The Bird House A Novel - By Kelly Simmons Page 0,44
alone. Was that why she agreed to our playdates, at all? To help with her assignations?
At least I could be relatively certain Tom would be there when I picked up his daughter. His little rule was that he’d always be back from his trips by Saturday morning.
When I arrived I’d barely lifted my hand to knock when Ellie pulled the heavy door away from my knuckles. She must have been sitting on the bench in the foyer, waiting.
“Well, good morning to you,” I said.
“I’m ready,” she said, grinning and gesturing to a puffy vest that was meant to suffice for a coat.
“Indeed you are.” I smiled and decided not to ask what on earth she planned to do if her arms and legs felt an unseasonable chill, and not her chest. I looked past her, toward the slice of kitchen visible from where I stood. I saw dishes in the drainer, rubber gloves. No parents.
“Where’s your father?”
“He’s in New York.”
I frowned; Tom had broken his rule? “Really? What about your mother?”
“She’s in the bathroom.”
“Is she bathing?”
“No, silly! She’s brushing her teeth.”
Tinsley’s phone vibrated on the kitchen island like a trapped June bug. I watched it scuttle about, and leaned over to steady it.
“Run and tell your mother we’re leaving,” I said, and the moment her back was turned, I whisked the phone into my purse.
“Well,” Tinsley said and smiled widely as she ascended the steps, “where are we off to today?”
Her teeth, which had always been large, gleamed postbrushing and suddenly struck me as ridiculous. I couldn’t take my eyes off them as we spoke—they were comical, a parody of a mouth.
I endured reexplaining myself: that we were going to the orchard. That there would be cider and strawberry picking. That it was right off Westchester Pike past the place where Theo and I had always bought corn. I left out the part about their famous cider doughnuts—I didn’t care to be admonished again for feeding her child sugar.
“Strawberry picking, huh?” Tinsley replied, ruffling Ellie’s hair. “But Westchester Pike—isn’t that kind of a long drive?”
I picked at the edge of my purse. It was my turn to speak in slow motion.
“Why do you ask, Tinsley?” I said, pulling out every syllable. “Do you need extra time for something today?”
I met her eyes, and to her credit, she didn’t look away. But she didn’t look angry, either; she looked at me the way women have looked at each other in locker rooms, in ballrooms, in drawing rooms since the beginning of time. She looked as if she was sizing up a rival.
“No,” she said, too late.
“Well then.” I smiled, a small smile, graceful, just a hint of teeth. “We’ll see you… later. Give Tom my love.”
At the orchard we went on a hayride through the farm and Ellie whispered, “Are there seat belts?” I told her just to hold on to the edge of the truck and the look on her face when we first took off was a mix of fear and joy. The freedom of her body, the swaying and bouncing, not held back by restraint. It was like seeing an astronaut’s first weightlessness in space. This is childhood, Ellie! I wanted to shout above the children’s squeals. This is all it is, so much and so little. My father and I took a hayride every year to pick pumpkins. We’d walk down every row in the patch, and he’d pick up vine after vine to look beneath it, trying to find the smallest pumpkins for our fairy gardens. The last things we’d add before the winter took them away. And in the spring, we picked strawberries together, too, not from an orchard, but from our own land, out past the gazebo, just short of our neighbor’s stables. We always stopped to give a strawberry or two to their horses.
There were no horses at this orchard, though, and we walked into the barn and looked at displays of fruit carvings—elaborate faces that dried and fell into themselves, sunken apple cheekbones, tiny apple dimples. That’s how I will look in five years, I thought. I let her eat not one, but three cider doughnuts because she said they were the most delicious thing she’d ever tasted. She wanted to take some home for her father, but I advised against it.
“Your mother would not like that,” I said.
“My mother is ridiculous,” she said, crumbs flying as the words came out.
I laughed and told her everyone thought their own mother was ridiculous.