t the most technologically advanced family. Mom did all her writing on a typewriter. The laptop I used for homework was so slow that surfing the internet was a joke. I’d log on to check e-mail and could go and use the bathroom before anything came up.

Dennis flicked through the channels until he found a movie he wanted to watch, some comedy with Jim Carey. I’d seen the movie before. “This okay?” he asked.

“It’s fine.”

A few minutes into the movie, I looked over and Dennis had fallen asleep. I shook my head. He was a piece of work, but he wasn’t really a bad guy. Last year, he’d organized an MS walk when he’d found out one of the school librarians had Multiple Sclerosis. The event had gone off well, even got a big write-up in the local paper, and he’d raised over five thousand dollars for the local MS chapter. My mother said he’d probably only done it so he could put it on his college application. She was probably right, but at least he’d done something, helped a few people.

I took the remote control and changed it back to Food Network, lowered the volume. Bobby Flay was grilling fish tacos. They looked good, and I decided to try and make them soon. I held the remote control in my hand ready to change it back in case Dennis woke up.

When he finally did wake up, we played blackjack and fivecard stud. Dennis’ dad had a weekly poker match at their house and Dennis said he wanted to get better at it before he asked his dad if he could join. Like most things, Dennis was better than me at poker. Thankfully, we only used Monopoly money. He’d have no problem taking twenty dollars from me, even though his parents had a lot more money than mine. His dad was vice-president of something or other at the hospital where my dad worked.

“You know what we need to get you, Hale?”

“I can’t imagine,” I said, knowing what he was going to say.

“We need to get you a girlfriend.”

I shook my head. “No, thanks. I’ll be out of here in a couple months.”

He nodded. “That’s right.”

Dennis never mentioned my mother but he had told me the first week she was gone that if I ever wanted to talk about it he’d be glad to listen. We heard the front door open and my father walked in. I hadn’t realized it was almost six.

“Hey, Mr. Hale,” Dennis said.

“Hey guys,” Dad said, walking back to his room.

Dennis looked at me and was about to say something but didn’t.

“I better get going. My mom is probably going to have dinner ready soon.”

My dad came out dressed in his running outfit, sweat pants and a long sleeved T-shirt. “What’s for dinner, Julian?”

I looked at Dennis. He raised his eyebrows a little.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Dad shrugged and walked out the front door.

Dennis looked over at the cookbook. “Your mom’s, huh?”

“Well somebody around here has to cook. I usually just heat us up some TV dinners.”

“Sure you do,” he said, heading for the door.

While Dad was out on his run, I made tilapia with caramelized walnuts for dinner. I had the lightly breaded tilapia in one sauce pan and the walnuts smothered in butter, and a bit of sugar, in another pan. The snow peas had already boiled. The butter smelled good.

The tilapia recipe came from one of my Rachael Ray cookbooks. I pulled the tilapia from the heat and was drizzling the walnuts over the fish when my father came in the front door. He looked like he’d worked up a good sweat.

After Dad showered and changed clothes, he sat at the table.

“So how was your run?”

“Good,” he said. “Julian, your cooking keeps getting better.”

It did taste pretty good, but I thought the walnuts probably could have been cooked a little longer. They were still pretty crunchy.

“Work okay?” I asked.

“Sure. Nobody died on me today.”

The night before he’d told me how one of his patients had a heart attack and died in his hospital bed. He said the man was reall old and had a bunch of medical problems but everyone was still shocked when it happened.

“Do a lot of your patients die?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Not really. If they start heading south we ship them to ICU.” He helped me with the dishes before we headed back to our separate bedrooms.

Each Saturday, since Mom left, Dad and I traveled to the local Harris Teeter and did our grocery shopping for the week. My father supplied the money, but I was really the one who did the shopping. I was pretty sure if I were old enough to drive myself, he’d be glad to send me to the store alone.

Dad pushed the cart, a few feet behind me, waiting for me to throw packages of chicken breasts, ground beef, and a couple pounds of salmon into the cart. I selected items from the grocery list I’d compiled according to the recipes I planned to make that week.

Before Mom left, I’d go grocery shopping with her on Saturdays, pushing the cart behind her as she walked down the aisles like she owned the place. Mom was good-looking and men noticed her. She was thin, had longish strawberry blonde hair and smiled at about every person we passed.

Mom never used a shopping list, said she liked to pick out whatever looked good. She said if she happened to forget an ingredient she’d just improvise. I wasn’t ready to improvise with my cooking. I needed the step-by-step instructions recipes gave me.

As we walked the aisles, my father would occasionally reach over and grab a bag of potato chips, maybe some pretzels, but not much else. After Mom first left, I’d thought his general state of numbness had to do with missing her, but then I wondered if it was because Dad couldn’t do anything on his own and counted on Mom to do everything. I’d come to believe it was probably a combination of the two.

“We got everything?” my father asked.

“I think so.”

We walked to the closest open register. The cashier was about my age. I knew she had to be at least fifteen to get a job here because I’d looked into applying for a job a few months earlier. She had dark hair and was thin, rail thin. I’d never seen her before, so I didn’t think she went to my school. Her badge said her name was Tia.

As if she could read my mind, she said, “Where do you go to school?”

“Grimsley.”

“I go to Greensboro Day School, but a couple of my friends go to Grimsley, Rachael Riggins and Valerie Baldry,” she said.

“Do you know a guy named Dennis Kindl? He’s on the tennis team.”

She shook her head. “I’m not much into sports.”

When I looked back at my father, he was flipping through the latest issue of People.

As I watched Tia slide bananas across the scanner, I remembered we were out of peanut butter. I walked down the pet food aisle as a shortcut. Since we didn’t have any pets—Dad was allergic to dog and cat fur—we avoided this aisle.

At the end of the aisle, I saw two kinds of bird food: red bird food and songbird food. I picked up a bag of songbird food with sunflower seeds and other white and brown seeds and nuts. I read the names of birds this food was meant to attract: chickadees, cardinals, finch, sparrow, nuthatch, tufted titmouse. My father’s voice pulled me back. “Julian. Let’s go. You’re holding up the line.”

As I turned, I noticed for the first time that he had gained weight in the last couple years. His legs looked softer than I remember them being. There was also a slight bulge in the belly of his white shirt. He hadn’t gained fifty pounds or anything, but his clothes looked tight and uncomfortable.

I set the bird food down and headed for the aisle where the peanut butter was. Tia smiled at me when I came back to the register with the large jar of Jiffy. “Sorry about that,” I said.

She smiled. “No problem.”

After our usual Saturday night take-out pizza, Dad went in his room and I stepped out onto the back porch. It was a nice night, cool and breezy. Birds chattered and called out next door. Occasionally, I’d see one fly out of the shrubs. I wondered what Old Lady Peters was doing. I pictured her sitting in front of the TV with Lucky on her lap or at her feet.

The phone rang. It was Mom. She sounded like she’d been drinking. She talked about the weather, about her novel, and then asked if I had any plans for Sunday. When I said I didn’t, she asked if Dad was still running.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Good for him.”

“Did you go shopping today?” I asked.

“No.”

“I thought with it being Saturday,” I said.

“Julian, I’m too busy to cook.” I couldn’t imagine my mother not cooking. At home, writing and cooking were the two biggest parts of her day.

“Everything else okay?”

“I’m fine. Let me talk to your father.”

I knocked on his door and he opened it without saying anything. I held the phone up. “It’s Mom.”

He half-smiled, took the phone and walked out to the back porch. I did the dishes, rinsed out our cups. I wished I could hear what they had to say to each other.

A few minutes later, he walked back inside holding the phone. I took it from him, lifted the phone to my ear and said, “Mom? Mom?”

Dad shook his head. “She’s already gone.” He walked back to his room and closed the door. I didn’t see him again until the next day.

As I sat out on the back porch eating my cereal for breakfast, my father came outside, dressed in his running outfit. “Going for a run,” he said. “Two miles.”

“That sounds like a lot.”

“If I’m not back in a half hour send out a search crew.”

“Will do.” He walked down the steps, toward the front of the house and all those miles ahead of him. At the grocery store, I’d bought a bag of sugar cookies. I wondered how easy it would be to feed one of those birds by hand like Old Lady Peters had done. I broke a cookie into five parts and placed them on the porch rail. I sat a few feet back and waited. It took a good ten minutes before a sparrow showed up. It hopped around the cookie before taking a piece and flying up on my roof.

After the same bird did this a couple times, I scooted my chair close to the rail, swept what was left of the cookie into my palm. I rested my hand on the porch rail, figuring the bird might not even realize he wasn’t eating off the same surface. But when I looked up at the roof again, he flew away, back toward Mrs. Peters’ yard and the safety of those shrubs.

I decided to go over to Old Lady Peters’ and see if she needed help with her birdfeeders and birdbaths. She’d said we could start on Monday, but I didn’t have anything else to do. So much of my life had centered around my mother that after she left I sometimes felt like I was floating from one place to the next. The only things I seemed to do were homework, cook or watch the Food Network. And I wondered from time to time if it was the act of cooking itself that I liked so much or the fact that it reminded me of my mother and the things we used to do together.

When Old Lady Peters wasn’t out back, I remembered it was Sunday and she was probably with her son. I wasn’t sure if I should be in her backyard alone, but it would be a nice surprise for her if I got the feeders filled before she came back. As I headed for the bucket of bird food up by the porch, Lucky walked out the cat door and rubbed his head against my leg.

I was changing the water in one of the birdbaths when I heard someone say, “Who the hell are you?”

I turned, my hand still squeezing the sprayer and squirted Simon square in the face with a thick stream of water. “Sorry, sorry,”

I said.

“Jesus, kid,” he said, wiping his face off with a handkerchief. “What are you doing?”

It seemed a pretty stupid question to me, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to answer it or not. “Filling the birdbaths.”

“I see that, but why?”

Thankfully, at that moment, Old Lady Peters walked outside.

She looked at Simon, and at me, and started to laugh.

“What’s so funny, Mother?”

“Nothing. I asked this young man to help me with some chores around the house.”

Simon looked at her first and then at me, the corners of his mouth turning down. I didn’t know what to say or do, so I rolled the hose back up and left through the side gate.

As I sat on my back steps, I could hear them next door. “Are you paying him?” Simon asked.

“I tried, but he won’t take any money.”

“Kids these days.”

“Oh, please Simon. He’s a nice young man. Let’s go inside and have some pancakes.”

A few seconds later, the screen door slammed again. I heard a chirp-chirp and turned. Two sparrows were on the porch ledge taking turns pecking at what was left of my sugar cookie. I broke another cookie in half and held it out. One of the birds looked at the cookie, looked hard, and when I could actually feel it leaning toward me the bird lifted up in the air, hovered a foot or so from my outstretched hand, but flew away without taking what I offered.

I didn’t feel like watching TV, so I went for a walk. It was one of those quiet Sunday afternoons when the whole world seems to be asleep. A block from my house, I spotted something on the curb across the street.

It was an empty clay pot. I picked it up. It was dirty, but there didn’t seem to be any cracks in it. Since it was on the side of the road and the next day was garbage day, I figured someone was probably throwing it away. The pot reminded me of the one I’d destroyed. Thankfully, my father still hadn’t mentioned it. I wondered if I could take this one, maybe give it to Old Lady Peters.

I heard a thud, thud and looked up as my father jogged by on the other side of the road. He didn’t look up at me. His legs were all over the place, his arms tight by his side, his hands curled into fists. No, he didn’t look like the other joggers I’d seen, but he did look like a man with determination, something I hadn’t seen in him before.

