1996
I met Mrs. Delaney the first time I saw Bay Court.
It was only weeks after we had spilled Ben’s ashes into the lake in Prospect Park. In fact, I guess it all started after the ceremony and the balloons and the useless attempts to comfort Gretl, his heartbroken mother, who had lost her husband only the year before. We went back to her apartment afterwards, where we sat awkwardly in her living room, surrounded by old photos, books and memories that neither of us wanted to talk about. Finally, the few relatives who had also shown up—Ben’s Aunt Isabeau and Uncle Gabe, their grown children, and a noisy little girl named Rachel—made their excuses and left us alone.
Gretl sat and stroked her arm where you could still see the ghost of her concentration camp tattoo. “When he was little, I told him the numbers were magical,” she moaned. “I told him they would protect him from evil.”
I gave her the fistful of pills she needed to get to sleep, put her to bed, and listened as she drifted away, murmuring about somebody named Jakie.
After leaving Gretl, I had planned to go to a bar and get completely smashed, but I realized that I was too exhausted. I stopped off at a bodega, bought a six-pack of beer, and went home. And found a note from my landlady under the door that said she needed our apartment for her daughter, so I had a month to move out. Oh, and she was sorry about Ben.
I couldn’t face looking for a place just yet. I boxed up all our stuff, had it put into storage, and crashed with a bunch of friends. Luckily, they were patient with me—my savings were starting to dwindle, my very Catholic parents hadn’t spoken to me since I came out to them five years earlier, and I just didn’t have the energy to start looking for work.
Still, I couldn’t depend on the kindness of friends—or even strangers—forever. I called in a couple of favors, got some part-time work doing layouts for some small-press magazines, and started to search for a new place to live.
It turned out to be a lot harder than I thought. Gentrification had hit the outer boroughs. Everywhere I looked, the place was either tiny, too expensive, or in the kind of neighborhood where you don’t go out after dark—and the fact that I didn’t have a steady job didn’t help. I was too broke to buy, too old to share, and was starting to wonder if I’d end up in New Jersey or have to leave New York entirely.
Then, early one Saturday morning, one of the realtors I’d signed with called and said she had something in south Brooklyn that might suit.
“Two bedrooms, a living room, a dining area and a small kitchen,” she said and quoted a rent that was nearly within my budget.
“Okay,” I said. “What’s the catch? Is the place falling down?”
“The place is fine,” she said. “Actually, it’s in excellent condition. They’re just very picky about who they rent to, and a quiet, single, middle-aged man would suit them just fine. Look, Carlos, what do you care? Just go and look at it. If you like it, and they like you, I’ll see if we can negotiate them down a tad.”
She paused. “You’ll pick up a key from one of the neighbors, a woman named Mrs. Delaney. I understand she can be a bit, well, forthright in her opinions, but if she likes you, you’re in. So be polite.”
The place was a few blocks from the last station on the subway line, and what with slowdowns and changing trains, it took longer than I thought. When I finally emerged from the subway, I found myself in what looked like an old-school working-class Brooklyn neighborhood. There were stores on one side of the street and a large old-fashioned Catholic church on the other; around me, retired men sat glumly outside a dark bar sucking on paper cups filled with beer; teenage girls of varying hues surreptitiously passed around a cigarette; a woman in too-tight denims chatted with another wearing a hijab while toddlers ran around their legs. A white working-class neighborhood in the process of integrating. I wondered if I could fit in.
Following the directions the realtor had given me, I found the right street, turned and walked toward the middle of the block. About halfway down, a small green sign reading “Bay Court” pointed to a stone staircase between two red brick houses. I climbed the six stairs—and stared.
I had expected some kind of bleak apartment complex. Instead, I was standing in a small, quiet courtyard lined on either side by narrow two-story attached brick homes, each with a yard hardly larger than a bed sheet. It was quiet and nearly deserted—any sounds from the streets around seemed muted, far away.
A sudden chatter from my left: A mockingbird sitting in a nearby bush scolded me for a moment and then flew to the center of the courtyard—where there grew the biggest, strangest fir tree I’d ever seen outside of Rockefeller Center.
