Lydia Blanton

Bird Behavior

2,148 words

The color on the birdhouse I painted my freshman year of high school is starting to fade. The afternoon sun glows orange against what used to be bright red walls and a blue roof; lightened by the years of direct sunlight. It was cheap craft store paint, anyway. It wasn’t meant to last a lifetime.

        I know there’s a nest of brambles inside, stuffed with five gray eggs huddled close to one another in the small space. When I was still in high school I’d come out every morning to see if there were any new eggs or if the feed was lower than usual, and drag Dad out to see the differences. Mama always hated the birdhouse–how close it was to the porch railings she’d had redone, how bird poop always ended up dried along the wood. She used to come out with a broom in the mornings to chase off the birds, and I had to devote my Saturdays to washing the railings to get her to stop.

Dad is changing out the bird feed that hangs from the foundations, an unlit cigarette clutched between two of his fingers. There’s dirt on the knees of his jeans from the garden, and the hole in his wide-brimmed straw hat seems to have gotten bigger since he went to weed out the corn this morning.

        “Careful,” I yell out when the spear the house sits on shakes with the weight of the feed he hangs back on it. “There’s five eggs in there.”

        He squints at me. “There were four yesterday mornin’.”

        “I guess she laid another one today.”

        Dad peers through the hole in the front of the house, grinning when he sees the extra spotted egg. “Well, alright then.”

        He comes to sit next to me on the porch swing, rusted chains chinking against the chirp of birds and a lawnmower running in some yard a ways away. He lights his cigarette and taps the ashes into the grass at his feet, huffing a cloud into the air. The wind blows the smell of smoke in my direction, into the flyaway pieces of my hair, and I breathe it in through my nose.

        He and Mama used to smoke when I was little, tucked into a cloudy alcove in the garage full of Dad’s music equipment and Mama’s bookshelves bursting with pages that stink of smoke even though she hasn’t touched a cigarette in eleven years. Me and my brothers used to sit on the chairs out there, smoke smell seeping into our clothes, and talk to them until we got bored enough to go back inside the house. The smell of a cigarette brings me back there, laughing with Mama over the latest cliche in her romance book.

        I don’t bother telling Dad to go smoke it elsewhere.

        I look out at the garden that’s become of the backyard, the knee length stalks of corn reaching up out of the dirt in hopeful tendrils. Maybe they’ll get tall enough this year so that I can crouch between the stalks and hide from Dad while he’s weeding like I did when I was a kid.

Can you see me?, I’d yell between the gaps, Can you see me now?

        “Do you think it’ll be a good harvest this year?” I ask him.

        Dad looks out at his creation. It’s the time of the season where the problems start to happen. The past four years have been failures full of soil too acidic or too dry, or frosts happening later than anticipated. He’s already had to pull out the sprouts and replant four times already this year.

        But today he smiles. “I think it’ll be the best one we’ve had in a while.”

        The happiness in his face is shadowed with age; the gray hairs of his beard, the lines that crease at the corner of his eyes as he smiles, the thin gray strands of hair sprouting from his bushy eyebrows. The brim of his hat casts a shadow against the right side of his face when he turns to look at me, and I wonder how long it’ll be before he can’t come out and bend over his plants anymore. How long it’ll be before he’s too tired.

        He’s still all happy when he asks, “How’s Leo doing? I haven’t seen him in a while and I know he was really interested in weedin’ and helpin’ with the corn.”

        He’s right. Leo had been interested. He worships everything my Dad does, and it isn’t even a weird obligation he felt like he needed to have as my boyfriend. He just loves my Dad, even the piece of him that hides away for hours every night with a bottle of Jack Daniels.

        Leo has his ways of loving people. You could show him the crappiest part of a person and he’d love them anyway.

        I go to answer, reminding myself that I had told my parents that Leo couldn’t make it to Sunday dinner because he was busy with his own family. Not that he was actually sitting at home with take out from our favorite Japanese place in town. “He’s good–”

“Are y’all coming in or what?” Mama pokes her head out of the back door, squinting against the light and pursing her lips when she sees the two of us rocking on the swing. “Your plates are gettin’ cold.”

“Oh!” Dad jumps up and stomps out his cigarette in one movement, “Comin’ honey!”

I kick the remnants of his cigarette butt off of the wood of the porch and try to dust away the dusty patches his bare feet left behind so Mama doesn’t have a cow when she comes out here and sees the mess he left behind.

The dining room table is decorated with the usual seasonal placemats Mama likes to find at the antique store downtown: soft blue with embroidered sunflowers for summer. There’s only three plates set out tonight. There hasn’t been five since Christmas–the only family dinner my two brothers come to besides Thanksgiving. Their absence is expected. They’ve managed to perfect the art of letting my parents down on their invites. I never got the hang of disappointing Mama like they did the second they moved out.

Dinner is fried chicken tonight. It’s Dad’s favorite meal, and you can tell by the way he drums his fingers against the wood of the table as he waits for Mama and I to come sit. Steam still wafts from the plates sitting perfectly on the placemats, and my mouth starts to water.

