Even her chirps sound disappointed in me. “I’ll have to come to terms with it, I know. Just promise me you’ll donate my things. Don’t just throw ’em out like garbage.”
“I would never do that. I’m not that kind of person.”
“Then I guess someone must’ve raised you right.”
It’s the closest she’s come to any sort of compliment to me or my mom. I’m half proud and half insulted.
Finally it’s time to try out Maggie’s tub for the first time, andI put her to bed in the open cage and allow myself to sink down in absolute bliss. I’ve wanted a tub like this all my life, and the windowsill is right next to it, perfect for paperbacks. Maybe I should feel weird that someone died downstairs today, but it’s not like I knew my great-uncle Abraham. I feel bad for him in the way that you feel bad for people you don’t personally know, but it certainly seems like he lived a long life and died peacefully in a place where he was content.
I read until I’m pruny and the water is tepid, dry off, remove my makeup, and snuggle down in the cozy bed, already looking forward to seeing Hunter again tomorrow, even if it’s going to be weird. It does not escape me that Maggie yet again dodged the question about why she was feuding with the Blakelys, but I’m going to find out eventually. We’re pretty much stuck together unless she wants to go join the turkey gang.
I fall asleep, and my dreams are filmy, misty things, wisps of trees and waterfalls and something elusive, just out of reach. Some time later, when all is dark and still, I wake up straining to hear some odd sound, but whatever it was, it’s gone. The room is freezing, colder than it should be in late summer, the moonlight shining in through the window to make a patch of icy white on the ground. I breathe out and my breath hangs in the air like a question.
“Bye, Uncle Abraham,” I say, half dreaming.
I burrow deeper under the covers, and as I fall back asleep, it feels like someone pats my hair.
21.
The next daydawns gray and rainy, and I spend ten minutes just lying in bed, luxuriating. The misty morning filters gently through the tall windows, making the rosy walls a pretty periwinkle and giving me the sensation of being wrapped up in a cocoon. The sheets are soft and worn, the quilt just heavy enough. I am not hurrying through breakfast or driving exactly the speed limit so I won’t get pulled over on my way to work. I am not being yelled at by Mr. Buckley or scrubbing the black charcoal out of the coffee pot he insists on leaving on all day long. I’m not cleaning dirt off my coffee table after Billy and Jimmy monopolized my TV to watch football and refused to take off their work boots. I’m in my own soft, puffy bed, in my own apartment that I own without a mortgage, which is right over the business that I will soon make my dream store. This bed—
“GamGam?”
She bustles into the room and jumps up onto the bed. “You know you can call me Grandma, right? Or Grammy? I never got my chance to be a Grammy.”
“GamGam, did you ever…get up to any funny business in this bed?” I ask her, looking down at the pastel quilt.
“I am not a GamGam!” She fussily shakes out her feathers. “And no, I did not”—she doesn’t want to say it, either—“have relations in this bed.”
“So you didn’t date? No hookups? Hot parrots in your area? Were you on the lookout for a big cock—”
“Lordy!”
“—atoo boy?”
The look she gives me is one of avian disgust. “Are you normally this interested in the sex lives of your elders?”
“No, but I don’t usually inherit their mattresses. So who was my grandfather?”
Maggie paces across the quilt. “I don’t see how that’s important.”
“Then tell me why the Blakelys hate you.”
“No!”
I grab her and stand, carrying her to the big cage. “I’m getting sick of you dodging my questions, so you can be in the Cockatoo Clink until you decide to get honest with me. You have nothing to lose. You have no dignity. You’re a parrot who poops on a puppy pad. So just tell me the truth.”
I close the door and snap on the carabiner that always kept Doris from breaking out.
“This is against the Geneva convention!” Maggie shouts.
“Yeah? You keep saying that, and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t apply to birds. Legally, I can eat you and put your feathers in my pillow.” I open a kitchen cabinet and find plates and bowls in neat stacks. “Do you have a coffee maker?”
“I was more of a tea person,” Maggie says, which isn’t helpful.
“Then you can stay in the Cage of Truth and Bad Choices to contemplate your sins.”
Long-term, this lack of coffee supplies will not work for me, but short-term, I know where to get the best latte in town. I take a quick shower, slip into jeans and a tee, fluff my hair, add some eyeliner, and spritz on some perfume, because I now know that I can’t leave this apartment without seeing a new acquaintance. Before I head out with my raggedy old umbrella, I figure out which keys open the apartment door and the store door, and separate them, sliding them onto my regular key ring.
