Things I Want to Say

by Cyndi Myers

  “Brady’s racing next weekend. You should come with us.”

  “It would be fun to see the races again. But Casey would probably want to come with me.”

  “Tell him it’s a nostalgia thing—that you’re going to relive your childhood. He’ll be too mortified to even think of joining you.”

  “I’ll do it.” She laughed. “My mother always said the best revenge of parenthood was being able to embarrass your children.”

  “She’s right. Sometimes it’s the only revenge.” Tammy picked up her sandwich and shook her head. “They have so many ways of getting to us, without even realizing it.”

  Karen nodded. There was no one who could hurt you like your child, and no one who could bring you as much joy. It was the paradox of parenting, something you never thought about when you were the child.

  If pain and joy were barometers of love, then her love for her sons knew no bounds. And her frustration with her father was almost as limitless. Having Casey here brought home the contrast. Sometimes she felt balanced between the two, trying frantically to make life run smoothly for them both. Unfortunately, neither man appreciated her concern. Why should they, when she never gave them a chance to live without it?

  And then there was Tom—the other man who was important to her. She was stuck with trying to placate him long distance, an impossible task. “You’ve known Brady a long time, haven’t you?” she asked.

  Tammy smiled. “Since third grade. The first day we met, he threw a spitball at me. I knocked him down on the playground later and sat on him.” She laughed. “It was true love.”

  “So, does he ever say things that surprise you? Things you had no idea he was thinking?”

  Tammy tilted her head, considering the question as she chewed. “Not really.” She shrugged. “I don’t think Brady’s a very complicated person. He likes his job. He likes racing and fishing. He loves me and the kids. If something’s bugging him, he broods about it a few days and then moves on. We’re a lot alike that way. Why? Has Tom surprised you?”

  Karen nodded. “I thought he’d understand why I had to come look after my dad. Instead, he’s practically pouting because he has to look after Matt and the business by himself for a summer.”

  “He misses you,” Tammy said. “That’s sweet.”

  “He doesn’t sound very sweet on the phone. It’s like he wants me to abandon my father and come home.”

  “He’s probably just feeling a little panicky about looking after everything without you to help. He’ll get over it. I’d do the same thing in your shoes. Your dad needs you right now.”

  Except Tammy would never be in Karen’s shoes. Her father lived two blocks away. She saw her parents every Sunday afternoon and countless times during the week.

  “I’m trying to talk him into coming down for a visit,” Karen said. “Maybe if he sees how helpless Dad is, he’ll be more understanding.”

  “I’m sure he will be. And I know you’ve missed him.”

  She had missed Tom—especially at night, when she lay alone in her childhood room. But she didn’t know what to expect from him these days, or what he wanted from her. They’d been married all these years and there were days when she felt she hardly knew him. They’d been so busy—raising the boys, running a business, managing a home—maybe they’d missed out on something important to their relationship, some exercise or habit or activity that would serve as insurance for the years ahead when it was just the two of them again. She wanted to think they could be close in the years to come. Closer than she felt to him right now. What would it take to get to that kind of closeness? Or was that another fantasy, like her dreams of bonding with her dad?

  In some ways, her father, for all his sullen silences and uncooperative moments, was easier to deal with than Tom. Having been away from home so many years, she no longer had a fixed role in his life, so there were fewer expectations to live up to.

  She sipped iced tea and ate the last of her sandwich. She’d expected to learn a lot about her father while she was here; she hadn’t counted on learning so much about herself. For instance, she drew an inordinate amount of satisfaction from the knowledge that whenever she and her father disagreed about something, she was sure to have the final say in the matter. She told herself this was a petty, mean attitude, but there it was. She wasn’t always a sweet, nice person. Maturity had taught her to take comfort from that. There was peace in accepting one’s faults. Accepting others’ faults was more difficult, as she was learning with her father, and Del, and Tom and even Casey. She hadn’t had any luck changing their behavior, but silently accepting it felt wrong, too. What would it take to find her voice and tell them exactly what she thought?