That night, while Dad went out to buy some new running shoes, I made dinner, roasted chicken with potatoes and carrots. I considered telling my father that I’d seen him out running but didn’t.

Roasted chicken was pretty easy to cook. You just rubbed a mixture of rosemary, thyme, and cracked black pepper all over the skin, which I’d already rubbed down with olive oil. Then the chicken went in the oven at 350, for two hours. It was one of the meals, along with pot roast or manicotti, Mom would make on Sundays.

As we ate dinner, my father said, “Where’s the wishbone?”

“Up on the windowsill.” Mom always played the wishbone game with me, but I couldn’t remember the last time Dad had. He usually just sat there and watched us.

”You ready?” He held one side of the bone. I grabbed the other. He closed his eyes tight and said, “Ready, set, go.”

The thin bone snapped. I had three quarters of it, but wondered what he would have wished for if he’d won. Would he wish for Mom to be back here, with us, tonight? I assumed so because that is what I wished for. I wished my father talked to me like Mom used to, instead of walking by and nodding as if I were supposed to understand what that meant. I wished my parents were sitting next to each other right now, on our couch, watching a movie, splitting a bowl of popcorn. And I wished a bird would fly down and land on my hand and peck at the crumbs I offered.

But why was my father smiling at me from across the table? Was it because he knew Mom was coming back soon? Or was it because he knew I’d win the game and he was trying to give me a sliver of

hope? I wasn’t sure, but that was okay. It would have to be. He held his hand out and I gave him my broken bone. He walked to the garbage can and threw it away.

The next morning, I walked over to Old Lady Peters’, carrying the pot I’d found on the side of the road. I’d scrubbed it twice yesterday, so it looked practically new. Lucky met me at the gate. The table was already laid out with milk and tea, a half dozen sugar cookies. Old Lady Peters was on her knees in the yard. My first thought was that maybe she’d fallen, but then I realized she was pulling weeds.

When she heard me, she stood up slowly and started walking over to the table. “Morning, young man.” She sat down across from me. “What do you have there?”

I set the pot on the table. “I found it on the side of the road and thought you might be able to use it.”

She lifted the pot to examine it. “Someone was throwing it away?”

“Yeah.”

“The world is full of waste,” she said, setting it back on the table between us. She poured tea for her and milk for me. I leaned back in my chair and drank the milk. It was good and cold.

A sparrow landed on the table, opening and closing its mouth. He hopped toward me, then stopped and turned back to Old Lady Peters. He hopped up to her, took a bit of the cookie and flew off into the shrubs. Then a little white and grey bird, about the size of a sparrow, with a black head, flew down and took another piece of cookie from her hand.

“What kind of bird is that?” While I knew some of the most common birds, like cardinals, blue jays, doves, and sparrows, this was a type of bird I’d seen before but didn’t know what it was called.

“That’s a chickadee,” she said as it flew away.

“How do you get them to eat out of your hand?”

“Oh, much practice, about sixty years worth. Only certain birds will do it—chickadees, titmouse, the rare sparrow. But you get them in your yard, get them used to the feeder food and then you take it away for a couple days, then offer it again, this time in your hand. It takes a while, but with a little patience you could do it.”

“Was Simon mad about me being over here?”

She laughed. “Who knows? Sometimes I think he gets mad when he comes over here on Sunday and finds me still breathing.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “He’s your son. I’m sure he loves you.”

She smiled at me. “So where is your mother? I haven’t seen her in a while, haven’t smelled those cigarettes of hers drifting into my backyard.”

I wasn’t sure how much to tell her. I didn’t think it was any of her business.

“She’s down in Florida, working at her parents’ motel. The manager quit. She’s there until they hire someone else, and she’s finishing up her novel. It’s going to be published when she’s done with it.”

“Good for her,” she said. She opened her mouth as if she were going to say something else but stopped herself.

I didn’t want to talk about my mother anymore, not today, so I walked out into the yard and got to work filling the feeders and birdbaths.

As I worked, I could hear her behind me calling out bird names: “Mourning dove, cardinal.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m identifying the birds who are talking.”

“Talking?”

“The bird calls. I hear a bird and can tell what kind it is without looking up. It’s a habit, a way for me to stay in practice, identifying them. Also, I like to do it while I’m out here working because that way if I can’t see the bird right away, and don’t feel like craning my neck to look for it, I can put a mental image of the bird in my head. It’s always good to keep your brain working.”

“So you just hear the bird and know what kind it is?” I asked.

She nodded and pulled a fat worm from the ground and tossed it onto the brick path. It didn’t take long before a robin flew down from one of the trees, picked the worm up and flew off again.

“I better get going,” I said.

“Do you want to see the sparrow’s eggs before you go?”

“Can we?”

“Bring that bucket over here.”

I carried the bucket over to the birdhouse.

“Climb on up and have a look,” she said.

As I climbed up on the bucket, I stood a foot or so above the nest. I expected the father bird to fly down and pop me on the head, maybe drive his beak into my temple. I could see the headline: Teenage Boy Killed by Angry Bird.

I lifted the top of the birdhouse. There were four eggs, white with brown specks, sitting on what looked like a bed of pine needles. Each egg was about the size of a large grape.

“Cool,” I said, because no other word seemed right.

“Cool indeed,” she said. “Let an old lady have a look.”

I stepped down and held her arms as she climbed up on the bucket. It probably wasn’t a very good idea for her to be climbing up on this narrow bucket, but I didn’t think it would do any good to tell her that. Plus, she’d probably done it hundreds of times before.

“They are coming along nicely.”

“How much longer until they hatch?”

“A few more days, I’d say.”

“I better go or I’ll be late for school.”

“Well get moving then,” she said.

I laughed. My father had left for work almost an hour earlier, but still I peeked around the corner to make sure no one was around.

On Friday morning, I found Old Lady Peters at her patio table, sipping tea. After saying hi, I walked over and grabbed the bucket of bird food. “Where are you going?” she asked.

“To work.”

“What’s your rush?”

“School starts in an hour.”

“We don’t work without nourishment around here. I don’t want you passing out on me. Then I’ll have to call an ambulance and it will wake up half the neighborhood and the next thing you know people will wonder what I’m doing working you half to death.”

I had no idea what she was rambling on about. I sat down at the table. There were three cookies and a tall glass of milk on my side of the table. As I picked up a cookie, a sparrow landed on the table in front of her. She held a cookie out and the bird took it. When another sparrow landed on the table, I held my cookie out but the bird flew away.

“Is that the same bird every time?”

She shrugged. “Maybe. Do you hear that?” I could hear a bunch of bird calls and didn’t know which one she was talking about.

“Right there,” she said, pointing at a little grey bird on the ground beneath the closest feeder. “It sounds like a cat, but it’s actually a bird. A catbird. Funny name for a bird but fitting.”

As the bird walked around, I listened closer. It did sort of sound like a cat. Lucky walked between my feet. “How old is Lucky?”

“Twelve or thirteen, I can’t remember. Got him when he was eight weeks old.”

I wondered if I should ask her anything else. She must have sensed this because she said, “Young man, it is okay to just sit here and not talk, enjoy the birds in the garden. That’s the best part of it.”

At that moment, I knew why I had started to look forward to coming over here. Like my mother, Old Lady Peters made me feel comfortable and acted as if she actually enjoyed my company and, despite the fact she served me milk and cookies, talked to me like I was an adult. Plus, helping her gave me something to do and I could pretend, for a little while, that when I walked home my mother would be sitting there, waiting for me.

“So what is it with you and these birds?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“They’re only birds.”

“Only birds?” She raised a hand to her chest, pretending to be shocked.

“You know what I mean. They’re everywhere. It’s not like they’re special.”

“Oh but they are,” she said and smiled. “Take those sparrows, for example.” She lifted her hand to the yard. There were at least ten out there at the feeders. “They were brought over from England. One pair was released in New York City in 1850 and now they are all over the country.”

“How is that possible?”

“Anything is possible, Julian. Two beget four, who beget eight, who beget sixteen. Science and math and poetry. That’s what birds are. I’ve spent a lifetime watching them and reading about them. I started with a basic bird book with pictures of birds and their names. I’d see a bird and match it to the picture and identify the type. You do that a while until you know them by sight. Then you watch them and open your ears and listen and you learn what sounds they make.

“Each type of bird is different with unique calls and songs. And once you can name birds by sound, you start to read about their habits and how they got their names. The more you learn about them the more you want to know. Some paleontologists believe they are direct descendants of dinosaurs.

“But I’m getting ahead of myself. Start slow, notice the common birds, your cardinals or robins or sparrows. Learn a couple new ones each week and before you know it you’ll recognize twenty different species, then fifty. I’ll look and see if I have an old guide book lying around I could let you borrow.”

“But I still don’t get why you like them so much,” I said.

“Let me say this. Everyone should have something they are passionate about, something that fills their heart with joy. Those who don’t, I’d say, are missing something. For my son, it is money. He makes a lot of money and he likes his money and I imagine him—though it saddens me—reading over his bank statements each night before bed with a gleam in his eyes as if they were some sort of fairy tale, maybe even stuffing a crisp hundred-dollar bill under his pillow for safe keeping. For my late husband, it was numbers. He was an accountant and loved to sit with his calculator and his numbers. He wasn’t interested so much in the fact that he dealt in currency, only that when he put his numbers together they equaled zero. My mother loved to watch clothes flap about on a clothesline during a windy day.

“For me, it has always been birds. The summer I first discovered their magic I was six. My parents went on vacation and left my brother and me at my uncle’s in Arizona. A man named Frank the Crank lived in his neighborhood. He was a strange man. A hundred and ten degrees and he would walk down the street in a big, grey jacket, pulling a cart behind him. I still to this day don’t have a clue where he was going. But there was a big, wooden box in his cart.”

Old Lady Peters picked up her cup of tea and took two sips before continuing her story: “So one day, I was riding a bike up and down the block when I turned the corner and he was walking along, pulling his cart, humming. He was older than my parents, but not real old, nowhere near as old as I am now. When I said hi, he didn’t move; it was like I scared him.”

As she told the story, I could hear birds flying around, singing their songs out in her yard and the shrubs all around us. I had started to notice, over the last week, how they didn’t all sound the same: some sounded happy, others excited or mad.

“I asked him what he had in the box and he said he’d show me for a dollar. I told him I didn’t have a dollar, and he said I better not tell anyone that he’d let me see for free.” She laughed and shook her head. “That’s probably the whole reason I fell in love with birds. I was so excited to see what he had in that darn box. He said, ‘you ready?’ and I said I was, then he lifted the lid on one side of the box and there was this huge white bird with a flat face. A barn owl. Of course, I didn’t know what kind it was back then. The bird jumped up on the edge of the box and stared at me with big black eyes as if considering whether or not I’d make a good lunch.

“Frank let me pet the bird. Its claws were as big as my hand, and it kept its eyes on me the whole time. After a couple minutes, he put the owl away and opened the other part of the box. Three sparrows flew out, a foot or two in the air. They hung there, hovering for a few seconds because he’d tied string around their legs. He let them fly like that for a few seconds and then pulled them back in one at a time, like a kid pulling in a balloon or kite.

“Seeing those birds changed me. Maybe because it was something unexpected on an otherwise boring summer day, in some place I didn’t want to be, some realization that beauty was all around me. I don’t know. Now, if I saw someone with birds in a box like that I would say it was cruel. But back then I didn’t. It changed my life. I started looking for birds and the funny thing is the more I looked, the more I found.

