Birdie

Birdie

Copyright © 2016 by U. Mandy Carrico

BKC Publishing

First Edition

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the above author of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

To my mother

Who taught me to value people for who they are on the inside without ever saying a word on the subject. That’s how loud your actions were.

Birdie
             

It’s the picture that
stops me. Bright and prominently displayed on a desk, a blonde haired, blue-eyed man with a winning smile and a mischievous expression that is easily captured in portrait watches me walk past and causes me to nearly trip over my feet.             

My feet are the reason I was walking by. It’s my first day at Pine Oak Public Library as their new reference librarian and I’m wearing mustard flats paired with navy pants and a white top, all crisp and new and hopefully impressive. Everything is so new, in fact, that I’m wearing the flats straight out of the gate without field testing them first and my toes are pinched off and, if my guess is correct, in need of blood supply.

I had excused myself from my first day celebration of pie and cookies in the break room so generously thrown together by my new coworkers and headed for the bathroom for some toe-wiggle action. And that’s when I saw him.

With my plastic fork still dangling from my mouth from where I licked off the remaining frosting as I walked, I lean over to get a better look. He has his arms wrapped around the shoulders of a red-headed woman in an overused pose that they both make look fresh and new and original.

Katy. That’s the woman in the picture. She cut me my slice of pie.

As if my thoughts have materializing powers, her voice is suddenly behind me.

“That’s my fiancé,” she says and I’m startled back into an upright position. The fork falls from my mouth and clatters onto her desk. Feeling hot, I pick it up and clench it next to my side. She reaches past me and straightens the picture as if my looking at it disturbed it somehow. When she glances back at me, her face if full of dopey joy and expectance.

Expectance. Oh, right. “He’s handsome,” I offer and her smile grows even wider.

“Thank you. We’ve been together three years.”

Three years. I take in a steadying breath. I hope Katy doesn’t notice. “Well, you make a cute couple,” I say. I back away slowly, smiling a big, fake smile and looking for an exit.

“Aw, thanks Anne. Maybe one day we could double. Are you seeing anybody?”

I shake my head. “Not really. I’ve got to go to the bathroom.  Excuse me.”

I find relief around the corner, out of view from Katy’s puzzled expression. It’s probably not the direction of the restroom, but I no longer need one. I just need to be alone. I keep walking down a hallway that looks like it’s headed for archives. The first door I come to, I duck in and slouch against a filing cabinet without turning any lights on.

The darkness has a calming effect. Three years. They’ve been seeing each other for three years. Somewhere in those three years he fell in love with her. He couldn’t imagine his life without her. He asked her to be with him. Forever. While I’ve been trying to keep my Jenga-stacked life from tumbling over. It looks like we’ve lived our last few of years in very different ways.

The desk of my new coworker at my new job on my first day is the last place I ever thought I’d see the face of my ex-boyfriend.

Birdie

We’d almost gotten to
desert, lemon cupcakes with butter cream frosting from my favorite bakery in northeast Houston. 
Game and Grille
Restaurant and Bar
was gracious enough to allow the outside dessert in light of our celebration. My belly is stretched from eating my browned Cornish hen as well as half of my sister’s.  Darla is picking at her plate, still playing the vegetarian card even though I know she cheats sometimes to eat chicken enchiladas from Rico’s House, her favorite Mexican restaurant, in between her classes at the community college. 

My father is quiet as he has been all night.  His silence envelops the table and puts everyone on edge.  My mother shreds her cocktail napkin, her food untouched.  I fork another bite of garlic stuffing in my mouth.  I’m full, but I don’t have anything to say and chewing helps temper the deafening silence, like bubble gum popping my ears.

The cupcakes sit on the edge of the table, waiting, but I don’t make a move for them.  It is my eighteenth birthday and it doesn’t seem appropriate.  Things are supposed to be done while I follow along for the ride, enjoying the experience.  I’m not supposed to facilitate.  Up until this point my mother had been fitfully progressing the dinner, but now her eyes are brimmed red and the cocktail napkin is shrinking in her hands, raining down in jagged bits.

“I can’t do this.”

My father finally speaks.  Darla and I don’t move our heads, but our gazes swing towards him, mine more questioning than Darla’s.  I let my stare rest on her for a moment. What did she know?

“Now’s not the time, Howard,” my mother replies in a low, even tone.

“Now is the perfect time, Sheila.  You fucking Robert Smalls is all I think about all the time.  I don’t want to think about it anymore.  I can’t do this.”

I furrow my eyebrows at my mother who won’t look at any of us.

“We agreed to get through Birdie’s birthday dinner and not make any decisions until tomorrow.”

My father picks up his fork and stabs his hen.

“I. Can’t. Do. This.”  His eyes are raged and he turns to train them on me.  “What about Birdie? Is she another Robert Smalls? Did you do it on purpose?”

The garlic stuffing bite I just ate rises up and lodges itself on the base of my throat.  I try to swallow it down, avoid the embarrassing alternative.  My stomach hardens, resisting.

“God damn you, Howard,” my mother hisses, grabbing his forearm.

My father yanks it away and stands up.  His eyes never leave mine.

“We didn’t adopt you, you know,” he spits at me.  “Your mother’s a whore and you’re a whore’s daughter!”

The other eyes in the restaurant look at us, some fleeting and discreet others wide and unabashed. 

My father leaves the table, keys in hand and bill unpaid.  My mother follows suit.  Going after him perhaps?  I don’t know.

Darla sits with me at the linen-covered table.  She pushes one of the lemon cupcakes at me.  I ignore it.