It looked like a cross between a tree and a huge green lollipop. For the first ten feet, the trunk was as straight as a telephone pole, although it was wreathed in so much ivy that you couldn’t see the color of the wood beneath. Above that, there were a few green branches, and then a few more from which a torn web of what looked like netting dangled. Past that, the tree sprouted huge, thick branches that reached out so far they nearly touched the roofs of the houses on either side. I craned my neck up; the tree had to be about 20 feet high, at least.
“And who are you, young man?”
I quickly looked back down. A woman was sitting under the tree in a wooden folding chair, a paperback in one hand—for some reason, I hadn’t noticed her before. She was wrinkled and blue-veined, with bright silver hair hanging in a page boy cut that made her look like a somewhat dried-up 1920s flapper. She put her other hand up to shade her eyes and squinted at me from under a blue cotton sun hat.
“Are you the new tenant?” she asked in a distinctly Irish accent.
“Excuse me?”
She sighed in obvious exasperation. “For number eight. Over there.” She pointed to one of the houses, which had a small “For Rent” sign stuck into the tiny lawn. “I’m Mrs. Delaney.”
Oh. Right. Good, Carlos, piss off the new neighbor before you even take the place. I mentally shook myself. “I’m sorry. The realty company told me that you’d let me in.” I smiled, trying to look like a nice, quiet, perfect renter. “My name is Carlos Acosta.”
“Yes, they told me your name.” She stared at me for a very long minute while I waited, wondering if I should ask her for the key. “I see you’ve noticed the tree,” she finally said. “What do you think of it?”
I shrugged. “It’s a bit weird-looking for a tree. But then, I like weird.”
Mrs. Delaney smiled and dipped into the pocket of one of the ugliest polyester jackets I’ve ever seen. She pulled out a key hanging from a huge paper clip, which she tossed it to me. “Take your time,” she said. “I want to finish this chapter.” And she opened her book and started reading as though she’d completely dismissed me from her mind.
I unlocked the door and pushed it open. My first impression was that the house was indeed small; I’d seen apartments that were larger. There was a living/dining room (with, Dios mío, a gas fireplace) and a tiny kitchen downstairs; walking up the narrow stairs, I found two small bedrooms and a bathroom.
The place needed work—the paint job was abysmal, and the bathroom had probably been designed by a refugee from 1962. And I wasn’t too sure how well I’d fit into an enclave that was overseen by an obviously nosy Irish lady.
But it was a house. With a fireplace. And a dishwasher. And a staircase. And a lawn.
I did one more short tour, went over to the door, put my hand on the knob and then stopped. “Should I take it?” I asked and looked behind me as if Ben would suddenly manifest there, in the living room, wrinkling his nose at the color of the walls and figuring out which tchotchkes would go on the mantelpiece. I hadn’t made a major decision without asking for his input for nearly a decade; it was hard to get out of the habit.
Of course, he wasn’t there. He would never be there. But I knew what Ben would have said: “You like it? You can afford it? Then for god’s sake don’t spend time thinking about it—grab it before somebody else does.”
He was right. Of course. “Okay,” I said, and opened the door.
Mrs. Delaney was still sitting under the tree. “So,” she asked as I approached, her bright blue eyes fastened on my face, “you’ve decided to take the house, have you? Ah, well, that’s lovely. I’m sure you’ll like it here.”
I offered her the key. “I’ll think about it,” I said, a little miffed at being taken for granted.
She smiled and waved away the key. “Nothing to think about. Just call your real estate agent and tell her that I said to arrange for the lease. You can move in whenever you like.”
* * *
I wondered later if she’d heard me talking to my dead lover—the walls of those homes didn’t strike me as very thick. Still, the next morning I sent in my answer and my references; a two-year lease arrived in my email an hour later. I forwarded it to my lawyer, who told me it was a standard lease with nothing objectionable added. I signed it, sent it, and two weeks later stood outside my new home watching the movers drive away with a good chunk of my change.
It was a Friday afternoon and the courtyard was quiet; most of the other residents were probably out at work (although I did see a few curtains twitch—no doubt neighbors trying to figure out who I was).