“When I taught, I always kept a feeder or two outside my window, hanging from the limb of a tree. I did it for those days when the students weren’t paying attention or when I’d gone over the same point a dozen times and they just weren’t getting it. I would look out there and see a bird. Maybe it was a cardinal, or maybe a junco in winter, or even a chickadee, but it would buoy my spirits and get me through. There is nothing more beautiful than a bird taking flight. On my wedding day, I stared out the church window, watching a male cardinal feed a female in a maple tree. Breastfeeding Simon, I would look out his nursery window and see birds. They have always been there for me.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“So what about you, Julian. What fills your heart with joy?”

“I don’t know.”

She smiled. “That’s okay. You’re still young. You’ll find it. What about your parents, what fills their hearts with joy?”

“For Mom,” I said. “It would be her writing.” As far back as I could remember she was at that typewriter everyday. Whenever we’d go on vacation, she would be okay for the first day or two, but after that she’d get fidgety, sometimes snapping at me or Dad, and she would stay that way until she got home and started typing again. Then she would be fine. It was like she needed to write. It was part of her.

“And your father?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe it’s running. I’ve seen him trotting out of your yard a lot lately.”

“He’s training for a marathon. I don’t think it’s running though. He’s only been doing it a couple weeks.”

“You ever considered running with him?” she asked.

I remembered Mom saying the same thing. “Not really.”

She shrugged. “It might give you a chance to learn something about him. It’s amazing what we can learn about people if we just ask. But enough of this talk. You’ve got to go to school and I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Peters,” I said.

She winked at me and walked to her porch door, leading to the house. After checking that the coast was clear, I walked back to my house.

As my father pushed the grocery cart up to cash register number five, I spotted that Tia girl again. “Hi, Grimsley boy,” she said.

“Hi, Greensboro Day School girl.”

She laughed as she ran our groceries across the conveyor belt. I was checking my list again to make sure I’d gotten everything when she said, “Do you cook?”

I looked up. She was holding Rachael Ray’s 30-Minute Meals 2 cookbook in her hand. I’d asked Dad when I’d spotted the cookbook if I could get it and he’d said sure.

“Maybe it’s for him,” I said, nodding back to my father who was once again flipping through the weekly issue of People.

“No offense to your dad, but he doesn’t look the type.”

“Do I look the type?” For some reason, I was comfortable talking with her. Maybe it was because we didn’t go to the same school, so I didn’t have to worry about saying something stupid and then running into her at school the following week.

“Not really. So do you cook?”

“A little,” I said.

“I like Rachael Ray too,” she said, nodding at the book. “But Bobby Flay is my favorite. I’ve got three of his cookbooks and a couple of his DVD’s.”

Behind us, someone yelled, “Help.”

My father dropped his magazine on the counter and ran toward the back of the store. I followed him. In the dairy aisle, there was an old man lying on the floor. My father got on his knees, leaned over the man, and started CPR. People began crowding around.

“Someone call 911, now,” Dad yelled as he continued with his chest compressions. “Julian, arch his head up.” I fell to my knees, beside my father. He positioned my hands under the old man’s head, so that I was lifting his chin up into the air. The back of the man’s head was wet with sweat. My father counted one and two and three as he continued compressions.

“You okay?” he asked me.

I nodded, though I felt a little dizzy.

He didn’t say another word to me, but kept alternating between thirty chest compressions and breathing twice into the man’s mouth. Time seemed to slow down, and for a few minutes the only thing I could hear was my father’s heavy breathing. Then I heard the sirens. When I looked up, two paramedics were running toward us, pushing a stretcher.

My father stepped aside as they loaded the man onto the stretcher. People were patting him on the back, saying great job, but he turned to me and said, “Let’s go.”

We left without paying for, or picking up, our groceries. It was as if my father desperately needed to get out of there.

On the drive home, I didn’t know what to say. He’d just saved a man’s life. My father was a nurse and trained to do these things, but it was still a shock to me. The only other medical thing I’d ever seen him do was apply a butterfly bandage to Mom’s forehead a few years ago when she tripped and ended up with a pretty good size gash over her right eye.

When we pulled into the driveway, he asked, “You okay?”

I nodded that I was.

“I’m going to go for a run to clear my head.”

“Sure, Dad,” I said. But I didn’t want him to go. I wanted him to explain to me what had just happened, how you could save someone’s life and want nothing more than to distance yourself from the event and not talk about it.

I watched my father walk out of our front yard. At the edge of the yard, he turned back as if he knew I was standing there. He smiled at me, a little forced half-smile and then disappeared down the street and into the sunshine ahead.

While my father was out on his run, I cleaned the bathroom and vacuumed: two more chores I had picked up since Mom left. When he walked in the front door, he was sweating as usual, his face flushed pink.

“I thought we might go to a movie after I take a shower,” he said. “Sounds good,” I said. I couldn’t remember the last time the two of us had gone to the movies.

We decided on an action movie, but I dozed off in the middle of it. When I woke up, I turned to my father. He was staring at the screen, a slight smile on his face. I was having a hard time seeing him as my dad, something had changed between us. Of course, it wasn’t hard to figure out why. How many people see their father save someone’s life?

After the movie, we went to Pizza Hut for dinner and ordered a large pepperoni. Mom hated meat on her pizza so she would only order cheese, maybe a veggie with extra cheese.

When I was stuffed and couldn’t take another bite, I finally said, “It was great, Dad, what you did at the grocery store.”

“You did a good job, Julian. Most kids wouldn’t have been able to handle it.”

“Have you done CPR before at work?”

“A few times. Do me a favor, Julian. Don’t tell your mother about it.”

“Why?”

“Just don’t, please.”

“Okay.” I wanted to ask him about Mom again, find out what was really going on between them. I had my suspicions, but neither one of them would tell me. And maybe it was because they didn’t want to disappoint me or maybe they didn’t fully understand it themselves. But I couldn’t push him that night, not after what he’d done.

“Did you always want to be a nurse?” I asked.

He laughed. “No. I wanted to be a potter.”

“A potter?”

“You know, like make pots, bowls. Your grandfather was a potter. He worked construction but at night and on the weekends he would go out to his garage and make pots. About once a month he would fire up his kiln, which was basically a big oven where you put the pottery so that it cooked and hardened. When I was about your age, he started letting me come out to the garage and taught me how to make a pot. I could see why he loved it so much. It just felt so natural to me, everything from turning the clay and shaping the pot, to firing the kiln.”

This was news to me about my grandfather, but I’d never known the man. He’d died the year I was born. And it was news to me that my father used to do pottery. I never would have guessed he’d done something like that. “Why did you stop?”

“Lots of reasons.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“I married your mother and one of us had to get a real job, so I enrolled in nursing school. I hadn’t planned on it. If you’d told me back when I was your age I was going to become a nurse I would have laughed in your face. Your mother actually brought the information pamphlet home and we read over it and it seemed like a good idea. At the last minute, she backed out. I figured what the hell and filled out all the forms and to my surprise they accepted me.”

“Do you miss it, pottery?”

“It’s been so long I don’t think about it anymore.”

“Couldn’t you do it like your father, at night and on the weekends?”

“I suppose I could if I really wanted to.”

I wanted to ask him if pottery filled his heart with joy at one time. I didn’t think being a nurse did and was pretty sure running didn’t either. I viewed his running this marathon as a goal he wanted to accomplish, a way to eat up time until this thing with Mom blew over.

“Why do you ask? You trying to decide what to do with your life?”

“I guess,” I said.

“Seems to me that you’d make one hell of a gourmet chef.”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ve all got to do something.” He looked at his watch. “Oh, shit. It’s seven. Your mother will be calling any minute.”

I’d forgotten about her calling tonight. I wondered if she’d call back later. In the time she’d been gone and we’d established the Wednesday and Saturday routine, I’d never missed one of her phone calls.

Since we were already late, we decided to stop and do our grocery shopping again. We didn’t go to our normal store. Dad said he didn’t want to run into anyone who knew what had happened earlier, so we ended up driving twenty minutes out of our way. It was almost nine by the time we made it home.

Mom had called three times. She didn’t leave a message, but I saw her number on the caller ID. After my father went to bed, I took the phone out on to the back porch.

“Everything okay?” she asked. “I was worried.”

I told her Dad and I had gone to a movie, then out for pizza and just lost track of time. I didn’t tell her about what happened at the grocery store, but I did ask about his pottery.

“Was he good?”

She laughed. “He was amazing, a natural. People would buy whatever he made.”

“So why did he quit?” I asked, wanting to hear her side of the story and wanting to know something more about my father’s life before he became a nurse.

I heard her light another cigarette, take a long drag and exhale. “I met your father at an arts & crafts show. He was only twenty, probably the youngest craftsmen at the show, but his pottery was amazing. I remember he had on old jeans, a T-shirt covered with dry clay, like he’d come straight from his workshop. He looked so damn handsome, Julian. He had longish hair and a beard. I asked for his number and called him a week later and asked him out.”

“You asked him out?”

She laughed again. “Hard to believe, I know. On our first date, I showed him some of my poems, which was all I wrote back then. He said he thought they were good. Three months later we got married.”

Maybe I’d heard the story of how they met before but had forgotten. But she still hadn’t answered my original question. “But why did he quit?”

“Why do people quit anything?”

“I don’t know.” I had quit playing sports because I knew I wasn’t very good at them, but that didn’t seem to be the case with Dad.

“What did he tell you?”

“He said one of you needed a real job, so he decided to become a nurse.”

When she didn’t say anything, I asked, “Is that true?”

“Yeah, I guess it is.”

“Come on, Mom.” Our backyard was black dark and I could hear cicadas and frogs calling back and forth. I imagined my mother walking around a little motel room in Florida, a place that seemed as far away from me as a remote village in Russia, the phone pressed against her ear, covered by all that hair of hers.

“Out of the two of us, your father was the one who could go out and work in the real world. He was good at everything he did.

All I did, even back then, was smoke cigarettes and lean over a typewriter. I’ve never been any good at anything besides writing. When I got pregnant, he decided to go to nursing school. He planned to continue with his pottery on the side and weekends. And he did for a while, but you were not an easy baby and I needed help and he had his nursing classes and eventually it just got to be too much.”

“Do you still have any of his old pottery?”

“Only one, that pot in the living room. The one with the little flowers painted on it.”

I almost dropped the phone. My heart pounded in my chest and I felt, for a moment, like I might vomit. Shit, I’d destroyed my father’s last piece of pottery.

“You still there, Julian?”

“Yes.”

“I better go. It’s getting late.”

“Goodnight, Mom.” I hung up before the ocean air and wind filled my ear. After setting the phone on the table, I lowered my head into my hands and began to cry.

When I woke the next morning, my father was still asleep. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to face him after discovering what I’d done. I tried to find some comfort in the fact I hadn’t known what the pot was, or what it meant, but it didn’t offer much.

I walked over to Old Lady Peters’ backyard, but she wasn’t outside. I assumed Simon had already taken her for their usual Sunday outing. I changed the bath water and filled the feeders. On the table, a sparrow and a pair of chickadees were jumping back and forth, eating cookie crumbs.

I heard my back door open and knew my father was probably looking for me. I didn’t want him to catch me over here, but I didn’t really want to see him either. I felt awful about what I’d done and knew I couldn’t avoid him for too long. We were two guys living alone in a small house. But I didn’t really want to avoid him. I wanted to hear more of his stories, find out more about him and my mother.

