Shelby sighs dramatically and leads me down a hallway to a closed door. “I hope you’re decent, because we’re coming in!” she shouts. “And don’t try to hide in the closet. I can smell your VapoRub.”
There’s no answer, so she reaches over the doorframe and pulls down a nail, which she uses to pop open the lock. The door opens, and I’m faced with a red-cheeked, puffy-eyed Tina McGowan sitting on a recliner in Minnie Mouse pajamas, her bare feet stuck in a bubbling footbath and her neck gooped with VapoRub. A rose-breasted cockatoo stands on the sky-blue carpet between us like a guard dog.
“This is trespassing!” Maggie shouts, making me wince.
“Mama, honestly, what the hell?” Shelby says.
Poor Tina sneezes violently and looks like she wants to throw up. “I…I just…wanted to take care of her.”
I close the door, squat down, and look Maggie in the eye. “I know everything,” I tell her. “So I’m not going to pester you for answers anymore.”
“You don’t know half of what you think you do,” she grumbles.
I reach into my pocket and hold out a handful of pistachios, which were Doris’s all-time favorite food. “Now, if you’ll come along, you can have all these nice pistachios.”
She clicks her beak as she thinks about it. “Well, I don’t know. Tina’s been an absolute pleasure.”
“That’s because she can’t hear you and is thus free of your complaints, insults, and general meddling. I’ll commit to trying to get along better if you will.”
A sigh. “Fine. But no more closing the cage door.”
“And no more calling me a hussy.”
Shelby gasps. “She did not say that!”
I look up. “Absolutely she did.”
She shakes her head. “I’ve never heard of a familiar that mouthy, but I guess parrots come with a built-in attitude, huh?”
My eyes meet Tina’s. The guilt and terror on her face tell me she knows exactly where that attitude is coming from, and she knows it’s not just the parrot talking. Maggie must’ve found some way to communicate with her. My eyes bounce around the room until I see a Scrabble board set up on the floor, the tiles strewn around in various words.
“Clever girl,” I murmur.
I hold out the bird backpack, and Maggie hops in. “Pistache!” she barks in a voice that now makes me miss the old Doris. I obediently put the little pile of nuts in her food cup, and she starts gobbling them down.
“Please don’t be mad, honey,” Tina says. “I was trying to help.”
I give her the best smile I can conjure, given the circumstances.“I know. Thanks for keeping her safe. But if I have a heart attack later in life due to the stress caused by the last few days, I’ll send you a bill.”
She laughs weakly and puts her fingers to her chest. “Nearly gave me a heart attack, too, if I’m honest. It ain’t every day a pink bird lands on your windshield. I thought I was inPsycho.”
“The Birds,”Shelby corrects.
“Well, just the one.”
I zip up the bird backpack and gather the rest of the stolen supplies. Shelby offers me a reusable grocery bag to carry everything. Tina doesn’t budge from her recliner and footbath, but she calls, “I’d offer to fix y’all some lunch, but my feet. Help yourself to anything in the fridge. Leftovers are in the butter tub.”
Shelby opens the fridge to show me that it’s about fifty percent butter tubs. It reminds me so much of my mom’s fridge that my chest goes tight. “Who needs real Tupperware, right?” she says. She pokes around until she finds some chocolate pie, and we sit at the table and eat our slices off china saucers while Maggie works through her pistachio pile and sings little bits ofThe Music Man,almost against her will.
On the way back to town, Maggie is quiet and Shelby is apologetic. “Sometimes my mama doesn’t have the sense God gave a goose. I can imagine her taking in a stray—she tried to adopt a possum one time, for Pete’s sake—but to find Doris and then decide to steal all the flyers and keep her? That’s just beyond.”
“Doris can be very stubborn,” I tell her. “But I think we’ll learn to compromise.”
It’s a sign of that compromise that Maggie does not argue with this statement.
Shelby drops us off, and I tote Maggie upstairs, where she settles back in with a decent enough attitude.
“So did you have a nice adventure?” I ask her.