“It looks good, Mama,” I tell her when she pulls out her chair to sit. Her silver-dyed hair hangs perfectly above her shoulders, framing her face and the smear of flour against her jaw. I tell myself I’ll point it out to her after dinner, and forget about it altogether when she smiles in gratitude.

Dad leads the prayer, and the empty space fills with the sound of metal against ceramic plates, Dad’s compliments spoken through his full mouth, Mama’s laughter. The room feels full of the happiness that shrouded my childhood. Since I’ve moved out, it has felt out of reach, at the edge of my vision. It’s funny that Sunday dinners are what make it feel as real as ever.

“It’s a shame Leo couldn’t join us for dinner,” Mama starts when the initial eating frenzy has quieted, “It would have been nice to see him.”

Dad voices his agreement. “I was just talking to her about him, too,” He cuts his eyes to me, “Make sure to tell him we missed him tonight.”

I shift in my seat and glance at Mama. Talking about Leo with my Dad is fine, but I don’t like talking about my boyfriend with Mama around.  After three years of dating, she’s learned to love him. She’s never said anything mean-spirited to him. She’s never made him feel left out.

But I know she doesn’t want him to be my husband.

It’s a cloud that’s settled over the two of us. Her silently and terribly holding in the fact that she’s scared I’m going to end up living with Leo’s family in a trailer home with six kids, and me.

I know that with my graduation comes the idea of engagement, and I know Leo knows that, too.

And I know Mama knows that, because she’s the one who told me–very severely–that I am damn well not getting engaged or married or anything of the sort until I have a diploma with my name on it.

I avoid the subject whenever I can, except in situations like this, where the subject presses down on me on all sides.

“I saw his mom at the Pig the other day.” Mama bites a green bean in half. A laugh starts in the back of her throat. “Not like I could have a conversation with her.”

I stare down at my mashed potatoes. The words rake against my skin, begging for a reaction I try to breathe through.

Leo’s mom doesn’t speak a lot of English. Where Mama refuses to learn the basic Spanish that goes into brief hellos, Leo’s mom wakes up an hour early to watch YouTube videos on English pronunciation in hopes she’ll be able to meet my family officially one day. Mama doesn’t want to go through the trouble of even having dinner with Leo’s family.

I’d told her about Leo’s mom once. The videos she watched in the mornings, how she wanted to meet everyone.

“About time,” She’d said, “If you’re going to live in the country you should speak the language, right?”

“You could’ve said hi, still,” I keep my voice even. “It would have made her day.”

Mama shrugs. “No point in that.”

I spear a cluster of green beans on my fork. I accidentally bite a piece of my cheek when I’m chewing them. The tang of blood hits my tongue. I chew through it. Quietly, silently.

“Honey,” Dad’s voice is soft across the table. “Maybe we should get that Rosetta Stone program on the computer. Maybe by the time they get married we’ll be able to talk a little.”

Mama goes on eating her food casually, as if this conversation is normal. As if she’s right. She rolls her eyes, “I’m not spending any damn money learning a language I don’t need to know. If they want to talk to me then they can sure as hell learn English.”

I scoot my chair out. The sound of the legs scraping against the hardwood turns Mama’s eyes frantic, and I can almost see the scolding forming in her head.

I’ve gotten on my hands and knees to take care of those floors, I can almost hear her saying, like she does every time,  you should know better than to scrape them up.

I push my chair back in, sure to drag it along the floor as I do, and it stops whatever she was about to say. She purses her lips.

“I’m leaving.”

Mama frowns. “You haven’t finished your dinner yet.”

“I’m finished.”

She rears back at my tone, and puts on the confused expression I’ve seen every time I’ve decided to put up a fight. “I don’t understand why you’re so upset.”

It’s predictable, her reaction. Confusion, sadness at the fact that her words were met with anything but laughter or agreement. Judgment for getting upset over something so “small”. I’ve dealt with it my entire life. The bubble of happiness bursts, and the pieces rain down around the two of us. I stare at her and pretend I don’t feel the pull to apologize, to cower.

“I’m going to head home.” I say evenly. “Thank you for dinner.”

When Leo asks me how it went when I get back to our apartment, I glance in the mirror in the entryway to make sure the redness around my eyes is gone. He’s all earnest as he looks at me, curled under a blanket on the couch we got from a thrift store forty-five minutes away.

I think about Mama, and all the things she doesn’t know. I breathe.

The blanket is warm where I drape it over my legs next to him. “Dad says he misses you. The corn’s growing.”

“Oh, really? It’s gonna work out this year?”

“Yeah, yeah I think so,” I feel the anger softening at the excitement in his eyes. That genuinity that really only seems true when it’s him who’s showing it. “Mama misses you, too”

“Does she?”

He knows about the judgment that hides under her skin. But, like my father, Leo loves the pieces of her that are ugly and offensive.

Just like me.

“Yeah, she does.” I’d like to think she does. I’d like to think she loves me enough to get past it.

Leo grins.