Eventually, I would have to confess. It would be better if I just told him instead of waiting for him to discover the pot was gone. But I wouldn’t, couldn’t, tell him yet. It would have to wait until the right time.

When I heard the back door shut again, I walked out of her yard and stopped at the shed and retrieved my bike, an old black Mongoose I’d had for years. I filled both tires with air and walked the bike around to the front yard where my father was stretching on the porch steps.

“There you are,” he said. “Going for a bike ride?”

“Thought I’d go with you.”

He smiled. “I could use the company.”

My father didn’t run particularly fast, so I was able to keep up without much trouble. We circled our block and crossed over into another neighborhood, and then further out again into yet another neighborhood. Each of the neighborhoods were similar to ours: older two and three bedroom homes close to UNC-Greensboro.

He stared straight ahead, never blinking or changing his expression, as he ran. The soft tap of his shoes hitting concrete, his breathing, and the hum of my bike tires were the only sounds I heard.

We passed a man and woman out walking. The man was pushing a baby carriage. I wondered what he had given up for his child. I wanted to apologize to my father for everything I’d cost him, his love of pottery and then destroying his only remaining piece of pottery, but didn’t know how.

“That’s two miles. Time to turn around,” he said.

We covered the same area, not talking, only moving forward, covering ground and distance. Then we were back in our neighborhood and finally on our street. When our house was in view, my father stopped running and walked the last fifty yards. I eased back on my pedaling and stayed beside him.

At our house, he started his usual stretches, resting one foot on the third step and leaning into it. I rolled my bike down the driveway and set it against the back of the house. My legs felt a little wobbly, even though he’d worked much harder than me.

Walking back out front, I spotted Old Lady Peters’ car pulling into her driveway. Simon was driving. I considered waving but figured it was best not to. Simon went around and helped her out. She looked at me and gently nodded her head. I nodded back.

Dad was sitting on the steps, holding two bottles of water. I took the one he offered and sat next to him. “Thanks for going with me.”

“What do you think about when you’re running?”

“One step at a time,” he said and smiled.

“I called Mom last night, after you went to bed.”

“Did you tell her what happened at the grocery store?”

“No,” I said. “Do you think she’s going to come back?”

He lifted the bottle to his mouth and took a long drink. “What does she tell you?”

“That we’ll have to wait and see.”

“That’s true. And it’s also true that she went down there when the manager quit and that she wanted to finish her novel. But you’re smart enough to know there’s more to it than that.”

“Do you want her to come back?”

“Of course, I do.” Then he stood up as if he’d said all he was going to on that subject. “Thanks again for coming with me today.”

“You bet.”

“So what’s for breakfast?”

“I was thinking about French toast.” I knew he loved French toast.

“Damn, that sounds good.” He squeezed my shoulder as we headed in the front door.

By the time I made it to Old Lady Peters on Monday morning so many things had changed. I’d learned what my father’s passion had been and that he’d essentially given it up for me and I’d destroyed the only remaining evidence from his past life. I’d also learned how my parents met and my father had admitted for the first time that Mom’s leaving involved more than a motel and a novel.

But Old Lady Peters was sitting at the table, sipping tea with three sparrows standing in line, waiting to get a nibble off one of the sugar cookies she held out for them, as if nothing had changed at all.

She turned and smiled. “Morning, young man.”

“Good morning,” I said.

There was a pot on the table behind the tray of tea and milk and cookies. It was the same size as the one I’d given her, but there was a plant with bluish-purple flowers in it now. The pot made me think of my father’s. I wondered if she might have some advice on how or what I should tell him.

“Is that the pot I gave you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I knew you had a good eye for detail.”

“What kind of plant is that?”

“Hyacinth,” she said. “They come in all kinds of colors—pink, white, red, and this shade of blue. It’s called hyacinth blue.”

“It’s pretty.” I didn’t know what else to say. It was pretty.

“The sparrows have hatched. Do you want to see them?”

“Let’s go.”

As we walked over to the shrubs, I spotted something white in the grass. I picked it up, realizing it was part of a discarded bird egg. It was so light that I found it hard to believe this thin shell had supported a life. “Can I have this?” I asked, holding up the shell.

When she said I could, I slid it into my shirt pocket.

I set the bucket down and held onto her arm as she climbed up. She laughed and said, “They’re beauties.”

The baby birds didn’t really look like birds at all. They were pink and featherless, no bigger than one of my fingers. They could have been anything, baby rats or squirrels. Their mouths were stretched wide open, asking for food. I wouldn’t say I was disappointed in what I saw, just surprised. How was it possible something this fragile might be able to fly some day?

“What do you think?” she asked.

“Wow.”

“We better leave them alone, don’t want to worry Mom and Dad.”

As we walked away, back over to the table, the babies’ parents flew back over to the nest, one of them disappeared inside while the other, the father with his black beard, stood on the roof, keeping guard.

“How long until those sparrows are able to fly?”

“Couple weeks.”

She looked down at her watch. “School starting late today?”

I ran and filled the feeders and changed the water. The birds flew away as I approached, disappearing into the shrubs until I was done and then flying back to the feeders. A pair of gold finches flew over my head, bright and yellow in the sky.

“See you tomorrow,” she said. “Don’t forget this.” She was holding the pot with the pretty flowers in it.

“You sure?”

“You found it you should keep it.”

I took it from her and said, “Have a good day.”

And then I was gone. How many other kids, I wondered, spent the morning looking at a nest full of baby birds? But how many would even care?

When we made it back from the run, I pulled our dinner out of the fridge and set the casserole dish in the oven, on reheat, while my father went to take a shower. I’d decided what I’d do was make dinner when I got home from school and then it would be ready when we got back from training. This was the first day I’d tried it. I’d made baked ziti with sausages, one of my favorites, which wasn’t hard to make at all.

While you boiled the pasta, you cooked the sausages just enough to sear them. Then you cut them into ½ inch pieces and placed them in a casserole dish with the pasta, some sauce and topped it off with tons of mozzarella. Into the oven at 350 for about thirty minutes. Done. Tasty.

As we were eating, my father said, “What we’ll do is run three miles a day this week, then four next week and five the week after and so on. On the Saturday run of each week, I’d like to go a mile or two more than what we’ve been doing all week. I’ll take Sundays off to rest.”

He had eaten his meal fast and stood up to get seconds. He dished us each another plateful. His training plan made sense to me, but what I was really thinking about was what Mom had told me, and how I was going to tell him what I’d done. I’d like to forget about it, pretend it never happened, but he’d eventually discover it missing.

“What would you need to start doing pottery again?”

He looked at me sort of strange, as if trying to figure out what I was up to or why I’d suddenly taken such a big interest in his past. “A place to work and a potter’s wheel for starters. Hell, I’m not even sure I could do it anymore.”

“Maybe you could use the shed,” I said. The only things in there were the lawnmower, a couple of old doors, and a few other gardening tools and fertilizers. If we cleaned it out, he would probably have enough room to work.

“I don’t know, Julian,” he said. But I could tell by the far away look in his eyes that he was imagining what it would be like to work on his pottery again. He sort of laughed, like he’d just heard some private joke, and then smiled: “I did like it. Time slips away. You have a little something on the stereo. People talk about being in the zone. The rest of the world slips away and you become this thing you’re working on. It’s the greatest feeling in the world.”

I knew what my father was talking about. Sometimes when I was cooking, I would lose track of time, of everything around me. I’d have three or four pots or pans going at once. The house would smell of garlic or onions or hot, searing meat. I couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t imagine having a conversation with someone. It just felt right, then serving the food, arranging it on the plate, a sprinkle of this or that, maybe some parsley, some sauce. It was the kind of thing, a trance almost, I didn’t come out of until I sat down to eat. I assumed that was what he meant by being in the zone. I’d have to somehow get him back into doing what he’d once loved.

I woke the next morning at 5:14 and walked out onto the back porch. It wasn’t light yet, but not quite middle-of-the-night pitch black either. I’d left the cracked sparrow’s egg and the pot on the table yesterday. I picked the egg up now and let it roll around in my palm like a soft stone.

I wanted to go on over and check on the baby sparrows, see if I could find another egg shell. But it was too early to go over there, so I decided to go for a walk.

I didn’t normally go for walks in the morning. It seemed different than at night, being out here so early when most of my neighbors were sleeping. It made me feel like I was part of some select group of people who got to experience these precious, quiet moments before first light.

I spotted Lucy’s father sitting out on his front porch steps, in his pajamas, sipping coffee and reading the newspaper. He waved and I waved back. A man jogged by, wearing bright orange running shorts.

When I looked up, I was surprised to see Old Lady Peters walking straight toward me. She was wearing her usual outfit of overalls and that big hat. She had Lucky on a red leash.

“Good morning, young man.”

“Hello,” I said. “Out walking?”

“Everyday at 5:30 sharp. You following me?”

“No.”

“Lighten up. I’m just kidding,” she said and smiled.

I had no idea she went for walks in the mornings.

“Let’s go if you’re coming with us.”

I followed her. Surprisingly, Lucky didn’t pull against the red leash, but was walking at a steady even pace, staring forward as if training for some kind of cat road race. I had never seen a cat walked with a leash before.

Once I was beside her, I noticed she kept reaching into the pocket of her overalls and pulling something out. It took me a few seconds to realize she was dropping a steady, thin line of birdseed along the sidewalk. I turned around and saw a few birds, cardinals and sparrows hopping around the sidewalk, eating the breakfast she offered them.

I didn’t quite know what to say, so I didn’t say anything at all. She seemed fine with this because she didn’t talk either. As we made it back to my street, I saw my father’s white truck backing out of the driveway and driving away. He was probably twenty-thirty yards away and heading in the opposite direction, so I didn’t think he could see us. I hoped he’d have a good day at work.

“You coming over for morning milk and cookies?”

“Sounds good.”

While she went inside to get the tea and milk and cookies, I changed the feeders and bath water. The sun was just starting to come up, that sweet moment between night and day. In a matter of minutes, birdsong doubled, triple, as if the rest of the birds were waking up.

Old Lady Peters walked out and set the tray on the table. “Hear that?”

“What?” I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. Most of the time I didn’t know what she was talking about.

“That owl.”

I listened closer and was able to block out the other sounds and heard an owl out there somewhere. It’s steady, whoo-whoo.

We sat at the table and listened to the owl, as if both of us knew by saying anything it would ruin the moment. And then as quickly as it had began, it stopped.

When I turned to Old Lady Peters, her eyes were closed. I assumed she’d fallen asleep. As it got lighter, I began to hear more and more birds, their songs bouncing off each other. I heard what I thought was a cardinal, its quick, clicking sound, like some kind of uneven Morse code. I looked up and found the cardinal above us in the dogwood.

A sparrow landed in the center of the table, followed by another. I held out two pieces of cookie and the birds walked over, seemed to look at each at the same time, as if to say I’m not so sure about this, then flew away.

“Be patient. They’ll do it eventually,” she said. “I got you this.” She was sitting up, holding a small book in her hand. She slid it across the table. Birds of North America by Roger Tory Peterson. It wasn’t a new book by any means—it was weathered and the top corner of the cover was ripped off. On the cover, there was a drawing of seven birds on a fence.

“I thought you might like a book on birds. Here is one of my first ones. You’ll be able to recognize many of the birds in the garden.”

Thumbing through it, I spotted a cardinal, a dove and a blue jay. Next to each drawing there was information on what the bird ate, where it was usually found and the average size. In the last few pages of the book someone had written in tiny black script, dates and places and bird names: 8-16-68 Lexington, KY (Warbling Vireo). I figured the dates must be from the first time she’d seen a particular type of bird.