  More importantly, how much would the truth cost? Was it a price she was willing to pay?

  Pay attention.

  “I am, Grandpa.” Casey refrained from rolling his eyes. After all, the old guy couldn’t help it if he had to type everything instead of talking.

  But his grandfather wasn’t the most exciting person to be around even when he wasn’t sick. Not to mention that having a conversation with him was like being back in school. But it wouldn’t kill Casey to humor him. He leaned over the old man’s shoulder and studied the spreadsheet on the screen. “You were saying something about the way birds are classified. Families and stuff. I remember that from biology class.”

  His grandfather stabbed at the keyboard once more, his one-fingered typing surprisingly fast.

  Class = aves

  Phylum = chordata Subphylum = vertebrata

  Orders = passeriformes (passerines) and non-passerines

  He looked at Casey to make sure he understood.

  “So every bird in the world is either a passerine or a nonpasserine?” Casey asked.

  The old man nodded.

  23 Orders, 142 Families, 2057 Genera, 9,702 Species

  Casey nodded. “I got that. And you’ve seen close to eight thousand of them.”

  First you learn the orders, then the families, and soon.

  Casey frowned. “But why? I could just learn the names of the birds themselves. Why wouldn’t that be enough?”

  The old man glared at him, his eyebrows coming together, jutting over his beak of a nose. He looked like a caricature of an angry bald eagle. His hand shook as he typed.

  There is a correct way to do this. You must learn the orders first.

  “If you’re going to get all cranky, I’ll leave and go watch TV or something.” Casey took a step back. He got enough grief about stuff like this from his mom and dad. He didn’t have to take it from somebody he was trying to help, even if it was his grandfather.

  Sadie sat up when Casey moved, and looked at him expectantly. The dog was the best thing about his summer so far. She followed him everywhere and had plopped down next to Grandpa’s desk as if she’d been living here all her life.

  The old man continued to scowl at him, then his shoulders sagged a little. He nodded and beckoned Casey to him once more.

  All right. We’ll learn names first. But the orders are interesting. When you know the names, you’ll want to know the orders, too.

  “Fair enough.” Casey sat on the corner of the desk and watched as his grandfather highlighted the cells of the spreadsheet. Ailuroedus buccoides, White-eared Catbird. Ailuroedus melanotis, Spotted Catbird. Ailuroedus crassirostris, Green Catbird.

  The old man stared at the funny Latin names like it was some hot porn site or something. He was so enthralled, he’d probably forgotten Casey was even there. Which was okay with Casey. He leaned down and scratched Sadie behind the ears and studied the man at the computer, thinking how odd it was that this was his mom’s dad. They didn’t look much alike; Mom took after Grandma in the looks department, which he guessed was good. Grandma still looked all right for an older lady. Even before he had the stroke, Grandpa hadn’t been all that handsome. He kept himself neat and clean, but he didn’t care about stuff like clothes or hairstyles.

  But Mom did act l
ike her father sometimes. When she was at the landscaping office, working on something on the computer, she had the same kind of intensity Grandpa had now. And she showed her emotions on her face the way Grandpa did. One look in her eyes and you knew she was happy or angry or upset. She never had to say a word.

  Uncle Del looked a little more like his dad, at least around the chin and nose. But Casey couldn’t imagine someone more different from Grandpa than his mother’s brother. Del was real outgoing and friendly. Mom said he was a con artist, so maybe the friendliness wasn’t always real, but he sure wasn’t the type to spend days alone in the jungle looking for some rare bird the way Grandpa did. And if Uncle Del was mad or glad about something, he’d tell you right to your face.

  When Casey looked at his mom and her brother that way, he had to wonder how they ever ended up with the same parents. Then again, he and Matt were plenty different. Matt was the smart, responsible one—just like Dad. Casey thought of himself as the more creative type. An artist, except that he didn’t paint or play an instrument or anything like that. Dad couldn’t understand him at all, so they clashed all the time.

