The Bird House A Novel - By Kelly Simmons Page 0,26

plenty of time for me to drain the mug, and the waitress to refill it while Ellie was in the ladies’ room lathering up her hands. It wasn’t so much that in the surroundings of my youth I felt young; I was merely bolstering my courage for what I was about to tell her.

“Ellie,” I said quietly when she came back, “do you know about breast cancer?”

“The pink ribbons,” she said.

“I thought of this today when we saw that one-legged bird at the pet store, and I—well, do you know what breast cancer is? Do you know what it means, or, or, how you get it?”

“From… birds?” Her face was open and sincere, the opposite of scared. That’s why I went on, I told myself. That’s why.

“I had breast cancer,” I said. “It means sometimes you have to have your breast removed.”

“They cut it off?”

“Yes, that’s what happened to me. Now I only have one breast. The left one. I wear a sort of pad to balance it out.”

She tried not to look at my chest, but couldn’t help herself. “How did that happen?”

“It’s genetic. I had cancer and so did my mother and Aunt Lillian. You get it when you are born, when you are a tiny baby, and it shows up later.”

“Will my dad get it, then?”

“No, honey, only girls need to worry.”

“But you don’t have any girls.”

I blinked at her. I couldn’t tell if she had missed the point or made one.

“Well, dear, I just wanted you to know. It’s one of those interesting things about a person, like having a scar or a hidden constellation of freckles on your hip.”

“Like Harry Potter’s lightning bolt,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, relieved, and almost willing to believe that my ragged chest could be the source of such strength, such power, if only I was able to look at it in the proper way.

June 1, 1967

bubble bath

black coffee

PETER CALLED ME AFTER I dropped Emma off at nursery school. I was still shaking from my experience there, could barely register his voice.

I held the phone in one hand, the baby basket in the other. Don’t cry, I said to the baby, to myself, to the air. Don’t cry.

“Ann?”

I said nothing, but I know he could hear me, breathing, being, on the other end. I was aware of my own weight, the heaviness of a human being standing upright. It was unbearable, suddenly, and all I wanted was to fall into the pillow of his voice. The soft, appropriate words he always chose.

“When were you going to tell me, Ann?”

“When his draft number came up?” I answered feebly.

“Annie,” he said. A world in one word. “Is he—”

“No,” I said too quickly. “How did you know?”

“Is it a secret?”

“Well, no, of course not.”

“I saw Betsy at the post office. She told me you’d had a boy this time.”

“What did you say?”

“I asked her if you’d named him after me.”

“Oh, Peter, you did not!”

“You’re right. I did not.”

He wanted to see me again, just for coffee. Not anything else, just coffee. Said he’d been thinking about me every day since the reunion. He said he was in my neighborhood for a business meeting and wondered if I could slip away. Just for coffee, Annie, I promise.

I said no. Although I hadn’t seen him since that night at our class reunion, somewhere in the throat of that single syllable I knew there would be another chance, another meeting, another coffee. I was prescient; I was beginning to hear things people didn’t say. I said I couldn’t, but promised him I would call him next week, and he chuckled, saying he’d heard that one before.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, when you broke up with me that August before college, when we met at your aunt’s house, that’s exactly what you said. Your parting words, for a dozen years.”

“I broke up with you and then said I’d call you?”

“Well, it was a little worse than that. You broke up with me after I gave you three hundred dollars, and then said you’d call me.”

“What?”

“Remember, your father had just left, and there was that business with the money? You were worried about going to college, about expenses, what you would wear. So I gave you a gift certificate to Lord and Taylor. You broke up with me two weeks later.”

“I thought we both agreed to break up before college, and agreed to be friends.”

“Ah, selective memory. You probably don’t remember that on fall break, I ran into you