“You kids know why you couldn’t stay with Carl anymore, right?” He pauses. “He’s not reliable. You’re better off here.”
We don’t say anything. Patrick clears his throat. “I put my cell number and the address here on a paper by the phone. One for each of you. Carry it with you.” He stares again at Birdie and then knocks twice on the wall and takes the stairs down.
Birdie picks a bedroom and goes in.
The hallway is dark.
Somewhere there is a clock ticking.
On the way here, I tried to pretend that today was a Wolf Day, Mama’s greatest invention: a spontaneous amazing adventure. But Wolf Day was all about saying yes. Moving to Patrick’s is all about saying no.
No to Fry Shack ice cream sundaes.
No to fashion magazines for Birdie.
No to easy walks to town.
How can it really be true that Patrick is Mama’s brother?
**Observation #773: Shoebox Inventory
5 bedrooms, 0 decorations on the walls unless you count some painting of a ship in a bottle & another of wooden ducks
1 ancient basset hound (named Duke) that might be blind & also deaf
1 fridge (no magnets):
3 pounds of frozen ground beef, 2 pounds of frozen ground elk, 2 packages of bacon (1 frozen), 1 bag of tortillas, 1 jar of mayo, 1 jar of grape jelly, 1 block of cheddar cheese, 3 sticks of butter, 8 eggs, 4 carrots, 1 cabbage
2 wooden cupboards (with the doors removed):
9 giant cans of beans, 5 cans of tuna, 2 boxes of cereal (no milk), 1 jar of peanut butter, 2 onions, 1 jar of nuts, and something round wrapped tightly in foil and covered in a small towel
1 overgrown backyard with a big lonely-looking oak & 4 other smaller trees
1 giant circular shed on the side of the house (Birdie said it’s an old grain silo that’s been shortened—he saw one on some home makeover show he watched with Uncle Carl)
1 large something next to the shed, covered in a giant tarp on a trailer—a boat?
1 big living room window that would let in a lot of light if only you’d pull the curtains back
1 wood-burning stove with a giant pile of logs & kindling (the only thing in the whole house that is anything like home)
0 pieces of evidence that Patrick is related to Mama or Uncle Carl or any of us
CHAPTER 2 DINNER WITH A CLAM
After unpacking a little, I find Birdie sitting on the back of the living room couch, staring out the large front window, his face close to the glass. The curtains are open, so light floods in.
“Are you cold?” I ask. “You look cold.”
He’s got his purple jacket on with the hood up. It’s October and starting to get chilly because of the nearby mountains, but I’m not sure I’d wear a hood indoors just yet.
“It’s so windy here but with no rain like at home. It’s cold sitting by the window.”
“Then why are you sitting there?”
“Because if you sit right here and look out, it almost reminds me of our front yard.”
I stand behind him but don’t see it. Our house didn’t have a chain-link fence. We had tall rosebushes and a little fig tree.
I’m not cold, but I go to the wood-burning stove and make a small bridge of wood, just like Mama taught me, and shove crumpled newspaper and wood chips underneath and then light a match. The newspapers catch quickly and I watch the flames for a moment and then close the little door.
In the kitchen, there’s no bread, so I use tortillas for peanut butter and jelly, which was something an old boyfriend of Mama’s used to do before she broke up with him—I’m pretty sure the tortillas were to blame.
When I return to the living room with the food, Birdie’s eating a Honey Bunny Bun.
“Birdie, stop. I have real food.”
Birdie looks over at the rolled tortillas and the little pile of nuts and a couple of carrots.
“I don’t think I’ve eaten a carrot since home,” Birdie says, finishing his Honey Bunny Bun. “I don’t even remember what they taste like. Probably not as good as a Honey Bunny Bun—is that peanut butter and jelly in those tortillas?”
I don’t think we’ve had any kind of raw vegetable since Mama’s house. “You can’t live on Honey Bunny Buns forever,” I say.
“Says who?”
“Says me, your wise, all-knowing, Honey-Bunny-Bun-expert older sister.”
“Um, if anyone is the Honey Bunny Bun expert, it’s me.”
“Actually, it’s probably Uncle Carl.”
“True.”
We don’t say anything else for a long time. We sit on the back of the couch and look out the window and eat our picnic lunch, and there is the faintest crackle coming from the wood-burning stove and it’s finally warm enough for Birdie to put his hood down.
I’m about to ask Birdie what makes the view from Patrick’s window so much like Mama’s when I see it. Maybe not what he sees, exactly. But with the fire and the stupid crunchy carrots like the ones Mama would make us eat all the time, and sitting in a real living room, on a real couch (a couch we don’t have to sleep on at night), I feel like home with Mama wasn’t just some dream like I’ve been telling myself the last ten months. We did live in a house. We did have our own rooms, with our own things, our own real lives. It had all really happened.
• • •
When I hear Patrick return right after the sun sets, I’m lying on the rug in Birdie’s room as he sorts through his binder of fashion collages. He made it from magazines and gel pens and stickers. Uncle Carl even bought him a whole stack of new magazines once. Birdie calls it
