Betsy to know precisely how sentimental I could be.
In the kitchen I took a damp cloth and tried to clean the house over the sink. Sap clung stubbornly to parts of the brown slatted roof; it formed flat shellacky moles I’d have to chip away later with a tool. I pulled gently on the miniature rust-colored door and looked inside, fearing gummy waste, pecked walls. Assuming the birds had trashed their hotel room. But no, the finches and robins and cardinals had left it fairly clean. The wind and weather had beaten the bird house, not the birds.
What to tell Ellie of this? Could we sit with a book of North American birds, catalog the species and the behavior, tell her all I’d learned since the bird house went up? How in the beginning I watched them fly and flit from the comfort of my morning bath, before the children woke up, in those few weeks—was it a month? was it less?—before everything changed?
And how afterward I’d simply stand at the window, having come in to brush my teeth or cream my face or go through some other motion, and be surprised that it was still there, still standing and serving its purpose, providing a haven. All those days when Theo worked till dawn, the bird house swung in the breeze, less empty, less small and confining than my own dwelling.
Since I had to go out and run errands with Ellie, I took a shower to rinse the leaves from my hair, and at the last minute, I brought the bird house in with me, and let the hot water soak into its sticky roof.
When Ellie arrived, we hopped in the car and drove outside town to pick up supplies. Carole’s Crafts was in one of the upscale strip malls Theo had designed. That was his legacy: a better strip mall. My father, who approved of me marrying an architect, would have been appalled by this. He worked only for people, not companies; he designed homes, not buildings. Theo didn’t even design buildings, really, but places. Locales. He did make sure that all the stores had similar facades and similar signage—small, wooden, subtle. He was proud of how he made them blend in. But inside, where he’d had no control, all subtlety was lost—in Carole’s Crafts, the aisles were crammed from floor to ceiling, boxes were open, displays pulled apart. People yakked on their cell phones as they searched through the rubble; one woman spoke in Russian over her receiver and I stared at her until she moved away.
“The nerve of people,” I said as Ellie led me to the wreath-making area at the back of the store.
“They all have to call their kids because they’re confused about what stuff to buy.”
“Well, that makes sense.”
“Here they are, Grandma!” she cried, and skipped to the shelf bulging with robins, cardinals, blue jays, finches, and ravens.
“What, no turkeys?”
“They only have those out for Thanksgiving, silly,” she said and smiled. “We could come back then.”
“Oh, I don’t think there’ll be a need for that,” I said as a woman behind me shouted, “What size?” into her phone.
Ellie held up a cardinal in each hand, surveying them like a falconer. As she angled her head from one to the other, something about her bearing, the tilt of her chin and nose, was birdlike, too.
“Which cardinal do you like better?” she asked. “Blue eyes or black?”
“I rather like the blue jay,” I said.
“No,” she said with finality. “Red goes better with black-and-white photos.” She sounded exactly like Tinsley when she said it—firm and exacting but smiling. I remember the first time Tinsley cooked Thanksgiving dinner. I offered to bring a side dish, but she had all the recipes planned and a shopping list already made. Ellie and I left with the darker-eyed cardinal, foam board, and wire. Outside the magnetic door I dug my keys out of my handbag and asked if she wanted to go somewhere for ice cream.
“No, thanks. But—”
“But what?”
“Can we just go to the pet store and look? I promise I won’t beg for a kitten or anything.”
She pointed to the wooden sign a few doors away: SQUEAK’S PET VILLAGE.
“All right, why not?”
Some of the same people who’d been in the crafts store were also in the pet store, using their phones to photograph puppies. This looked ridiculous to me, snapping pictures with a phone. Like using a hand mixer as a microphone.
Ellie wiggled her fingers through the openings in a