“Mom’s having an affair,” she says simply.  I cock my head at her.  She and I are complete opposites.  She is strawberry blonde, lithe, and freckled cutely.  A single headband pushes her long strands from her face, letting her green eyes shine.  I’m dark, curved and hippy, with tan skin and black spiraled hair.  She is only three years older than me, but her face is etched with maturity as she stares at me, waiting for my response.

“I gathered that,” I reply finally.  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What are you going to do now that you know?” she asks.

I shrug.

“That’s why.”  She bites into a piece of the cupcake and I can tell from her face she tastes nothing.  Like my garlic stuffing, it is just something to do.  “I have some money saved up from lifeguarding.  I’ll get dinner since I think our parents are gone.”  She wipes at some lemon frosting on her bottom lip.

I sigh, a hollowed sound. The tension between my parents has been there for weeks.  If I am being honest with myself, it’s been there for years. My family has never felt whole or congealed or right. Maybe that’s why everything feels so dry right now. I have no tears, no saliva for my food, my skin itches.

“Ok.” I tell Darla. “Thanks.”

“Yeah, no problem.” She gives me a half smile. “Happy Birthday.”

Birdie

The town of Shenoah
, Texas is one hundred and six miles north of Houston and one hundred and thirty-three miles south of Dallas and where my mother was raised. When Mom graduated high school, she ran to the nearest large city so I suppose Houston won out due to its being twenty-seven miles closer than Dallas. Soon after arriving and making her way in the city as a bank teller with three roommates, she met Howard Clements. He was ten years older than her, established, and the son of Jackson and Marjorie Clements who grew the family wealth in the construction equipment business.

Shenoah’s development boasts three restaurant chains, a movie theater, a science museum as well as a history of Shenoah museum, a small community college, and two local factories: Johnny Cups, maker of earth decaying Styrofoam dinnerware and Steamson Mowers and Lawn Equipment. Their race for biggest town supporter means the elementary school kids never have a want for crayons and the senior citizen walking parks are paved, mowed, shaded, bursting with gardens, and glistening clean.

This is what my mom is telling me as we near the exit off Interstate 45 for her hometown. She says it like she's an advertiser trying to sell me on this place. Like my opinion carries weight on whether or not she deposits us here for the remainder of my senior year.

"The guys there have that small town cuteness," she says giving me a sly look. "All manners and dimples."

I don't respond. I'm not trying to be a sullen teenager but neither am I rejoicing in my relocation. I flipped through her yearbook a couple years ago when I was bored at home and trying on blouses from her closet. At the time my mother and I were the same height and bust size. I now outweigh her, outbust her, and my arms and legs have taken on a thicker look where her limbs are still enviously slender. Finding a shelf behind a rack of hung shirts, I saw the yearbook sitting there. Thirty minutes and a diet coke later, I had flipped to the end of it spotting only one black kid, a sophomore. There were also two Hispanic kids, but one looked blonde and blue-eyed and the only hint of ethnicity was his last name. Hernandez or something similar, I can't recall.

I notice things like that. A side effect from being the minority in my own family.

I wonder if twenty-four years is enough time for that black kid, that Hispanic kid, and that kind-of Hispanic kid to have families of their own and grow the minority population.

"I won't have time to notice manners or dimples," I say because she keeps glancing at me, waiting for me to respond to one of her remarks. "It’s February. I graduate in four months. Four. Hardly enough time to explore the town much less notice the guys in it. I'll be in and out. Why I couldn't just get through at my old school, I don't know."

Mom's face hardens. "Your father and I could not live in that house together another day. And I can't stay in Houston, it's too difficult. Darla chose your father, you chose me. So we go."

I didn't actually choose Mom, she was my option by default. Howard (I couldn't bring myself to call him father anymore. It had never felt natural anyway) hadn't looked me in the eye since my birthday. And not even two weeks later, I have all my belongings stuffed haphazardly into two suitcases and I am belted into the cab of a tan and green Ford Ranger that I'm pretty sure belongs to the infamous Robert Smalls.

We don’t speak much after that. Mom’s face flattens out and she stops her attempts on trying to sell me on the pearls of Shenoah.  I punch at the radio again. The last exit number listed five restaurants with chain names which gives me hope that there’s a radio signal nearby since the restaurants’ presence suggests a population. I’m in luck. Freda Payne fills the cab halfway through her
Band of Gold
song and it isn’t until I’m singing the chorus that I realize it’s a little too appropriate for the situation and I hiss in an embarrassed breath. But Mom is tapping her thumb on the steering wheel, oblivious to the lyrics.

“Do you know why I named you Hummingbird?” she asks suddenly.

“Because Darla was the last normal name you liked?” I joke. I actually know why she did, she’s asked me this a handful of times over the years but she still brings it up as if she’s never revealed to me her inspiration for my name.

“Because I thought I was going to lose you,” she says. Her eyes don’t see the road in front of her. She has that faraway look she gets sometimes. “Your heartbeat was so fast, fluttering. Like a hummingbird’s wings. They had to go in early to get you out before you fluttered away.”

I’d heard this many times, but something in her expression captivates me. I know more is coming.

“I could almost feel it,” she says, almost whispering to herself. “Feel you fluttering inside me.” When she glances at me, her eyes are watering. The version I knew was of Mom and Howard waiting in the hallway while the doctors C-sectioned me out of my birth mother. Howard had told me on my birthday I wasn’t adopted but the words from my mother swallow me up in a thick wave of surprise.

She wipes at her eyes and sniffs, signaling the end of this emotional exchange. Sure enough when I glance at her again, her eyes are once more focused on the road ahead. We fall quiet and just listen to the peals of Freda lamenting over lost love.

Now that you’re gone

All that’s left is a band of gold.

All that’s left of the dreams I hold

Is a band of gold, and the memories

Of what love could be

If you were still here with me…

Twenty-seven extra miles and everything in Mom’s life could’ve been completely different.