I went inside, shut the door, and began to unpack.
After a couple of hours, I sat back and contemplated the piles of boxes on the floor and on my couch. Part of me—the part I inherited from my efficient, no-nonsense mami—said that I should keep unpacking, and that the sooner I got that done, the faster I could get on with my life. The other part wanted to take a walk and check out the local bars to see if any looked friendly.
“Nu-uh,” I finally told myself. “You can check out the bars tonight. Work first.” I reached out to another box.
And then I smelled it. Smoky. Strong. Very unpleasant. Coming from outside.
There were two windows in the front wall of the house, one on either side of the door. They were covered by cheap white blinds, which I had decided to keep until I got something a bit snazzier to protect my privacy. I pushed a dusty slat down and peered outside.
In front of the house next door, a man was carefully pushing small sticks into his lawn and setting the tip of each on fire with a lighter.
Okay. So I had eccentric people living next door. I was a New Yorker—I could handle eccentric. I decided to ignore the whole thing.
Fifteen minutes later, I realized I couldn’t ignore it. The smell was getting intense, to the point where I had to crank open the kitchen window and dig out my fan to try to air the place out.
Time to meet the neighbors. I went for the front door.
Once outside, I wasn’t sure what to do or say. The man acted like I wasn’t there—just kept pushing each stick into the ground, lighting it, and going on to the next. Small plumes of evil-smelling brown smoke drifted up and dispersed throughout the area.
I cleared my throat. “Hi, there,” I said, in what I hoped was a conversational tone of voice.
The man turned and stared at me. He was practically a caricature of an aging Brooklyn mook: Somewhere in his 70s, with thinning white hair and an impressive paunch. “Hello.” he said, noncommittally, in the sort of gravelly, well-used voice that I always associated with construction workers and ex-cops.
I walked over to him and stretched out my hand. “Carlos Acosta. I just moved in.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We saw.” He gave my hand a cursory shake. “Bob Halloran. Where you from, Carlos?”
“Queens. Astoria, to be precise.” He scowled at me, but I plowed on, determined to be polite. “I was just wondering…”
And then I got a better look at the sticks he was planting, and my voice trailed off. I recognized them—they were what we used to call punks, bamboo sticks with a brown coating that were used to light fireworks. They were fun to play with when I was a kid, but they weren’t usually used as lawn decorations. What the hell was it all about? Some sort of weird religious ceremony?
The man saw me staring. “We got an animal problem here. Squirrels, cats—they dig holes and crap on the lawn. I figure this will keep them away.” He gave a wide wave toward his lawn, which I now saw was mowed down to about a quarter of an inch, so perfectly that the grass might have been painted on.
“Oh.” I was trying to figure out what to say to this when a large woman with streaked blonde hair and wearing a bright purple track suit came storming out of the house directly across from mine. “Bob Halloran!” she yelled, heading for us like a truck out of control. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
I took a step back—she looked like she was planning to plow right into us—but Halloran just narrowed his eyes and stood his ground. “I’m minding my own business, Vivian,” he shouted back. “What is your problem?”
“You know damn well what my problem is,” the woman huffed, stopping just short of the row of smoking punks. “I’ve got two kids coming home from school in half an hour, and all I need is for them to burn themselves on one of these…things.” She made an abortive move to kick one over, but then thought better of it and pulled her foot back.
She looked as though she would have said more, but a thin, white-haired woman wearing curlers and a bright pink apron that read, “Grandma Cooks Great!” came running out of Halloran’s house. “Vivian, what is your problem?” she demanded. “There’s nothing dangerous about punks—you used to play with ‘em when you were a kid, and you know it.”
After that, it became a verbal free for all. The three shouted at each other so enthusiastically that I was wondering whether I should call 911. Then Mrs. Halloran’s eyes widened. She closed her mouth and gave each of the other combatants a quick stab with her forefinger. As if given a signal, the other two immediately stopped and followed her gaze.