I read a little about the northern cardinal, a bird I saw every day. I was tired now and would have liked to go back to bed, forget about school, and sleep the day away.

“Can we see the nest?” I asked.

“I was just thinking the same thing.”

I carried the bucket over. “Ladies first,” she said.

After she looked, I climbed up on the bucket. The four babies looked about the same, little pink mouths. But they were starting to get a little fur. One of them lifted its bright yellow beak to me, stretched it wide and then lowered it. I wished I had something to give it, but what did I have to offer something as precious as a baby bird?

There was a letter for me in the mailbox when I got home from school the next day. My mother had sent me a couple postcards after she’d first moved to Florida and my grandparents sent me a Christmas card, but that was the sum total of mail addressed to me in the last six months.

But this time as I was about to drop the mail on the counter, I spotted my name in my mother’s sloppy script. She had the worst handwriting of anyone I’d ever met. I shook the envelope, not sure what to expect. I tore it open. There was a picture of my mother and father sitting on a couch, holding a baby, which I assumed was me.

The picture was old and square and slightly discolored. My father had a thick beard and was wearing a pair of jeans and a paint-splattered T-shirt. His hair was longer than I ever remember it being. Mom was wearing shorts and a yellow shirt. They were sitting on an old brown couch I didn’t recognize. She had her head resting on my father’s shoulder and he was holding me in his arms. My father’s bare feet were on the coffee table in front of them. And there, in the center of the coffee table, was that damn pot I’d destroyed, like a reminder that I needed to tell him what I’d done.

When my father came home from work, I was finishing up dinner, lemon herb-crusted chicken with yellow rice. I looked over at my Rachael Ray cookbook. I’d left the photo Mom sent me on top of the book. I grabbed it and slid it in the cookbook before he made it to the kitchen. That was close.

Later, after we did his run and ate our dinner, my mother called. I answered on the first ring. “So did you like the picture?” she asked.

“Yes, Mom. Thanks.”

“What did he say?” she asked.

“That you were beautiful.”

She didn’t say anything for a few seconds.

“Anything else new?”

“I saw a couple baby birds in their nest.”

“Oh yeah, where?”

I couldn’t tell her the truth. “One of my teachers found a nest and showed it to all of us.”

“Cool.”

“At first they were just these little pink things with dots for eyes. But they’re getting more feathers. Their eyes are open.”

“Well it’s getting late,” she said. “You’ve got school.”

“Is the writing going okay?” I was willing to talk about anything to keep her on the line. While I knew the picture she’d sent was to show me my father’s pottery, to me it had also showed us as a family, maybe from a time I couldn’t remember, but still it offered hope.

“Oh, Julian. I love writing but sometimes it’s about the hardest thing in the world. It’s like I need to do it even when I don’t want to, like my mind is constantly taking me back to this story I’m so damn sick of.”

And I knew writing wasn’t always easy for Mom. Most of the time when I came home from school and found her pounding away on her typewriter, she’d have a fire in her eyes, sometimes even a smile. But other times, I’d find her staring at the typewriter with something that could only be described as hate. I’d even seen her cussing at the empty white pages in front of her.

“I know it’s not easy but keep working. You’ll get it,” I said.

“Thank you, Julian. I love you. Have a good night.”

“Love you, Mom.” Then I heard the waves, the wind and imagined sand flying through the air. I wondered how birds could fly through all of that, wondered how my mother went back to the typewriter everyday, even on those days when it offered nothing in return.

While I hadn’t made it over early enough to walk with Old Lady Peters for a couple days, on Thursday I set my alarm so I could. At 5:30, I was sitting out on my front steps when Old Lady Peters walked out her front door.

She looked over to me. “You have your walking shoes on?”

“I believe so.”

“Let’s go.”

We walked without speaking for a good ten or fifteen minutes. As before, she pulled seed from her pocket and dropped it on the ground. When I looked behind us, birds were lining up to eat.

Two blocks from the house, we walked by Lindley Elementary. “You know I taught at that school for forty-two years. That’s why we bought the house, so I could walk to work.”

“Do you miss teaching?”

“Not really. Look up there.” She was pointing up at a tree. “A baby blue jay in the elm.”

I looked where she was pointing but saw nothing but limbs and leaves and the sun beginning to crack through it all. I looked again, harder, until I spotted the little spray of blue-purple in the branches. “Yeah, I see it.”

“Let’s play a game. Let’s count birds, or rather, we’ll have you count birds.”

As we circled the block I counted ten sparrows, three blue jays, a mockingbird, four doves, a pair of cardinals, and a pretty brown, orange and white bird she said was a towhee. She said it was part of the sparrow family but it looked bigger than any sparrow I’d ever seen. Walking with Old Lady Peters reminded me of walking with my mother. The way she didn’t seem rushed at all, just heading down the sidewalk, willing to talk or not talk.

Lucky’s pace was regular, steady, and he didn’t try to chase the birds that followed us, which surprised me because I’d seen him go after birds in her backyard. A couple days earlier, I’d seen him kill a tufted titmouse. Lucky was sitting on the back bench, under the butterfly bushes. As he stood up to stretch, with his paws on the back of the bench, the bird flew right at him. All Lucky had to do was lift his paws and catch the bird. He grabbed it and tossed it in his mouth. I ran after him but it did no good. By the time I caught him he’d already bit the bird’s head off.

When we made it back to our houses, my father was gone. There were at least twenty birds in her backyard: a red-bellied woodpecker, sparrows, doves, cardinals, nuthatches, titmouse, chickadees, and even a couple goldfinches.

When I mentioned how many new birds were showing up, she said, “It gets busier and busier as spring moves along and the weather warms up. The hummingbirds will be coming soon.”

“When do they show up?”

“Usually by May. If we’re lucky, maybe as early as next week.”

I’d seen pictures of hummingbirds, and some TV footage, but had never seen one in person. The bird book she’d given me said they were the smallest birds in the world and that their wings could beat fifty times a second. I could tell she was excited about the prospect of seeing a hummingbird because every time she mentioned them her eyes would light up and she’d smile.

“If I tell you something do you promise not to tell anyone?” I asked. I had to tell someone and she seemed about the safest person I could think of.

She turned to me. “Heavens, this sounds serious. Who would I tell?”

“I don’t know.”

After I told her the story about the fight with my father and what I’d done to his pot, she nodded and said, “Well, young man, you know you really only have one choice.”

“Let me guess. Tell him.”

“He’ll understand. You don’t have to tell him today but I wouldn’t wait too long. You’ll know when it’s time.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Peters.”

“No. Thank you, Julian Hale.”

“For what?”

She smiled. “For keeping an old lady company.”

After school, there was a message on my answering machine from Dennis saying he was throwing a party and I’d better be there. I knew it wouldn’t be much fun for me but also knew if I didn’t go he’d call me about ten times like he’d done the last time he had a party and I didn’t show up.

I headed to Dennis’ after Dad and I had finished our dinner of fish tacos. I had no idea who would be there, probably Anna and a bunch of her friends, other people from Greensboro Day that I didn’t know. Maybe that cashier girl, Tia, would be there.

But she wasn’t. There were about fifteen people, all strangers to me. Dennis had made a lot of friends at his new school. Some were on his tennis team and others were friends of his girlfriend. When Dennis walked in the room, people were instantly drawn to him.

I didn’t spot him right away, so I walked to the kitchen. Dennis’ mother, Joyce, was standing at the table, dishing out soft drinks and bowls of Chex Mix. Mrs. Kindl was a stay-at-home soccer mom. She carted Dennis’ two younger sisters around from sporting event to sporting event. And she was good-looking with her frosted blond hair and year-round tan.

“Hey, Julian,” she said as I walked toward her.

“Hello, Mrs. Kindl.”

She reached over and hugged me like she always did when I came over to their house. “School going okay?”

“It’s almost over,” I said.

“Your mother doing okay?”

She knew about my mother going to Florida, and like Dennis, had told me once that if I needed to talk to someone she was available. My mother and her had never been close—their lives were so different—but they were friendly enough toward each other.

I nodded. “The motel keeps her busy.”

“I bet,” she said. “I think Dennis went up to his room to get something.”

“I’ll check,” I said.

I walked up the stairs to Dennis’ bedroom. His door was open, but he wasn’t in there. There was a dark-haired girl, cute and thin, standing by the closed bathroom door.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“I’m Hailey,” she said. “I go to school with Dennis and Anna.”

I told her my name, that I went to Grimsley, but Dennis and I had been friends for years. I felt silly standing there, making small talk. She was nice enough, and friendly, but I felt so uncomfortable, as if what I said was being magnified throughout the house. I just wasn’t good with small talk, never had been. It always felt like I was pretending, saying what I was supposed to say, like an actor on a TV show, for that particular situation. I guess that’s a big part of why I liked hanging out with my mother and Old Lady Peters—I didn’t have to pretend to be someone I wasn’t.

This Hailey girl smiled at me. Her lips were wet with lip gloss.

“Do you know a girl named Tia who goes to Greensboro Day?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Can’t say as I do. Why?”

“She’s a friend.”

The bathroom door opened and Dennis and Anna walked out. His shirt was unbuttoned. “Hale, you made it,” Dennis said, hugging me in the hall. He smelled like perfume.

“How could I resist,” I said, trying to sound as sarcastic as possible.

Anna walked in his room and jumped on his bed. In the six months they’d been dating, Anna hadn’t said ten words to me. She was the sort of person who was only nice to you if you could help her in some way. It was pretty clear that I had nothing to offer a girl like her.

At his bedroom door, Dennis squeezed my shoulder and said, “I’ve got to take care of some business.” He winked at me as he shut the door. I heard Anna giggle and the quick squeak of bed springs.

When I turned back down the hall, that Hailey girl had disappeared behind the bathroom door. I shook my head, got out of there, and headed home.

As usual, we went grocery shopping on Saturday morning and Dad pushed the cart to Tia’s register. I wasn’t sure if he did this on purpose because he’d seen me talk to her or if it was coincidence that her register was empty every time we were ready to check out. That, I knew, would be a pretty big coincidence.

My father had never asked me about girls. Mom did though. She used to torture me with questions, introduce me to strange girls we’d pass on the street. She would have had a field day with Tia.

Tia smiled. “There they are. The heroes.”

My father didn’t say anything but lowered his head into the latest issue of People. I couldn’t figure out why he found that magazine so interesting. He didn’t watch much TV, see many movies, or listen to any current music, so I wasn’t sure if he even knew any of the people featured in the articles.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Good. You?”

She smiled again. The girl was full of smiles today. “Just fine. That man you saved, Mr. Casey, was in the store earlier today, shopping with his wife.”

“Was he okay?” I asked, turning back to my father. He didn’t look up or act like he’d heard.

“He looked great. They said he spent three days in the hospital. So have you done any good cooking this week?”

“I made lemon, herb-crusted chicken for the first time.”

She nodded, as if impressed, as she continued to run our groceries across the scanner and conveyor belt. The man who bagged them didn’t look much younger than Old Lady Peters. “How did it turn out?”

I shrugged. “Seemed okay, but I think I overcooked the chicken a little.”

She looked past me at my father. “Mr. Hale. How was it?” She knew his name because the store had those discount cards and each time they scanned it your name appeared on the receipt.

My father didn’t look up. “Everything he cooks is amazing. It’s like living with my own personal gourmet chef.”

While I appreciated the compliment, what struck me was how he hadn’t looked up, which told me he’d been listening the whole time.