  Mom was easier to get along with, but even she wished he were different sometimes. More ordinary, he guessed. Easier.

  Easier for her, that is. He couldn’t imagine anything harder than trying to fit into a mold that wasn’t right for you.

  Grandpa tugged at his sleeve and cocked his head. Casey listened and heard a melodic, gurgling song. Three slow notes, gluk, gluk, glee! “I don’t recognize it,” he said.

  Grandpa motioned toward the window, and gave Casey a gentle shove toward it. He shuffled to the glass and looked out. The call came again. Gluk, gluk, glee! This time, he saw the chunky, soot-colored bird with the shiny brown hood. “Brown-headed Cowbird,” he announced.

  Grandpa nodded, his mouth curved into a crooked grin. He turned to the computer and clicked on anew file. Casey’s List was the heading at the top of the page.

  “I guess I should add it now, huh?” Casey leaned around the old man and typed in the name of the bird and the time, date and location where he’d seen it. Grandpa added the Latin Molothrus ater.

  Casey nodded, and admired the new entry. So far the list Grandpa had made for him had only about a dozen birds on it. He’d done it mainly to humor the old man. But he had to admit, it was kind of fun, seeing a bird and noting all the information about it. He didn’t know anybody else his age who could identify half a dozen birds, much less more than ten.

  Grandpa smiled, and patted his hand. Casey returned the look. At least some people in his life were easy to please.

  7

  I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly, give them fruit for their songs.

  —Joseph Addison, the Spectator

  One of Karen’s earliest memories was of standing beside her brother’s crib, making faces and laughing with delight when he smiled at her. Even as a baby, he had charmed everyone who met him. He had grown into a sunny child and a willing accomplice in her elaborate games of make-believe.

  When had that changed? Had adolescence formed this gulf between them, or had the divide come earlier, when she realized that Del’s easygoing nature made him more popular than she would ever be? When he charmed teachers into overlooking neglected homework assignments while she served detention for turning in a paper a day late, had that made her see him in a different light? When he borrowed money and failed to repay it, dismissing her attempts to collect with a lopsided smile and a lazy shrug, had that been the final straw?

  She caught glimpses of the sweet boy she’d loved even now. On Saturday, he and Mary Elisabeth came to the house with a stringer of catfish and a paper sack of tomatoes, still warm from the vine. “Dinner’s on us,” he announced, holding up the fish.

  “All right!” Casey shut off the television and joined them in the kitchen, Sadie close on his heels. To Karen’s surprise, Casey had kept his promise to look after the beast, and Sadie slept each night on the floor beside his bed.

  “Del said his daddy loves catfish,” Mary Elisabeth said. “And the tomatoes are from my neighbor’s garden.” She began opening cabinet doors. “I’ll cook, if you’ll show me where everything is.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that.” Karen hurried to intercept the young woman as she hefted a cast-iron frying pan from the drawer beneath the stove.

  “Let her cook, sis.” Del steered her toward a chair at the kitchen table and set a long-necked bottle of beer in front of her. “Take a load off.”

  “You got anything in there for me?” Casey bent and poked around in the blue-and-white plastic cooler Del had deposited by his chair.

  “Nothing for you, sport.”

  Karen studied the bottle in front of her. Sweat beaded on the brown glass and chips of ice clung to the label. She’d been up half the night with her father, who’d developed a worrisome cough, and weariness hung on her like a lead shirt. She couldn’t remember when she’d seen anything more enticing and refreshing than that beer.

  She raised the bottle to her lips and took a long drink, a sigh escaping her as the icy, slightly bitter liquid rushed down her throat. Del laughed and sat in the chair across from her. “I’d say it’s been too long since you let your hair down.”