Mrs. Delaney stood a few feet away, her arms folded. “I was trying to watch my programs when I heard what sounded like a flock of seagulls screaming over a piece of garbage,” she said, quietly but firmly. “And then I started smelling burning garbage. Which turned out to be those foul items,” and she nodded at the smoldering punks.
I glanced at the three combatants. The two Hallorans looked like sullen children being dressed down by a hated teacher. Vivian looked smug.
“That stench will pollute every living thing in the Court,” Mrs. Delaney continued calmly. “Bob Halloran, I’d appreciate it if you’d remove them.”
She didn’t wait for an answer, but turned and strode briskly back to her house. I watched her for a moment, and then looked back at the trio. Vivian smiled and nodded at me. “Come say hello when you’re ready,” she said, and went back to her own place. The Hallorans glanced at each other, and then quietly started pulling the punks out of their lawn.
* * *
It wasn’t over, though.
A week after the incident with the punks, Halloran installed an electric fence two feet off the ground, which sparked unpleasantly every time a suicidal insect decided to pass by. That lasted until a small black poodle belonging to the elderly lady in the first house on the right ran into it and scurried away uttering a frightening whine. An hour later a police officer was banging on Halloran’s door and the fence came down.
A couple of weeks after that, Halloran placed several jars of water on his lawn because, he stated categorically, “Cats are afraid of the effect.” Somehow, the cats seemed to have conquered their fear; in fact, they saw it as a great place to get something to drink, as did the local squirrel population. Eventually, the jars disappeared as well.
For a while after that, things were quiet. I finished most of my unpacking and dragged the less important stuff down to the basement. I put up some of my posters and one or two of Ben’s. I called Gretl once a week just to keep in touch, and occasionally chatted with Ben’s cousin Eileen, who was looking after her. I stripped the bedroom of some really vile wallpaper and painted it. And then settled down to find some serious freelance work.
By this time, I was on friendly, although not intimate, terms with most of my neighbors. Vivian turned out to be a loud, friendly woman who worked part-time as a paralegal for a large Wall Street firm; she and her husband (an auto mechanic who collected old dime novels) and I would sit outside on fine evenings and gossip about the latest films, local politics, and the doings of the other neighbors. Sometimes, we’d be joined by one or two others.
It was, I had to admit, rather comfortable.
On those few occasions I did see Halloran (which wasn’t often), we’d nod politely to each other, but I didn’t say anything and neither did he. A sort of truce, I thought, had been established.
And then one afternoon, about three months after I’d moved in, I was working on a proposal, listening to the voices of some of my neighbors gossiping outside and wondering if I should join them when I was done when there was a sudden high-pitched squeal that made me jump. I rushed to the door and stuck my head out.
Several neighbors had formed a tight circle on Halloran’s lawn, staring at something on the ground. There was another ear-shattering shriek that ran up my spine; without even thinking about it, I strode to the circle of people and looked down.
A squirrel was lying on the lawn, pawing frantically at the grass, its back leg caught in what looked like an old-fashioned mousetrap.
“What the hell happened?” I asked.
“Halloran seeded his lawn with traps,” said Vivian scornfully. She was standing there, shaking her head. “He must have done it last night, or somebody would have stopped him. Now look.”
The squirrel’s screams were terrible, but nobody else moved. It was as though they were waiting for permission, or the cops, or something. The hell with that—I was still new there, but somebody had to do something. I stepped forward. “Someone get a pair of gloves. Heavy gloves, if you have them.” I looked at Vivian; she nodded and trotted back to her place.
I squatted down next to the squirrel.
“Okay,” I said, “I’m going to try to pull its leg from the trap. Does anyone know a vet around here?”
“There’s an animal hospital down on Fourth Ave,” said Mrs. Vincelli, the woman with the dogs.
“Call a car service, somebody,” I said. “As soon as we have the squirrel, I’ll take it over to the hospital. And maybe somebody has a shoebox we can put it in?”
Vivian had returned; she pressed a heavy pair of gloves into my hands. I put them on, and reached slowly toward the trap, but even with the gloves I was nervous—it was nearly impossible to avoid the teeth of the squirming animal. “Shit!” I hissed.
Then I realized that, except for the squirrel’s cries, it had become very quiet.
