The Bird House A Novel - By Kelly Simmons Page 0,1
has entered the room. It was one of those days when I missed Theo dearly. After all, it takes one to hold the ladder and one to climb it.
I don’t normally approve of such obvious seasonal decor, but Ellie was coming over and I wanted her parents—my son, Tom, and his wife, Tinsley—to know that I was quite aware, fully cognizant, of the upcoming holiday.
Of course I can’t remember every single thing; who can? Maybe that’s why I took up photography so late in life, started lugging Theo’s Nikon camera around. So I could document things, remember them, the way he used to. The stages of the buildings he designed were as fleeting as memory, after all; once the plaster covered the fragile wooden bones you never saw them again. Even when they were finished, completed, they changed by the season. Everything changes, even the way we look at it. I remember Theo used to lay out the progression of construction photos across his big desk, and explain each step to me, and what had gone right and what had gone wrong. In the beginning, before we had children, I sat on the corner of that desk with my chin on his shoulder and listened as he explained the engineering dilemmas and described the imported materials. He taught me about divided light and molding, about soffits and cupolas, giving names to things I’d seen but never truly known.
On the weekends, after we made the rounds of the tag sales, Theo and I would sneak into Realtors’ open houses, pretending to be in the market, and Theo would whisper in my ear the flaws and strengths of each floor plan. The den was too dark, the bedrooms too small. The kitchen should be reoriented to face south. These were our jigsaw puzzles; this was our cinema. When the children arrived, it was as if there was no room for our home life in his work life. I heard their voices, not his. And he heard his clients, no one else. That’s what I remember, and of course Theo isn’t here to refute me. There’s a certain glory in that, I tell you. Widowhood means I’ll always have the last damn word.
I invited Ellie over for more than just the Fourth of July. I forgot some of what the lawyer told me to do—but no matter. I believe I managed to collect what he needed. I do remember him saying it should be simple, and he was right—it was easy to execute, childlike, almost, except for one part.
Ellie arrived to spend the night and I didn’t even have to ask if she was thirsty. Aren’t all eight-year-old girls thirsty? I simply set out a glass of Coca-Cola next to the tray of sparklers and that little blond head bobbed straight for it, moth to flame. Why, I could have poisoned her, easily, with that amber glass.
When she finished drinking I brought out the fireworks jigsaw puzzle, then made a big show of needing to do the dishes, so Ellie didn’t think twice about me ferrying away her tumbler while wearing rubber gloves. I sealed it in a plastic bag and put it the freezer, just as George Marquardt Esquire told me to. Well, he told me to put something in the freezer.
The whole business reminded me briefly of a game I used to play with my father. Whenever he returned from one of what my mother called “his adventures”—a safari, a trek of some kind, a bird-watching expedition—he’d bring me back a present and hide it somewhere symbolic in the house, while providing only the barest of clues. This was no small undertaking, searching for these treasures, as we had ten bedrooms, eight baths, and, as I recall, many similar rooms with different names: den, office, library, sitting room. They had minor differences among them—the library had books and the den had taxidermy—but only the bedrooms seemed wholly differentiated, as each was a different pale color. Salmon, gold, mint. I console myself with the lack of memory by reminding myself that ten is quite a few of anything for anyone to recall. At any rate, I do distinctly remember my father hiding an Inuit doll in our freezer, of all places. (It was wildly unfair, the freezer being totally out of reach for a young girl, yet completely appropriate as a stand-in for tundra.) As I closed my own freezer door I heard the solid, reassuring hum that signaled its frosty seal,