Bird After Bird Read online

  What, you think walking into a small bathroom where a grown man is double-sicking isn't perilous? Obviously you haven't lived. That's danger, you know?

  Regardless, I thought about him. He smelled like art supplies and record stores, and his voice was smooth and scratchy like a favorite LP. I wondered about that painting he’d kept under a cloth. Would I ever see it?

  "What do you think, Ms. Crane?" I asked the origami. "Should I hurry back to check on Dad's house next weekend?"

  Dad.

  Saying his name aloud was still painful. I had so many fantastic memories with him, and they felt so fresh, flipping through the bird book we’d made when I was 12. “Our Indiana Big Year,” he'd called it, when we started the journal.

  Well, we started the journal but like so many parent-led projects, he was the one who kept up with it long after the novelty wore off.

  "Maybe I'm ready for a big year, Ms. Crane. The biggest."

  And that's when the idea took flight. I'd use Dad's journal and retrace our Big Year. I'd take my time, stretching out the days and reading those entries one at a time. Obviously I wanted to gobble them up, to feel my dad's presence again, but I hadn't gotten this far in life by jumping into emotion, by wallowing in grief.

  No, I was going to reread the journal entries one at a time, bird after bird, just like Dad and I had made them.

  Work was gearing up to kick my ass for the next few weeks, but I was sure I could slip away some weekends. What better way to take my mind off everything?

  Chapter Eleven

  Laurie

  This puppy! He was a total nuisance, chewing on everything. He’d mauled one of my mini mannequins and peed on a pile of sketches before I’d thought to pick them up. And I couldn’t decide what to name him.

  “Name him ‘Bud,’ short for ‘Budweiser,’” Billy suggested, popping the top on a cold one as he sunk his fishing line into the lake.

  “That’s about as redneck as it gets, Billy.”

  He laughed, raising his can to his lips, then kicking the beer back in about five seconds flat. He belched, crushed the can on his forehead, and threw it over his shoulder in one fluid motion. He’d been perfecting that one since high school.

  “Go fetch, Bud! Get it, boy!”

  The puppy wriggled on the leash, eager to play.

  “Stop telling my dog to fetch your trash, and don’t call him Bud!” I said. I took him off the leash and threw a tennis ball for him, which he brought back in seconds. I took a seat in the folding chair next to Billy, at the end of the pier.

  “Shit, I’m just fucking with ya,” he said, tapping his pole to make the line bounce in the water a bit. “You gonna train this one to do be a search dog, too?”

  I felt a spike of dread enter my chest. Couldn’t I just have a pet? Did I have to train him for S&R and relive all the agony of losing Sylvia and Boomer?

  “Haven’t decided yet,” I said, taking the moist tennis ball from the puppy’s mouth and tossing it again. His little paws galloped down the hardwood pier, and I couldn’t help but smile as his furry butt went flying onto the banks to retrieve the ball. “Not all dogs are cut out for that. Don’t know yet what this one’s going to turn out to be. Might just be a lazy heap of wasted flesh like his Uncle Billy.”

  “Good one, Larry. Good one.” He only called me “Larry” to aggravate me. For such a hick town, most folks in Birdseye were accustomed to calling me Laurie. You could always tell the ones who were uncomfortable with it by the way they called me Larry. I’d given up correcting them. Not worth it.

  When I was a kid and my mom was forcing me through the baby pageant circuit, my name confused the judges. They always tried to enter me into the Princess categories.

  But not everyone was a tool about my name. To be honest, I still think there are some people in town who are nicer to me because of my name sounding feminine than any other reason. Forget the whole war hero thing and the dead fiancé—a boy named Laurie gets a lot more understanding from folks than you’d think. Who knows what makes people tick? One of the reasons I preferred being alone in the cabin was that as long as I was there, I didn’t have to worry about what people said or thought.

  And that was partially why Billy and I were such good friends. He never failed to say exactly what was on his mind, at any given moment.

  Billy got a yank on his line, and in seconds he’d pulled a blue gill out of the lake.