I looked up. Mrs. Delaney was standing there, holding a small cloth bag. Without a word she sat down cross-legged in the grass next to me and, murmuring some quiet words that I couldn’t quite hear, slowly moved the bag close to the frantic squirrel. She didn’t seem worried about a nip from those sharp and possibly diseased little teeth; she just carefully pushed the bag over the animal’s head and body, and held it gently but firmly.
Whether it was what she was saying or the darkness of the bag or the loss of blood, I don’t know, but the squirrel stopped struggling. I was able to take the metal bar of the trap in one hand and the wood base in the other, slowly separate them, and pull the trap from the animal’s leg.
I threw the bloodied thing toward the house and sat back. I suddenly felt very tired. “Did somebody call the car service?” I asked.
“Don’t bother yourself,” said Mrs. Delaney. “The little anam is dead.”
I looked up. Sometime during the last minute or two, the neighbors had quietly walked back to their homes. The only people left were myself, Mrs. Delaney and Vivian. I took off the gloves and handed them to Vivian, who dropped them on Halloran’s lawn. “He can get rid of them,” she said roughly. “God knows what kind of vermin that poor thing had.”
Mrs. Delaney had picked up the bag so that the squirrel slipped completely inside it. She looked into the bag and sighed. “Too much fright and too much blood lost,” she said, as if talking to the squirrel. “Poor thing. Not to die of age or to feed a predator, but caught in a nasty human trap.” She looked up. “Vivian, I’m sure I can trust you to let Mr. Halloran know that I would appreciate it if he would remove those traps immediately.”
“Oh, he’ll hear from me,” said Vivian grimly.
“Don’t yell too much at the man, dear, he is miserable enough. Carlos, walk me to my garden. I need a nice strong young man like you to help me dig a grave.”
We walked slowly towards Mrs. Delaney’s house at the back of the Court. “I shouldn’t have allowed them to move in,” she said, as much to herself as to me. “I knew they were troubled souls, but her mother came from the same county as my father’s first wife, so I asked no advice but welcomed them in. And see what that has brought.”
We had reached the tree. She stopped, shook her head and stared at me. “I hope you will always pay attention,” she said sternly. “Listen to those who love you and want the best for you.”
I shrugged. “Not too many of those,” I said, perhaps a bit offhandedly.
“Of course there are,” she said, and then before I could say anything else, looked up to a lower branch, where a mockingbird sat and scolded us for coming too close to her tree. “Do you like mockingbirds?” Mrs. Delaney asked.
“I guess so,” I said. “They’ve got nerve. They’re not big birds, but if you go anywhere near their nest, they’ll attack, no matter how big you are. And they are wonderful mimics. My abuela—my grandmother—used to say that when my mother was young, she had the choice of being as beautiful and tuneful as the mariposa or as fierce and clever as the sinsonte—the mockingbird—and she chose the latter.”
I paused, remembering. “Ben and I…” I paused for a moment and then plowed on. “My friend Ben and I would sometimes go birding in Central Park. He was better at it than I was, but I could always identify the mockingbirds.”
I waited for the questions, or the sideways glance, but it never came. We just stood in the quiet Court, listening to the bird go through its repertoire, until Mrs. Delaney smiled. “Now, if that wasn’t a car alarm,” she said, “I’ll eat my hat. What a very smart bird it is.”
She continued to walk back toward her garden; I followed. “There’s a spade against the wall, behind that bush,” she told me. “You can dig a small hole there, in front of the window. Just deep enough so that cats don’t find her.”
The soil was soft, so it took only about 15 minutes to dig a hole, deposit the tiny corpse into it, and cover it up again. Just as I was finishing, Mrs. Delaney came out of the house with a glass. “Iced tea,” she said. “Tetley, with a bit of fresh mint in it.”
“Thanks,” I said. I drank it gratefully and handed the glass back. Mrs. Delaney regarded the small grave thoughtfully. “Something will have to be done about that Halloran,” she said, more to herself than to me, it seemed. “Dedication to your garden is a worthy thing, but he is causing trouble and pain, and that must stop.”