She raised her eyebrows a little. The eyebrows were a little wild. The right one had three or four hairs that stood up like antennae. She had little blue stars for earrings and a mole beside her right eye.

“Me and a couple friends have a little cooking group. Nothing too fancy. We just get together and cook, try new stuff, teach each other techniques. We’ve never had a boy in the group but if you’d like to come over and check it out we’d be glad to have you.”

“Maybe,” I said.

She wrote her phone number on the bottom of the receipt. “See you soon,” she said.

“Bye,” I said.

Out in the parking lot, my father tore off the bottom inch of the receipt and handed it to me. I expected him to say something else, to prod me about her, but all he said was,

“She seems nice.”

“Did you hear her say that man, the old man from last weekend, was okay?”

He nodded. That was all.

Later, that night, after I spoke to my mother and my father had gone to sleep, I pulled Pottery for Beginners from my backpack. I’d checked the book out from the school library. It didn’t look like a new book and I didn’t think my father was a beginner, but I figured it might help me understand a little of what it takes to make pottery. If I was going to try and push him in that direction then I needed to at least know what I was talking about. And I hadn’t shown him the book because I wanted it to be a surprise.

The book described the step-by-step process of making pottery. It went into the different types of clay craftsmen have used over the years and the various kinds of pottery wheels and what a kiln was.

I knew we could get the wheel and clay in the shed but I wasn’t sure what we do about a kiln. I couldn’t see us building one in our backyard. Maybe there were places that had community ones people could use for a fee.

I closed the book when I heard an owl hooting in the night. I stepped out onto the back porch and wondered how close the bird might be, and I thought about Tia and her cooking club. Maybe it would be fun to hang out with a couple kids my own age who liked to cook and learn from them. When I was alone in my own kitchen that was one thing, and I felt comfortable there, but to be around a bunch of people, especially girls, was another.

As my father slept in on Sunday morning, I went next door to check on the sparrows. Old Lady Peters wasn’t outside, so I assumed Simon had probably already come and picked her up.

I carried the five-gallon bucket over to the birdhouse and climbed up. The four babies were starting to get even more feathers and their face and eyes looked almost like the sparrows I’d seen flying around.

“Just what do you think you’re doing?”

I froze. When she started laughing, I turned around. Mrs. Peters was walking toward me, wearing a grey dress. “How they looking?”

“Good.”

She nodded and walked over to the bucket. I helped her up, holding onto her arm, at the elbow.

As she peered into the birdhouse, I heard her son’s voice. “Mom, you out here?”

She turned to me and winked, “Let’s hide.”

I didn’t know if she was serious or not. She climbed down and we walked over to the shed, hid against the back wall. She lifted her finger to her lips.

“Mom,” he called again, then the screen door slammed shut.

She laughed. “I better go before he has a coronary. Have a good day, Julian.”

“You too, Mrs. Peters.”

She squeezed my hand twice and walked inside.

After she went in, I filled the feeders and changed the bath water. I heard the door open again. I’d assumed they had gone, but it was Simon. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m changing the birdfeeders.”

“You don’t need to come over here anymore.”

“It’s not up to you,” I said.

“It’s not up to you either,” he said, taking a couple steps toward me. I got the impression from his stance that if I was his kid he’d have slapped me.

He looked down at his watch, cussed, and walked away. “You better leave now.”

I did what he said, sure that he’d be having another talk with my father.

It was a nice day, good weather for running, but it was a Sunday, Dad’s day of rest from training. We decided to mow the yard. He went around with the weedwhacker while I did the actual mowing.

Our yard wasn’t particularly big, so we were able to finish in about forty-five minutes. I considered mowing her small front yard but didn’t want to make Simon any madder. I’d spent most of the time, while I mowed our yard, thinking about what I was going to tell Dad about Mrs. Peters and what happened with her son.

After we’d put everything away, Dad and I sat out on the front porch, each drinking a bottle of water. “Dad, I’ve got to tell you something.” I hated to do it but knew it would be better coming from me.

“Let me guess, you’re going on a date with that cashier.”

I shook my head. “The lady next door, Mrs. Peters. For the last couple weeks, I’ve been helping her in her yard.” When he didn’t say anything, I told him the whole story, how she’d called me over the fence that day, about the early morning walks and the baby birds, about her feeding birds by hand, and about the conversation I’d had earlier with Simon.

He sipped his water and uncrossed his legs, taking his time and choosing his words.

“I know you told me not to go over there, but she needed my help that first day and I discovered that I like hanging out with her. She’s nice and knows all kinds of stuff. She’s taught me a lot about birds.”

Dad spat a thin stream of water between his legs. “Let’s say I tell you again not to go over there, would you?”

“If you told me today, now, not to, then no I wouldn’t.”

He nodded, patted my knee. “I’m okay with you helping her, but don’t be a smart ass to her son.”

“I won’t,” I said, thinking damn, that was easy.

He winked at me, and I went inside to start making dinner. I’d decided I’d make Shepherd’s Pie today—meat and mashed potatoes and mixed vegetables.

An hour later, the doorbell rang. It was Simon. I didn’t answer but went around back and told my father who it was. He walked down the steps and headed toward the front of the house. I watched the two of them talk for a few minutes even though I couldn’t hear a word they were saying.

As we ate, my father told me that Simon had asked him to keep me away from her and Dad had said no. This pissed Simon off. “Just try to avoid him,” Dad said. “And let me know if he says anything else to you.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“Did you hear that?”

Mrs. Peters and I were sitting at the table, having our usual breakfast, when she suddenly sat up.

“I think it’s a hummingbird.”

All I could hear was the usual chorus of birdsong all around us.

“Watch over there,” she said. She was staring over at the butterfly bushes. I looked past the still flowerless bushes at the red-based feeder.

When I turned to Mrs. Peters, she looked anxious, her lips pursed as if she were a contestant waiting to see if she’d won some contest. An odd excitement came off of her, and this made my heart beat fast and hard. For a moment, I didn’t hear a single bird in the garden. They were everywhere, in the trees and bushes, but I could hear nothing.

Then there was a thick buzzing, humming sound and before she said it I knew it had to be a hummingbird. She clapped her hands together. “A female ruby-throated,” she said.

I looked to where she was staring, over at the feeder. The hummingbird buzzed this way and that, taking sips out of one of the feeder’s holes before moving on to the next. The bird wasn’t quite as small as I’d expected. I was expecting something about the size of a bumble bee. To me the cool thing was how it hovered with ease, bobbing back and forth, more like a bee, than a bird. After a couple minutes, it lifted up and flew away, out over the shrubs.

“How do you know that was the female?”

“The male has an actual ruby red throat. The female doesn’t have that red throat area.”

We sat there for a few minutes. Both of us hoping that the tiny bird would come back. Finally, I said, “Do you want to go see the baby sparrows?”

She shook her head. “I think this old lady has seen about all she needs to for one day.”

She was right. Compared to the arrival of the hummingbirds anything else would be anti-climactic.

That night, after our run, Dad told me about one of his patients, a man who’d had a stroke but also needed open heart surgery. He said the man’s name was Walter Black. Dad said you could tell the man had money by the way his family dressed.

“This afternoon I walk in there to change some meds and his wife was holding his hands and singing some old song. She wasn’t a particularly good singer but it was sweet.”

I wasn’t sure what it meant and why he was telling me the story.

Did it have to do with Mom? I didn’t think so. During the last week, as we continued to train, he’d started hanging out a little more after dinner, helping me clean up before heading to his room. We weren’t exactly shooting the breeze for hours every night, but we’d been talking more than we ever had before Mom left. It felt to me like he was trying to let me into his life.

“Is he going to be alright?”

Dad shook his head. “Too much damage. He’ll be lucky to ever walk again. If he makes it out of surgery.”

I could tell this took a lot out of him. People dying, their lives changing right in front of him. And he’d done all this because he needed a job, something to support our family.

“I’m going to hit it,” he said, starting to stand up.

“Don’t, not yet.” My voice surprised me, but I didn’t want him to go to bed yet. He was actually talking to me about his life and I didn’t want him to stop.

“Let’s play UNO,” I said. It was a silly old card game I used to play with Mom and Dad years ago. I’d come across the deck of cards earlier while I was looking for a bottle opener. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d played it, couldn’t remember half the rules but didn’t think that mattered.

“You’re on,” he said. “Be right back.” He walked to his room while I dug out the cards from the back of one of the kitchen drawers.

When he came back, he was carrying his Miles Davis CD. He dropped it in the CD player and sat across from me. As he read the rules aloud, from the back of one of the cards, the music started. I’d always thought it was slow and sad music whenever I heard it seeping under the door, but that wasn’t the case. There were moments when Mr. Davis’ trumpet seemed to rise so high it was like beautiful screaming.

“I’m dealing first,” he said.

“Whatever. I’m still going to kick your butt.”

“We’ll see about that.” He winked at me as he tossed me a card.

I’d set my alarm on Tuesday morning because I wanted to go for another walk with Mrs. Peters, but as I opened my front door, she was backing her car out of the driveway. I ran up to her driver’s side window and knocked on the glass. She looked at me wide-eyed and lifted her hands in the air. The car coughed and stalled. She shook her head as I ran around to the other side and let myself in.

“Julian, you about scared me half to death.” She wasn’t wearing her overalls and white shirt. She had on her grey dress and her hair was combed back nicely.

“I suppose you want to go for a ride,” she said.

When I nodded, she shook her head and turned the key again and off we went, out of the neighborhood. Mrs. Peters drove with both hands on the wheel. She stared forward with her lips parted slightly. Driving seemed to take all of her concentration. As we headed downtown, I considered asking her where we were going because I only had two hours before I had to leave for school. She turned off the main road, into the entrance of the Green Hill Cemetery.

We passed hundreds of graves, marked by headstones big and small. She pulled the car over to the side of the road, turned it off and climbed out. “I won’t be long,” she said.

While Mrs. Peters hadn’t invited me to walk out into the cemetery with her, she hadn’t told me I couldn’t come either, so I followed her, staying back a little, through the maze of headstones. Twenty yards in, she stopped at a stone and kneeled down.

I read the names engraved on the stone: Roger Peters 1919-1992. Her name Evelyn Peters was below his with the year 1919 and a dash but no end date. I knew people sometimes bought funeral plots in advance so they could be together forever—my grandparents had done it—but still it must be strange to see your name on a headstone in a cemetery.

She talked to her dead husband for a few minutes before running her hand along the top edge of the headstone. I turned away. It was one of those moments, something personal between adults that made me feel uncomfortable, like when I used to see my parents kissing.

When she turned around, she didn’t seem surprised to see me standing there. She held out her arm and I took it as we walked back to the car. I helped her into her seat and walked around to the passenger side and climbed in.

After starting the car, she turned to me and said, “I like to come out here and tell Roger when I see the first hummingbird of the year.”

“Did he like birds as much as you?”

“Not really, but he was always willing to listen.”

As we drove away from the cemetery, I thought of that day she ran over my leg. I remembered her standing over me, looking down as if she didn’t quite understand who or what I was, this boy under her car.

“Do you remember that day you ran over my leg?”

She turned, her hands gripping the steering wheel. “What are you talking about?”

As we looked at each, our faces a couple feet apart, I knew she had no memory of that day. I could see fear in her eyes, something I’d never seen before. “No, Mrs. Peters, I’m just kidding.”

She patted my left knee twice and said, “You are a strange young man.”

When we pulled into her driveway, my father’s truck was gone.

