The Bird House A Novel - By Kelly Simmons Page 0,21

told her to go ahead, that I’d already eaten (and I had slipped two of them in my mouth while I was setting the table).

“So I did it,” she said, after the last bite. “I didn’t think I could but I did it.”

“So you did. You finished them.”

“No, Grandma, I mean I did the project—I found the aspect!”

“Really?” I put one hand against my mouth, feigning surprise. It wouldn’t do to let her know that Tinsley had already filled me in.

“Yes! And I came up with the best one. One no one else will have!”

“What is it?”

“I’ll show you,” she said, and opened the green leather album.

She paged past photos of weddings, christenings, and parties. She breezed through the tall churches and the rolling backyards and the brocade tables, turning so fast they came together in a mosaic, silk dresses and stained glass and silver cocktails, pulpit and sandbox and seaside, marble and slate, sunlight and candlelight, low fog and bubbling champagne.

They ran together in my head the same way sometimes: the before taunting the after. Like watching a past life flash before your eyes. When my mother met me at Porter’s Soda Shop and told me my father had left for good, and that she would be moving, the images started shifting then. Lining up in their flashing queue. I was furious with my father, and I didn’t even know the real reason to be. My mother sat very still as I cried, only moving to take small sips of her root beer float. She seemed to have used up all her tears already, but now, I wonder, forget the sadness, where was her anger? Where was her fury? Finally, I took a sip of my own float, and my face went pale.

“Wait a minute, you’re moving?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Not ‘we’?”

“Well, we’re not a couple anymore. I have to get used to saying I.”

“Mother, I meant me.”

“Well, of course you’re going to college, dear, in the fall. That much is certain.”

“But what about on fall break, and Christmas and…”

“Well,” she sighed, “I haven’t quite worked that part out yet.”

And the images of my other life began to pile up behind her. She smiled at me, a small smile, but not, I realize now, the kind of small smile that is all you can summon up, but the kind you are trying to contain. I imagine a fresh start might have seemed romantic to her then, at that moment, before the full realization of her financial ruin became clear.

I sighed and watched the pages of my life pass by again in Ellie’s hands.

“Here!” she said breathlessly.

I leaned in. The photo she pointed to was small; the white corners that affixed it to the gray page were barely bigger than her fingernail. I squinted. It was a black and white of my father in his workroom, a separate cottage that sat nearly an acre away from the main house. He was always apart from us, my mother used to point out. Even before he left. I didn’t understand what she was talking about—in my mind he was always at my side—or I was at his. If you extended every photo an inch in every direction, I imagined you’d find me lingering in every frame. In this shot, he was wearing a leather apron, smoking a cigar and laughing at whoever was behind the camera. Proof he was happy at that house at least once.

“Woodworking? Is that what you’ve chosen?” My father did love to tinker—he carved little boats for me and made drinks trays for Mother’s friends. Of course, if my dear mother had been sitting next to me, she would have suggested “Philandering” as an aspect.

“You’re getting warmer,” she said and smiled. “Look at what he’s making.”

Behind his shoulder, on the edge of the sawhorse, I could make out a small roofline.

“Oh, a dollhouse!” I cried. “How perfect, Ellie! I’m sure every little girl in my family had one, if we look carefully. My father did make a marvelous one for me, I remember now, with a—”

She screwed up her face. “No, Grandma, it’s not a dollhouse.”

“Well, surely—”

“It’s a bird house.”

“Bird house? I don’t recall him ever making a bird—”

“Yes, he did. And if you look at this other picture, with the other people, there’re two more in it.”

She turned to a photo of my great-aunt Minna, standing with my mother in front of our first Nantucket cottage, the one that came from my mother’s family. The roses climbing up the