She looked back at the mockingbird, which was now fastidiously grooming its wings. For a moment, it seemed to look back at her. One of the corners of her mouth raised just slightly. “The thought occurs to me,” she said. “You said you like birds. Wouldn’t you like to put up one of those bird feeders? There’s a pet store over on Third Avenue, run by a friend of mine—Animal Crackers, it’s called. Tell him I sent you. He’ll set you up.”
She turned and walked back into her house without another word.
That night, I thought about her suggestion—order, rather—to put a bird feeder in my front garden. The idea was silly, to say the least. A feeder in my tiny lawn would look absurd. And the mess it would make—not to mention the care it would take—would be a pain in the ass.
However, that Saturday, I found myself walking the seven blocks to the pet store.
* * *
The feeder didn’t come with any instructions, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out how to assemble it. And the next morning, when I opened my front door, three small brown birds who had decided to breakfast at the new establishment took off in a panic.
I watched them fly away, charmed. For a moment, I pictured myself spending the warm evenings in a small deck chair, a beer at my side and a guide to New York City birdlife in my lap. Then I thought about the daily outdoor gossip sessions and the constant parade of neighbors, delivery people and kids that pass through the court. There would be no quiet birdwatching here.
Still, each morning, before I even made coffee, I would go replenish the feeder. And I started to keep my living room blinds open so that, during periods of relative quiet, I could watch the birds fighting over the seed outside.
A couple of weeks later, I was on a call with a client when somebody pounded on my door as though they were trying to knock it down. It startled the hell out of me—I thought maybe there was an emergency of some sort, so I asked the client to hold, put the phone on mute, and opened the door to find Halloran standing on my threshold in an obviously foul mood. “I need to talk to you about your birds,” he rasped.
The man’s face was a dangerous shade of purple. He didn’t seem to be armed, and he didn’t make any attempt to come in, so I said, “One minute,” and closed the door. I unmuted the phone, told my client I’d call him the next day with my estimates, hung up, and opened the door again.
“Yes?” I asked.
“It’s your friggin’ birds,” Halloran said.
“My birds?”
“Your birds. From your goddamned feeder.”
“Oh. Okay. What about the birds?”
“They’re crapping on my sidewalk and on my lawn,” the man growled.
“Excuse me?”
“Your birds! This morning, they started leaving their goddamn droppings all over my front walk! And my chair! And my grass! The stuff is impossible to clean up. What are you going to do about it?”
Halloran stepped aside and let me look.
It was as though the Hallorans’ property had been struck overnight by some weird sort of disease. Their walk and their lawn were marked all over with ugly white blotches. A small folding chair that Halloran had put out was decorated with long white streaks.
It was pretty damned disgusting. Not to mention funny.
“You going to stop it or am I going to have to call my lawyer?”
Okay, it was Alice in Wonderland time. I lost my temper and any type of neighborly restraint. “I’m sorry, but are you insane?”
“Your birds are messing up my property!”
Maybe it was the dead squirrel, maybe it was just exasperation, but I’d had it. “You stupid bastard, what are are you talking about? You think I’m ordering the birds to shit on your stuff?”
“It’s your damn feeder!”
I began to laugh—I couldn’t help it. “Who the hell do you think I am?” I sputtered. “The fucking birdman of Alcatraz? I don’t tell the birds where to do their thing.”
But the man just wouldn’t let go. “Then why aren’t they doin’ it in your yard?”
I looked, and damn, but he was right. The white stuff was all over his walk, his grass, his chair—but the only evidence of the birds on my side was a scattering of seed hulls.
“Huh!” was all I could say.
As though to underscore the puzzle, a grey pigeon walked serenely from my lawn, where it had been searching out any seeds that had been knocked to the ground, and over to Halloran’s lawn chair. It fluttered up to the seat, serenely lifted its tail and left a gift in the center of the green plastic webbing. It then looked at us, unashamed.
At that point, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the bird had started a conversation like some come-to-life Disney cartoon. Halloran and I just stood there and gaped while the pigeon coolly ran a couple of its feathers through its beak and flew away.