  “Good one, yourself!” I held the lid of the cooler so he could put the flopping fish inside. Billy might have the elegance of a drunken rhinoceros and he was almost certainly a beeraholic, but the man could fish and he was a friend. My best friend, really, now.

  “I tell ya one thing that little mutt’ll be good for,” Billy said, shooing the puppy away from the cooler. “Next time your mom calls to try and guilt you into a family dinner, tell her you gotta babysit the pooch. You know she sure as hell ain’t having anything that shits or sheds into her McMansion.”

  I had to laugh. “Aw, this puppy just got cuter,” I said, reaching down to pat his head. I pulled his ears away from his face, and he stuck out a pink tongue, trailing saliva down the side of his snout. “You’re a hell of a mess,” I said to the pooch, “but Uncle Billy makes a point.”

  “You can cut that ‘Uncle Billy’ shit any time now,” Billy said. “Pretty soon I’m going to have a little butthole to wipe of my own, you know?”

  “Aren’t you already a little butthole? And are you trying to tell me you don’t wipe? Damn, man. I knew you smelled but I had no idea.” I popped open a beer from Billy’s other cooler, and he swatted me in the back of the head.

  “Pass me one, bitch.” We each had a sip of our own. “No, I mean I’m gonna be a baby daddy soon.”

  “You’re what?”

  Billy grinned, almost blushing. It was impossible to embarrass the man, but this was the closest I’d ever seen him. “That night you left me at the Beer & Bait, Lynette turned up with some news.”

  “Lynette, Lynette, Lynette…” I searched my memory, trying to remember who Lynette was. “You mean that waitress from Teeters in Jasper?”

  Billy grinned, nodding and winking all at once.

  “You filthy animal,” I said. “You knocked her up?” I remembered her huge chest, and the way Billy had salivated over it each time she’d brought us another basket of chicken wings, her thin white tank heaving with breathless delight as Billy smiled at her. “I’d thought she was just trying to flirt her way into a bigger tip. What was that…two months ago?”

  “Oh, I gave her the tip, alright,” Billy said. “Gave her the whole damn thing, all night long. Wuddn’t very tight, but I ain’t complainin’. Not yet, anyway. Been a fun run so far but things gotta change, Laurie. Always do.” He cast his line again. “Ask me in a couple of months when the butt-wiping and the child support kick in.”

  The puppy curled up under my seat, resting his head on my foot.

  I was about to ask Billy more about the Lynette situation, but he talked over me. “And what about you? You took off that night from the Beer & Bait with a chick of your own. Thought I knew her, maybe, from high school.”

  “Wren? I don’t think you know her.”

  “Wren! That’s her name. Wren Riley. She was a senior when I was a sophomore. You’d have been a freshman. You don’t remember that piece of ass?”

  I didn’t like the way he said that. Not at all. “You have her mixed up with someone else. She’s not from around here, I’m sure.” But was I? Hadn’t she told me she grew up around Birdseye? I guess I hadn’t taken her seriously.

  Billy shrugged. He shuffled his feet and accidently stepped on the puppy’s tail, causing him to give off a tiny yelp. “Point is, my brother—did you bury your bone in that bitch or what?”

  The puppy rose to his feet and started yipping at Billy. I guess he was feeding off my mood.

  I finished my beer and added it to Billy’s can collection, standing to leave.

  “I tell you what,
Billy. You’re gonna scare off the fish with all that talking. I’ll catch you at the Beer & Bait later, okay?”

  “Aw, you don’t gotta go—I’m sorry for being a dick. I didn’t realize you liked her.”

  I patted him on the back, then put the pup back on the leash and we headed down the pier towards the car. I wasn’t mad at Billy—it was impossible to stay angry at that loveable turd. He might be crude, but I’d learned a long time ago it wasn’t what people said that counted—it was what they did. And he never did me wrong.

  I was a little upset, though, I guess. His words rang in my mind as I drove away. “I didn’t realize you liked her.”

  Well, I’d realized it, but I didn’t expect it to affect me so much.