“I didn’t do too bad for an old lady without a license, did I?”

“What do you mean you don’t have a license?”

“Simon took it away from me a couple years ago. And he took all my keys away, or at least he thought he did. I had an extra set.”

I realized then that I hadn’t seen her drive her own car since the day she ran over my leg. Maybe that’s what Simon had promised my father years ago: that he would take her keys away and not let her drive anymore as long as I stayed away from her.

The next morning, Mrs. Peters was sitting at the bench between the butterfly bushes. The tea tray was at her feet. As I walked toward her, she said, without looking back, “Morning, young man.”

“Good morning, Mrs. Peters.”

The grass was wet with dew and it was a little cooler than it had been, so much so that I had to wear a jacket.

“I saw them yesterday afternoon. A male and female.”

She didn’t have to tell me she was referring to the hummingbirds.

She sipped her tea while I sipped my milk. I wanted to ask her something about her husband, wanted to know if they ever had problems. Maybe all couples go through some sort of trouble at different times, and this was my parents’ time. “Did you and your husband ever have any problems?”

She turned to me and smiled. “Oh, every couple has problems. Marriage is not easy. The secret, I learned a long time ago, was to say you’re sorry and not get hung up on past mistakes. Just tell the other person, I’m sorry, I screwed up, I forgot to take out the trash, I’m sorry I stayed out late with the guys from work. That takes care of most marital problems. Couples can work through most problems if they really want to.”

“I don’t know what my parents would apologize to each other for. They don’t, or didn’t, talk much. Mom worked on her novel all the time and Dad worked so much that he was tired by the time he got home. I can’t remember the last time I saw the two of them sit down and talk to each other.”

“Do you want them back together? Do you want to be a family again?” she asked,

“Yes.”

“What about your father, does he?”

“I guess so. He says he misses her, but he doesn’t do anything.”

“What would you like him to do?”

“Drive down to Florida and scoop her up and drive back home.”

“The caveman approach?”

We both laughed. “Yeah, something like that.”

“Maybe you should push him, think of it as gently coaxing him into action. Sometimes people need help in the simplest way. Maybe he thinks the thing to do is to just wait her out. And maybe he’s right. I don’t know either of your parents. I’m just saying a gentle push forward can’t hurt.”

“Maybe we could send her flowers or put an ad in the paper here for someone to run the motel. We could pay to move them down there. Maybe I could write her letters and sign them with Dad’s name.”

“It might work,” she said.

“Maybe.”

I heard the buzzing-hum before I actually spotted the hummingbird, a ruby-throated male this time. There was something almost other-worldly about these birds. I figured most people liked them because they were so small, similar to how people like babies because they’re tiny and cute, but for me it was their flight that was amazing. They could fly straight to the feeder, hovering in front of it, dipping their long tongues in and out. It was so smooth, so fluid, hovering back and forth an inch or two and then just lifting up like a helicopter. They seemed more in control of their flight than other birds. I had seen other birds fly full speed toward something, or into thick brush, and then veer away at the last second, but none of it looked as smooth as this.

When the hummingbird flew away, up over her shrubs, I figured it was time to get going. “Have you looked in on the nest?”

“Not today.”

I walked over to the nest and climbed up on the bucket. I could hear their slight peep-peep calls, asking for food. They were getting more feathers and starting to look like birds.

I helped her up and held onto her arm the whole time she stood on the bucket. “They look good,” she said, stepping down.

“How much longer until they fly away?”

“I’d say a few days now.”

“Have a good day, Mrs. Peters.”

“I already have,” she said.

And while I didn’t say it out loud, I thought, me too.

“He died today.”

For some reason, I knew Dad was referring to that patient, Mr. Black, he’d told me about the other night.

“How?” We were sitting at the table, eating chicken Marsala, after our nightly run. The mushrooms were swimming in the Marsala wine sauce and I made a mental note not to use so much wine next time. The chicken was tender and practically fell apart in my mouth.

“His lungs filled with fluid. It happens when these people lay in bed for a couple days. The man couldn’t walk, so he was just kind of stuck in his bed.”

“Tell me a story about someone who got better and left the hospital,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Not everyone who goes into the hospital dies.”

He took a bite of his chicken. “You’re right. Let’s see. One that made it. There’s been hundreds, thousands over the years.”

“Tell me about a patient you thought was going to die but who ended up walking out of the hospital. We could use some good news for a change.”

He closed his eyes, searching his memory. “I remember this guy named Charlie Shue. He was in his early thirties, but he’d already had open-heart surgery once and the doctors said if they didn’t operate again soon he wasn’t going to make it.

“By the time we got him up on the floor his lungs were filling up with fluid. His legs were swollen. But we got him into physical therapy, walked him everyday, and he started to get better. After four days on our floor, he was in good enough shape for the surgery. A week later, I was walking down to the cafeteria to eat lunch and I saw him leaving the hospital. There, that’s your good news story.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

After I set my dishes in the sink, I asked, “Do you want Mom back?”

“We’ve talked about this before. Yes, I want her to come back.”

“Well what are you doing about it?”

“I’m giving her time, space, to figure out what she wants. I hope she’ll figure out it’s me, us, that she wants.”

“I think you need to do more than that.” Even I was surprised at myself for saying this, but I’d been thinking a lot about it and felt pretty sure it was going to take something more than time to get

Mom back here.

“You might be right.”

“We could put a full-page ad in the Venice paper, a picture of us, saying come home. Or we could rent a billboard down there, somewhere she’d see it, asking her to come back.”

He laughed in a kind way. “You’re right. I’ve got to do something. Give me some time, a week or so, and then I’ll decide what to do.”

“Next Wednesday or I’ll decide.”

He laughed. “You’re killing me. Yes, by next Wednesday.”

I started loading the dishes in the dishwasher, sure my mother would be calling soon.

She did and I answered on the second ring. We talked for a minute while my father finished doing the dishes. Then I said, “Mom, I’ve got to go to the bathroom. Here talk to Dad.” Before she could say anything or protest, I handed my father the phone and walked into the bathroom.

I sat on the toilet lid for a few minutes. When I walked out to check, my father was sitting at the table, talking to my mother. He laughed at something she was saying. As I headed back to my bedroom, I figured at least I’d got them talking.

I was in the kitchen, the warm scent of salmon filling the room, when the telephone rang. The only phone calls we ever got were from Mom, and since this was a Thursday I didn’t think it was her. Checking the caller ID, I saw it was Dad’s work number.

“Hey, Julian.”

“What’s up, Dad?”

“I’m going to be late. Phil, my relief, called in with car trouble. Go ahead and eat. I should be home by eight. Guess we won’t get our run in tonight.”

“I’ll put the food in the microwave for when you get home.”

“That’s okay. One of the docs ordered us pizza. I’ll see you in a while then.”

I hung up, disappointed. I was making a new dish, one I had seen Rachael make a couple days earlier. It was salmon and spinach with a butter sauce. It looked pretty easy to make. You cooked the salmon in a pan for six minutes on each side while in another pan you sautéed the spinach down with a little olive oil. I had been looking forward to trying it out on Dad.

It was only a little after five, so it was possible Mrs. Peters hadn’t eaten yet. I removed the spinach from the heat, turned the stove off, and walked over to her house. She answered the door in a pair of white pants and a blue button-up shirt. She had on reading glasses and her white hair fell straight down her back. “This is a surprise,” she said.

“Have you eaten?”

“A strange question, most people start with hello,” she said. “But no, I haven’t eaten yet.”

“Come over then. I made dinner and Dad has to stay late at work.”

“Two minutes,” she said, then shut the door.

Back in my kitchen, I put an inch of butter in the microwave for a minute, then set two equal mounds of spinach in the center of each plate. The salmon went on top of the spinach, off-centered just a little. The bright green and orange looked good together. As I drizzled some of the melted butter on top of each piece of fish, the doorbell rang.

Mrs. Peters held a pie pan, covered in tinfoil. “Hope you like apple pie.”

“Who doesn’t?” I asked, stepping aside, so she could come in.

“Oh people will surprise you, young man. They certainly will.”

Was she talking about the fact that I’d knocked on her door and invited her for dinner? “Thanks for bringing the pie.”

“Always come to a party bearing gifts,” she said, handing me the pie. “Put this in the oven on 200, it’ll warm up nice.”

When I set the plates on the kitchen table, she said, “Let’s eat outside.”

It sounded like a good idea. It was a nice evening, the first week of May and sixty degrees. The mosquitoes hadn’t arrived yet. After we sat down, I waited for Mrs. Peters to pick up her fork before I did. She hesitated. I wasn’t sure what she was waiting for.

“It sure looks good,” she said.

It did look good, like something you’d see on a cooking show.

“You made this?”

I nodded.

“Impressive. I didn’t know you were a cook.”

“People will surprise you,” I said.

She laughed. “Yes, they will.”

I waited for her to take the first bite. “Umm,” she said.

It was pretty good. The butter was strong, and pleasant, but not overpowering. “Not bad,” I said.

“Not bad, my foot. This is good. I think we’ve discovered your talent,” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m not kidding, Julian. This is the best meal I’ve had in years.

You’ve got a gift.”

I was embarrassed and wanted to change the subject. “What do you usually eat?”

“Sometimes I make a big pan of lasagna and eat on that for a couple days.”

“What were you going to eat tonight?”

“A chicken pot pie TV dinner.”

“I’m glad you could come over,” I said.

“Me too.” She looked at the pot in the center of the table. It was the one I’d given her and she’d returned with flowers in it. “You watering this?”

“Everyday.”

She opened her mouth to say something, then stopped herself.

“So are you ready for some pie?” I went in to get us some, adding a scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. The warmth of the pie helped it melt nicely.

As I set the bowl in front of Mrs. Peters, she said, “You know girls love a man who can cook.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” I tried to think of someone I’d like to cook for. Lucy Sanborn came to mind. I imagined her sitting across the table from me, smiling as she ate. But, of course, I doubted I’d ever get a chance to cook for her. I thought about that Tia girl and her cooking club.

“So no prospects?”

“Not really.”

“A good looking young man like you. A lover of birds, a chef on the rise,” she said.

“What do you say to girls? I mean I don’t even really know how to talk to them.”

“You just say hi, I’m Julian. That should be enough.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“But it is. We don’t need fancy lines.”

Sure, I thought, you have no idea how hard it is to talk to girls. “What did your husband say to you when you met him?”

She looked away, out into the darkness of the backyard. When she didn’t say anything for almost a minute, I considered changing the subject, apologizing for being so nosy.

“That’s all he said: ‘Hi, I’m Roger.’ He was the landscaper at Lindley Elementary when I first started teaching there. I’d seen him around a few times. He would turn the mower off whenever a group of students walked by. It was a small thing but it’s the small things that make a person. Like you inviting me here for dinner.

“It was my first teaching job. He was taking night classes over at the community college and trying to save enough money so he could go to NC State and get his accounting degree. One day, I was at the grocery store, picking through the squash and zucchini. The next thing I knew about a dozen squash fell on the floor. It was a Saturday, a busy shopping day, and there were a lot of people standing around. I was embarrassed. I bent over and started putting them back and then this man was next to me, helping me place them back on the stand. We were on our knees, picking the squash up, when he said ‘Hi, I’m Roger.’”

I wondered what I’d do in that situation. I hoped I would do the same thing.

“So trust me, that’s all you have to say. Hi, I’m Julian.”

I had been so involved in her story that I hadn’t heard my father pull in the driveway, hadn’t heard the front door open. I practically jumped out of my seat when he opened the sliding glass doors.