  She started to point out that people with responsibilities and some sense of duty didn’t have time to let their hair down, but the words stuck in her throat. Maybe he had a point. Life couldn’t be one big party, as he seemed to try to make it, but neither did it have to be a constant grind, as hers too often was.

  Casey slid into the chair between them. “Where’d you catch the fish?”

  “Mayfield Lake.”

  Karen arched one eyebrow as he named a body of water owned by one of the wealthiest families in town. “Isn’t that on private property?”

  He grinned. “Not if you know the back way in.”

  His expression was such an exaggeration of fake innocence, she couldn’t help but laugh. “And of course, you know the way.”

  He glanced toward Mary Elisabeth, who was stirring cornmeal and spices in a bowl, humming to herself. Then he leaned toward Karen, his voice lowered. “I went around with the youngest Mayfield girl for a while. She knew all the places on their land where nobody would bother us.”

  She took another quick swallow of beer to distract herself from thinking about just what her brother and Miss Mayfield had been up to that they didn’t want to be bothered. “You haven’t asked about Daddy,” she said.

  The lines around his eyes tightened and he bent to retrieve another beer from the cooler. “I was going to. How is he?”

  “He had a rough night. A bad cough kept him awake.”

  “He’s better this morning,” Casey offered. “I think something just went down the wrong way. He still doesn’t swallow good sometimes.”

  Karen glanced toward the string of fish, wet and silver in the sink. “I don’t know if fish is such a good idea.”

  “We’ll mush it up for him. It’ll be okay.” Del popped the top off the bottle. “Where is he now?”

  “He’s asleep. I’ll send Casey to wake him up in a little bit.”

  “Don’t bother him. He probably needs his sleep.”

  Something in the overly casual way he said the words made her look at him more closely. “You act like you don’t want to talk to him.”

  “It’s not like we can have a conversation.” He stared across the kitchen, the muscles along his jaw tense. “Even before he had the stroke we didn’t have a lot to say to each other.”

  “No, he was never much of a conversationalist.” She wondered, sometimes, if all those years of sitting silent, watching birds, had taken away the habit of talking.

  “I know what you’re thinking.” Del pointed the lip of the bottle toward her. “You think since I live next door to him, I ought to be over here all the time, checking up on him and playing the dutiful son and all. Well, he didn’t want none of that and
neither did I. Except for our genes, the two of us don’t have anything in common.” He set the empty bottle down with a thump.

  The bitterness in his voice surprised her. She’d been so focused on her own problems with her father, she hadn’t thought much about Del’s relationship with him.

  Her eyes met Casey’s, and he quickly looked away. Had Del’s words reminded him of his own uneven relationship with Tom? Her husband rarely hid his frustration that Casey didn’t share his interest in the landscaping business or in working on projects around the house. Casey never said anything, but he must have felt his father’s disappointment keenly.

  It didn’t help matters, though, when neither of them would consider the other’s point of view—not unlike Del and Martin. “It’s not true that you have nothing in common,” she said. “You’re both stubborn.”

  “Oh yeah?” He cocked one eyebrow. “I’d say it runs in the family.”

  “Del, you need to skin these catfish so I can cook them.” Mary Elisabeth confronted him, hands on her hips. She’d tied a dish towel around her waist as a makeshift apron. The towel hung down longer than her shorts, so the effect was of a striped cotton miniskirt.

  “Aw, sugar, I’ll do it in a minute, don’t worry.” He reached out and pulled her close, one hand cupping her bottom like he was testing the firmness of a melon.

  “I’ll do it.” Casey jumped up and pushed back his chair.

  “You skinned catfish before, boy?” Del asked. “It’s not like cleaning one of those Colorado trout, you know.”

  “I know.” He rummaged in the drawer under the phone and came up with a thick-handled knife. He retrieved an enamel dishpan from under the sink, then picked up the stringer of fish. Sadie stood at attention, ears cocked, nose twitching. “You want fillets or whole?” Casey asked. “Fillets,” Mary Elisabeth said. “They’re big fish.”