“So?” Halloran asked, apparently not impressed by the idea of a wild creature purposefully using his chair as an outhouse. “Are you going to take that feeder down?”
“I’m not sure I should,” I said, still watching the small birds fluttering around the seed. “Mrs. Delaney said…”
“Robert? What’d he say?” Mrs. Halloran, her hair teased into a tall structure that looked like one of the birds had built it as a nest, banged out of their door and strode over, her eyes already narrowed and ready for battle. “Is he going to take it down?”
“It was Mrs. Delaney who put up the damned birdfeeder,” said Halloran to his wife.
“No, it wasn’t,” I said. “I put it up. She just suggested it.”
“Damned, indeed,” said Mrs. Halloran, totally ignoring me. “Didn’t I tell you that she had something to do with it? I swear, if we were living in my mother’s time, I would have reported her to the priest years ago.”
Her husband scowled at her. “I don’t give two cents for what your mother would have done. What I want to know is, what are we going to do about this?”
“Well,” Mrs. Halloran asked, “what does she want?”
They both turned and looked expectantly at me, like I’d know the answer to whatever it was they were asking.
I shrugged. “It was the day the squirrel got caught in your trap,” I said. “I helped her bury it, and she told me to buy the feeder.”
“You see?” Mrs. Halloran said to her husband, “I told you that you should be more polite to her. Now she’s helping out strangers instead of us, who are practically family.”
Halloran looked exasperated—I wondered if he had less faith in the value of those family connections than she had—but before he had a chance, she turned and glared at me.
I took a breath. “Look, Mrs. Halloran,” I said. “I’m new here. I don’t want to make trouble. I’ll tell you what. If you stop laying traps and setting fires, I’ll do some research, ask around, see if there’s something out there that will keep animals off your lawn without either killing them, or driving the rest of us crazy. But I can’t guarantee anything.”
“Nothing doing!” she said firmly. “We can’t wait for you to find some ‘acceptable’ way to keep our lawn clean. You wouldn’t care if every stray animal in the neighborhood used our yard as its private toilet!”
A small flock of about 15 starlings fluttered down to the Hallorans’ lawn. We all watched as they lifted their tails and flew off again, chattering gaily.
She looked back at me. I just smiled.
“Fine,” she said through gritted teeth. “We’ll stop. What we want doesn’t matter. Just tell that witch to leave us in peace.” She stamped back into her house, her hair quivering slightly on top of her head.
Her husband watched her go and then turned back to me. To my surprise, he almost looked apologetic. “Look, I don’t really care if the feeder is up or not if you can just stop the birds from messing up our property.”
He almost made me feel a bit guilty. “I’ll go talk to Mrs. Delaney,” I said. “And could you tell your wife that I didn’t mean any harm by putting up the feeder?”
“Sure,” said Halloran. “But she won’t believe me.”
A mockingbird that had been eating at the feeder chose that moment to flutter up from the perch. As we watched, the bird rose, circled Halloran’s chair three times, and then flew to the tree that loomed over the center of the courtyard. It came to rest on a wide, bare branch well away from the Halloran’s walk, sang for a few seconds—it sounded just like a car alarm—and daintily lifted its tail. A small white parcel hit the roots of the tree.
After a moment, I said, “It looks like I won’t have to go talk to Mrs. Delaney after all. Would you like some help cleaning up?”
“Nah,” said Halloran. “I’ll call my son. He owes me some money anyway; this will square us.”
We shook hands. I went indoors, sat at my desk, and looked out my windows at the birdfeeder, where a couple of finches were daintily picking through the remainder of the day’s seed. Behind them, the sun was beginning to set. I could hear Halloran raking through his lawn, probably looking for any last traps. Across the way, Vivian was scolding one of her kids for not doing his homework. Other neighbors were, I knew, cooking dinner, or watching the news, or smiling at a joke. Mrs. Delaney was doing—whatever it was Mrs. Delaney did when she was alone. And over us all, the Bay Court tree.
I closed my eyes. “Whatever my future holds, Benjamin mi amor, I will always love you,” I whispered.
There was no answering voice in my head. But for the first time in a long time, I felt something like peace.