  “Doesn’t matter now, though, pup.” I reached over to pet him in the shotgun seat. “She’s flown and I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again. You think she’s going to make time to meet me at an art museum? Chicago’s really far away. And what would I do with you?”

  The dog groaned in protest, so I threw him a bone—threw us both one, I guess. “We’ll see, pup. We’ll see.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Wren

  Dinner with Troy was okay, which meant it was amazing by Troy standards. He surprised me with a long walk around Millennium Park and a sunset stroll through the surrounding neighborhood to an Italian restaurant that was all the rage. If it had been anyone else, I’d have found it quite romantic. As it was, I was biding my time trying to decide how to best broach the topic of the MAM disaster.

  The food and ambiance were spectacular, and he spent the night in my bed, even though I told him I had a headache and didn’t feel like sex. I could have asked him to leave, but I didn’t want to have a late-night fight, and I still hadn’t figured out how to call him on the carpet for what he’d done. I hoped he’d just confess without driving me to the internet to see the email for myself.

  I couldn’t wait to get him out of the house in the morning.

  “Can I at least buy you breakfast?” he asked, as I nearly pushed him with both hands out the door.

  “I’ve got an early meeting. Think you know why.”

  “Yeah, that,” he said, sheepishly. A smile played at the corners of his mouth and I fought the urge to launch into him. “I’m taking today off, going to hit the golf course. Too pretty of a day to let it go to waste. Want to meet for lunch at the club?”

  “Plans with Janice, sorry! Better luck with the back nine!” I slammed the door.

  My phone tweeted and I glanced at the text.

  -Still on?-

  It was Janice.

  Maybe. Big meeting I’ll need a drink by the end, for sure. Can I do a last minute confirm?

  -No prob. I’ll get the table, either way, just let me know.-

  Deal

  I could have driven, but there was some research I wanted to do for the first official birding outing, so I grabbed Dad’s bird book and hopped on the train. If I had to endure this MAM situation at least I could plan a weekend escape, and I didn’t remember what the first stop was on the Two Birditos original tour. The train ended up being too crowded to read, so I used my phone to log into the Great Midwest Birding Group, and started looking around for recent sightings.

  Almost instantly, I got a private message from one of the board moderators.

  -RedWren! LTNS! You coming to Goose Pond for the Crane Days? You can lead a group of newbs if you want. We could use more experienced birders to point out the good stuff. Can we count on you?-

  I laughed. Rhoda had never been shy, in person or online when it came to her pet project. The Crane Days were worth it, too. Goose Pond Fish and Wildlife Area was an enormous inland marsh that attracted migrating wildlife from all over North and South America, and it was an important stop for several species of endangered birds. On paper, it might not sound like much, but there’s something about seeing several thousand Snow Geese or Sandhill Cranes moving in flocks that inspires awe. For some people, it’s the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls that awakens a love of nature. For people like Rhoda and me, it was the annual winged visitors to Goose Pond.

  Having qualified birding guides on hand was essential not just to educate new birders who otherwise didn’t know a chipping or song sparrow from the pests who built nests in their suburban downspouts—the success of the event as a whole was important because the cash it raised, however modest, went toward wildlife preservation.

  Yeah, I’d be honored, Rhoda.

  I made a mental note to ask the managing partner to kick in another annual sponsorship of the event. We might not be bringing in a single client from Greene County, Indiana where the event was held, but it looked great on the corporate website. “A firm that cares for the environment.” I was pretty sure they’d even posted a photo of me in hip waders from last year’s event, arm-in-arm with Rhoda and some of the guys from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources.

  Gotta run, though. Email me the deets.

  -No prob. Thanks, Wren.-

  The MAM execs were waiting in our biggest conference room when I arrived. Darcy met me at the elevator and took my coat. She handed me a printed agenda and a cup of coffee and gave me a thumb’s up as I rushed to join them.

