Page 99 of Meet Me in the Garden

“Appreciated as a snob,” I say.

“A snob and a genius. Nobody’s perfect. I’ll take it.”

“You’re impossible.”

He laughs. “Okay, okay. I’m just blowing off steam. Nothing personal against Felix, apart from that he left you and the kids, of course. Can’t imagine why you’d get so worked up defending him.”

“I know. It’s just the principle of it. I fundamentally disagree with what you’re saying. Take Bernard and Al. Al decides the company has to change, decides the only way is to unionize. The boss becomes the enemy. The company becomes the enemy. Unionizing is theonlyway.Meanwhile, Bernard is loyal to the company. He’s working from within to get us higher wages, extra vacation days, shorter hours. You might say he’s debasing himself, but I say he’s being a pragmatist. He’s being strategic. He’s going golfing with the vice president, bending his ear, leaving him more sympathetic to the workers while Al’s at secret meetings, showing up on Mondays with a new list of demands and ultimatums. Which method works better?”

“Clearly neither of them work. That’s why they’re moving the plant.”

I sigh. “I don’t even want to talk about this. I hate talking about it. It’s all anyone’s been talking about for years.”

“Have you started planning what you’ll do for work?”

From the back, there’s a rustle, a rattle of the cage. I say, “It’s the only job I’ve ever had. You know that. Some people are going to follow the plant to Santa Maria.”

“But not you, right?”

“No. Not me. I have some time to figure it out.”

“Maybe you could teach art lessons down in your studio.”

“I have no formal training.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“I don’t know all the words for things. I don’t know enough about the history.”

“I’m certain that you know a lot more than you think.”

“Maybe,” I say. “But art lessons aren’t it.”

Just past Riverside, a song comes on the radio. A fiddle. A lazy guitar strum. A woman’s voice, plaintive and sweet. “We don’t listen to enough country music,” Lionel says. His arm rests in the window, wind through his tight black curls, an unruly smile. “Tell you what. When the kids are out of the house and your evenings are free, we’re gonna do it all the time. I’ll show up with a bottle of something and you’ll have some country records for us to listen to.”

“We’ll prop the door open and play them loud,” I say.

“Warm summer nights,” Lionel says. “I can see it.”

I can, too. The comfort of it. The absence it might fill. “I’m worriedabout the family,” I say. “Who’d have imagined Adele and Al would ever stop hosting on Sundays?”

“Bernard and Al will figure it out. The plant’s moving on and they will, too, once they’ve had some time to nurse their grudges.”

“But it isn’t only Bernard and Al. It’s also my sisters. They seem relieved to have an excuse to avoid each other. I’m not sure why.” We’re passing through Riverside now, getting closer to home. “If we were going to lose what we had anyway, why didn’t I try with Ginny?”

We drive for miles longer, quiet now, and once we’re back on city streets Lionel reaches for the cage and pulls the bird out. He holds her, strokes her head. She coos. I stop at a red light and look at her. I’m sure I’ve passed her before, pecking around in Lionel’s coop, but I’ve never looked closely. Fawn beak and quick eyes, white head with black flecks, like a scattering of pepper in a bowl of salt. Soft velvet-gray body and bold black-and-white tail feathers. “She’s beautiful.”

“Sure is. Here,” he says, “try this.” He shows me how to glide my index finger across her back. “See how you can’t even detect her spine? That’s an indicator of an impeccable bird right there.”

At the next light, he hands her to me. Her body’s warm, her feathers soft. She smells like seeds and hay. Her heart beats against my fingers. The light changes and he takes her back. Soon we’re turning onto his street, and he puts the bird back in the cage. He’s smiling his Lionel smile, his gotten-away-with-something smile, and I want to go back in time to each moment I’ve seen it before, and each time we’ve been together this way, the two of us. “Are you sure you’ll be okay here?” I ask.

“What could go wrong?” he says. But I see something horrible on his door, a smear of red, more of it on his stoop.

“What is that?” We both step out of the car. It’s worse up close. Thick smears of blood on the wood and the knob, and below, on the stoop, pink entrails and white bone, guts spilled out and stomped on, and flesh, and feathers. I gag. Lionel darts down the steps and around to the side of the house, to his coop. I follow him, watch as he turns the combination lockand swings open the door. Inside, his birds ruffle and preen, peck and nuzzle.

“Look,” he says. “They tried to break it open.” There are gouges stabbed out of the wood along the padlock. They could have pried it off with more time.

“How’d they get here so fast?”