“Dad, you’re home.”

“Phil made it in. His girlfriend drove him.” Dad looked from me to Mrs. Peters, at the empty plates in front of us, as if he were trying to figure out what exactly was going on here.

Mrs. Peters said, “Hi. Evelyn Peters from next door.”

He shook her hand. “Jim Hale.”

When my father looked at me again, I said, “When you said you weren’t coming home, I invited Mrs. Peters over.”

“I see,” he said, then disappeared back inside.

I had no idea what was going to happen next.

“Should I go?” she asked.

Before I could answer, Dad walked back outside and set the rest of the pie and ice cream on the table. He asked if either of us wanted anymore—we both did and he served us each—and then filled his own plate. There I was eating with my father and Mrs. Peters, the two people I’d spent the most time with since Mom left. I wanted to take a picture of the three of us and send it to Mom because I doubted she’d believe me if I told her about this evening.

“So Julian tells me he’s been helping you with your birds and yard,” Dad said.

“He’s been a great help. And I just discovered what an amazing chef he is.”

“When Sandy moved to Florida, he just took over. I don’t know where he gets it from.”

“Mom taught me a lot,” I said.

“He does have a talent for it,” Mrs. Peters said.

“His mother is running her parents’ motel down there,” my father said.

“Sometimes distance isn’t a bad thing,” she said, glancing at my father, then turning away.

“Sometimes,” Dad said. “How long have you lived here?”

“Forty years or so.”

“You must have seen a lot of families in this house, over the years.”

While she thought about it, I heard a Carolina chickadee, a titmouse, a blue jay, and a crow.

“Four,” she said. “All of them have had children, at one time or another. There were the Hogans, the McIntyres, the Cobles, and the Davises. The Davises were my favorite. They had four kids, two boys and two girls, all of them blonde like their father. They were busy kids, always selling something for the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts.”

It was surprising to hear about other lives, and families, in our house. Of course, I knew people had lived here before us but to hear there were so many other kids before me was kind of cool.

Mrs. Peters stood up. “It’s getting late. I’d better get going, almost time for the Price Is Right.”

Dad and I stood up. “Thanks again, young man. Amazing.”

“Thanks for coming,” Dad said. “And for keeping Julian busy.”

“My pleasure,” she said, waving at him.

I walked Mrs. Peters down the steps, holding her forearm. I spotted some motion out of the corner of my eye. When I turned, I realized Dennis was standing by my father’s truck. For the briefest moment, I let go of her arm but then held it again.

At her front door, she held out her arms, reached over and hugged me. She’d never hugged me before, but I didn’t pull away. “See you tomorrow,” she said, then walked inside and shut the door.

As I turned around and faced Dennis, all the good feelings of the evening started to slip away. “What’s up, Hale?”

“Nothing.”

I started to walk away, trying to ignore him.

“What are you doing with that old lady?”

I turned and charged at him, pushed him to the ground. “Go screw yourself, Dennis. She’s a nice lady. Leave me alone and leave her alone. You only come over here when your real friends, or your girlfriend, are busy.”

He made it to his feet. I could see his hands were balled up. And while I hadn’t been in a fight in years, I was ready. If he said one more thing about her I’d punch him.

“I don’t understand you, man,” he said.

“You wouldn’t. You don’t know what it’s like to come home everyday hoping to see your mother’s car in the driveway. You don’t know anything about my life. So go home to your parents and your happy life.”

If he said anything, I didn’t hear him because I turned and walked up my back steps. My father was filling the dishwasher. He looked up at me as I walked in and shut the sliding glass door behind me.

“Everything, okay?” he asked. I must have looked upset.

“Fine, Dad,” I said and headed back to my bedroom, slammed the door shut. I heard my father walking down the hall. He stopped in front of my door. And while I didn’t know what I’d say if he knocked and asked what was wrong, I desperately wanted him to say something. But he didn’t. Instead, he walked to the bathroom to take his shower.

Entering the grocery store, I looked over at the row of registers and was relieved when I didn’t spot Tia. It wasn’t that I didn’t like talking to her. She seemed nice enough, and I appreciated her inviting me over to cook with her, but each time I spoke to her it was getting more difficult, as if I were slowly realizing she was someone I would like to see more than once a week.

I’d decided on three new recipes to try this week. Two of them were chicken dishes and the other one shrimp. For the shrimp, I planned to pour some olive oil, coarse sea salt and parsley in a bowl, whip it up and then set the shrimp in that marinade for a few hours. Instead of boiling the shrimp, which was the only way I’d ever cooked them, I would sauté them in a pan and serve them over yellow rice. Rachael had made the recipe last week and as usual it looked easy to do and delicious.

“Got everything?” Dad asked, grabbing a six-pack of beer.

“Think so.”

“Get ready then because your favorite cashier is waiting for you.”

I looked up and Tia was leaning against the counter, flipping through an issue of Southern Living. Maybe she’d been on a break before when we first came in.

“Let’s go to a different register,” I said, half-joking.

“No chance,” he said and laughed.

She looked up and smiled as we pushed the cart to her register.

“Look what the cat drug in,” she said.

“Hi, Tia.” I felt guilty for not calling her.

“Julian and Mr. Julian’s dad.”

My father smiled.

“Thanks for calling,” she said. “I waited and waited and waited.”

I didn’t know what to say. So much for hoping she hadn’t noticed.

“You know you stand the risk of breaking a girl’s heart when you don’t call her.”

The list of excuses I ran through my head all sounded pretty lame.

“Your loss. Heather made donuts. They were incredible. Strawberry filled.”

“How do you make donuts?” I had never seen anyone make them, not even on the Food Network.

“That’s why you’ve got to come over. You might learn something.”

This time she was wearing little spatula earrings.

“What are you cooking this week? Mom says you should cook at least one new recipe a week. Spend the other six days mastering old recipes. By the end of the year you have fifty new ones.”

“Sautéed shrimp.”

She laughed. “I saw that episode on Monday.”

After my father paid her, she wrote her number on the bottom of our receipt. This time my father tore it off and gave it to me right in front of her.

“No excuses this time,” she said.

As we loaded the groceries into his truck, Dad said, “She is persistent. And you both cook.”

“Think of the tension after we’re married. The two of us fighting for kitchen time. The kids neglected.”

“You’re plumb crazy, Julian.”

Dad decided to take a nap after our run. He said he hadn’t had a nap in years, but he was tired and felt like he needed one. He said maybe we would go to the movies later if there was something I wanted to see. While he slept, I went next door to visit Mrs. Peters.

She was sitting out on that bench by the hummingbird feeder and butterfly bushes. I cleared my throat twice because I didn’t want to scare her, but she didn’t respond. I assumed she’d fallen asleep while waiting to see some hummingbirds. Her head was against her chest and Lucky was between her feet. I went through my usual chores with the feeders and birdbaths. The birds were singing and screaming in the yard all around me.

I walked over to the birdhouse, climbed up on the overturned bucket, lifted the top and looked inside. They looked pretty much like every other sparrow I’d seen. One of them had the black square under the chin, a male, a little boy. They looked like they could fly and maybe they did fly out each day and come back. I’d ask her about that.

As I approached Mrs. Peters, I coughed again, still not wanting to scare her. Lucky was up on the bench now, beside her. It was strange that she didn’t respond to my coughing. And before I walked around the bench and faced her, I knew that Mrs. Peters was dead. Lucky ran over to me, kneading my shoes with his paws. Mrs. Peters’ chin was resting on her chest, her big hat shading her face from me.

I reached for Mrs. Peters’ hat with a shaking hand. I lifted the hat and her face was so pale, so soft white it took everything I had not to reach up and trace the vein that ran along the right side of her face, starting at her hair line and disappearing over the edge of her jawbone.

I shook her shoulder once, still thinking it was possible there might be a way to pull her out of this deep sleep. But even I knew it was too late for that. And then I was running to my house and banging on my father’s door, calling him, thinking maybe he could do CPR on her.

“What, what is it?” He stood there in shorts and a T-shirt, his hair everywhere.

“It’s Mrs. Peters.” I couldn’t say anything else, couldn’t say she was dead.

He followed me down the stairs and over into her yard and then was on his knees in front of her. He lifted her head, felt for her pulse on her arm and neck. Then he looked over at me, his eyes squinted as if he were in pain.

I said, “CPR?”

He shook his head. “It’s too late. She’s probably been out here, like this, for a couple hours.”

“You sure?”

“There’s nothing we can do. I’m going to go call an ambulance and her son. Come on.”

“In a minute.”

I could tell he didn’t want to leave me here, but he said, “I’ll be right back.”

I sat down on the ground, in front of Mrs. Peters. Her right tennis shoe was un-tied, so I tied it. Lucky rammed his head into my side. He had to know something was wrong. As I petted Lucky, his purrs vibrated against my hand. His leash was on the ground, behind her bench, and I thought for a moment I might be able to take Lucky for a walk and when we got back she would be sitting up waiting for us. But I knew this wasn’t going to happen.

I closed my eyes and called out the names of birds as I heard them: “Mockingbird, sparrow, wren, catbird.” I heard the buzzhum of a hummingbird. There was a pair at the feeder. As I watched their impossible flight, I hoped that Mrs. Peters had seen them earlier today as she sat out here, that she laughed and reached for them and maybe even tickled a feather. Something told me she’d probably watched them for a while, then closed her eyes and said a silent goodbye to this world.

My father and I pulled up to the funeral home. He asked, “You sure you don’t want me to come in?”

“No, Dad. I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll be back in an hour. Call me if you need me before then,” he said. The last couple days had been a blur for me. A few minutes after I left her backyard, an ambulance pulled into her driveway, followed by Simon. My father went out and talked to them. I don’t know what he said. I spent most of the day in my bedroom, strumming the strings of my out-of-tune guitar. Dad tried to talk to me a few times but I didn’t feel like talking.

When my mother called that night, I told her what happened with Mrs. Peters and about how I’d been helping her with the birds, about how she was able to feed them by hand. And I told her how she didn’t remember running over my leg.

“But you’re okay?” she asked.

“I guess.”

“You’d tell me if you needed anything?”

“I need you to come back home.”

“Oh, Julian,” she said. The line went silent for a few seconds.

“It’s not that easy.”

“Why not?”

When she didn’t say anything, I said, “I better get going.”

“I love you, Julian.”

“You too, Mom.” Then the ocean filled my ear: whistling wind, sweet dreams and all that promised.

On Sunday, I mowed the yard, trying to stay busy, so I wouldn’t think about Mrs. Peters. It was because of Mrs. Peters that I hadn’t missed Mom quite as much. And I had enjoyed being with Mrs. Peters, her and those stupid birds. I never would have expected, or appreciated, the simple, easy pleasure of seeing a bird flying around your yard. That was only one of the things she’d taught me.

I hadn’t gone over to her yard again until Monday, after school. Dad said we should feed the cat, so he’d gone out and bought some cat food and filled Lucky’s bowl. He said he didn’t see Lucky, but when I went over there all the food was gone. I changed the feeders and the water. I checked he birdhouse, and the nest was empty. The birds had flown away.

Dad showed me her obituary in the paper. I read through it a half-dozen times trying to learn something new about her. Most of it I already knew. It mentioned her husband and Simon, that she’d been born in Nashville and had been an elementary school teacher for forty-three years. But the things I didn’t know about her were what I found most interesting: she had a brother named Gray who lived in New York state and she had been a contestant on The Price is Right over thirty years ago.