  The execs were solemn as the grave when I entered. “Make no mistake, Ms. Riley, we’re pleased to see you, but—“

  “But Mr. Parker’s unfortunate email slip will never happen again, I assure you,” I said. “Now, what should we hit first? The results of the R&D scout trip to Mexico, or the consumer feedback on the mp3 stereo options?”

  The meeting went on in similar fashion until at last they had to go. Normally I’d have taken the clients to lunch on the company tab, but they were needed back in Detroit and had an early flight. I was thrilled I could keep my plans with my best friend.

  I reached my stop and the café a few minutes later. Janice waved me down from our usual table. We'd long ago agreed to no less than one monthly meet-up for a chocolate & coffee lunch with chocolate martinis for dessert.

  “What’s up, Man Eater?” She winked.

  “Sometimes I do wish I could eat them. Easier to deal with indigestion than damage control.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “No worse than normal, I’m just getting tired of it.”

  She nodded. “Panini sound good? I ordered them for both of us,” she said, rising to hug me as I put away my purse and jacket.

  “How many martinis did you order?” The waiter delivered our drinks and I told him to go ahead and send another round.

  “Girl, if only those things were as devoid of calories as you are of shame.” She raised her glass in a toast. “To my former boss and the best maid of honor a gal could ever have. I'm going to miss you.”

  “Miss me? Where you going?”

  “Congratulate me, Birdy Girl. I'm moving to New York."

  We clinked glasses and each had big gulps of the chocolate elixir. Janice worked for a competing econ consultancy. It was up & coming, and had offices in New York. "Moving? Of course you got promoted! Mozel tov! What did Harold say?"

  Harold was Janice's old man. Literally, he was really old—twice her age. Theirs was a unique love, for sure, but it worked. I hadn't been supportive when she'd first fallen for him—and because he'd been a client at our old firm, there were plenty of rumors that Janice was transitioning career-wise from economist to gold digger.

  If we’d been close in college, being deemed the office gold-digger and man-eater had just made our friendship stronger.

  Janice was a young, beautiful woman of color and Harold was a rich white industrialist firmly ensconced with his family's business: a brand of food products you could find on every grocery store shelf in the US, Europe, and beyond. The fact that his company used black women as part of their branding didn't help the ugly things being said about her behind closed doors at the office.

  "Aunt Janica," Martin called her, before I threatened to turn him in to HR. God, he was so ugly. Good ridd
ance. I sometimes wondered how he’d taken it when Janice had been hired in above him at the other firm.

  Harold and Janice were made for each other, though. She held her head high and before long the only thing anyone ever said about the union was how well Janice's ring fit her beautiful hands. A five carat princess diamond has a way to shutting people the hell up. So does job performance, and Janice’s was becoming well-known.

  Janice raised her glass to signal the waiter for another drink. "Oh, he’s not thrilled about moving back to the city, but you know Harry—he'll go wherever I want, whenever. Besides, he knows there are better cigar stores in NYC than Chi-town.” She shrugged. “It is what it is. It was his board that offered me the job, regardless of his complaints. Not like I could turn down the family business!"

  "So not just a transfer, but joining the company, huh?"

  She smiled, nodding. From the moment I’d met her in our Northwest University dorm room, I’d known she was a “family first” kind of girl. The countless snapshots she hung on the walls were proof of that. Cousin after cousin, siblings, aunts, uncles, and a zillion snaps of her mom and dad. I didn’t have a big family, myself, but Janice made me feel like I had a sister. Sometimes when she talked about their big Christmases, I thought I wouldn’t mind being officially adopted.

  "You'll knock 'em dead in New York." I finished my own drink and handed the glass to the waiter, who replaced both our drinks with fresh ones. "These have some kick today! Better bring coffee, please. I have a meeting at two and I don't want to stagger into it drunk. Again."

  We both giggled. Janice knew I'd never been drunk at a meeting and it wasn't likely to happen in my lifetime.

  "I’m going to miss you so much,” I said. “Who will I do chocolate lunches with?”

  “Oh, treat that admin of yours once in awhile. She’s a gem.” She smiled. “I’ll miss you, too, Birdy.”