The Real Macaw

by Donna Andrews

  Odds were both boys would want something soon, and probably simultaneously, but for now, I could bask in the pleasantly warm April air and relax.

  Or maybe not. Over on the Red Sox bench, Timmy and one of his teammates had begun hitting each other on the helmet with their bats and giggling uproariously. Where was the bench coach? And for that matter, where was the other kid’s mother?

  I should do something. But the bench was a good ten feet away from the bleachers. I looked around and spotted someone I knew from the pediatrician’s office.

  “Could you keep an eye on my twins for a second?” I asked her.

  She nodded, and I strode over to the bench and grabbed the end of the other kid’s bat just as he was about to pound Timmy’s helmet.

  “Stop that,” I said.

  “We’re wearing helmets,” the other kid said. “It’s not going to hurt anything.”

  He pulled at the bat, trying free it.

  “Bats against the fence unless you’re actually batting.” I was quoting one of the few T-Ball rules I’d learned so far. I pulled a little harder and gained possession of the bat. “You, too,” I said, holding out my hand to Timmy, who promptly surrendered his blunt instrument. He wasn’t a bad child, just a little easily misled.

  I hooked the bats into the chain-link fence behind home plate and returned to my seat by the baby carriage.

  “Thanks,” I said to my temporary babysitter.

  “You’re welcome,” she said. “You saved me the trouble of walking over there. That was one of my monsters trying to bludgeon your kid.”

  I wasn’t quite sure how to respond, but fortunately I didn’t have to. She was soon immersed in a conversation with two other mothers about logistics for a birthday party. A birthday party to which Timmy hadn’t been invited. Maybe I should start working to improve his social life.

  The Caerphilly Red Sox took the field. Timmy was playing the pitcher’s position. Of course since in T-Ball the kids whacked a stationary ball set atop an overgrown golf tee, “pitcher” was a purely honorary title for an additional infielder. I smiled and waved, in case he was watching. The Clay County Yankees’ coach hauled out the tee, placed a ball on it, and began coaxing the first batter to take his place at the plate.

  “Hello, Meg.”

  I turned and smiled.

  “Hello, Francine,” I said. I tried to make my smile warmer than usual, since I was looking at the one parent on the bleachers who probably felt even more out of it than I did. Francine Mann, wife of our new and unloved county manager, was so shy and self-effacing that she hadn’t had much luck making friends in her six months in Caerphilly. It didn’t help that she had a New England accent so strong it sounded like someone trying to parody one of the Kennedy clan. Many locals had a hard time accepting anyone whose southern accent revealed that they came from a different corner of Dixie. A strong Yankee accent could be the kiss of death with them. And Francine’s husband’s decision on the animal shelter was probably the last nail in the coffin of her social aspirations. I could bet she wasn’t getting a lot of friendly looks from the locals these days.

  I’d been on the receiving end of “not from around here” myself when I’d first moved to Caerphilly, even though I’d grown up only an hour’s drive away. I felt a sort of kinship with her. Or was it just pity?

  “Nice to see you,” I said. “How have you been?”

  “Fine.” She didn’t look fine. Her shoulders were hunched as if she expected a blow from somewhere. Then again, she was tall—almost a match for my five feet ten. Perhaps she merely had an extreme case of the bad posture many tall women adopt in a vain attempt to minimize their size.

  “How are the babies?” she asked.

  I reported their latest stats and accomplishments, and she oohed and aahed. Thank goodness for the twins, who provided a neutral topic of conversation. I liked Francine well enough. She’d been very kind to me when I was in the hospital, where she held some sort of administrative job. But I had no idea what her interests were and I suspected we had little in common.

  Except babies. Clearly they were an interest. Quite possibly an obsession. I’d heard enough town gossip to know that she and her husband had no children of their own, and that the six-year-old she chauffeured to practices and games was her husband’s son by a brief first marriage.

  As she cooed over the twins, I found myself suspecting the lack of additional children wasn’t her choice. Her husband’s maybe, or Mother Nature’s, but not hers.

  “They’re dahling.” Her accent was, as usual, particularly pronounced on the ar and er sounds.

  I heard some muttering behind me. Did I detect the word “Yankee”? I focused on Francine.

  “And you’re so lucky,” she was saying. “Didn’t I hear you’ve found a live-in nanny?”

  “No,” I said. “We do have one of my cousins living with us. The house is enormous, and you know how tight the housing market is in Caerphilly. And luckily Rose Noire likes helping with the children.”

  Actually, although Rose Noire loved the boys dearly, I suspected her motive for helping out was her fear that, left to our own devices, Michael and I probably wouldn’t feed the boys entirely on wholesome, organic food, much less raise them to be self-aware, environmentally responsible little vegetarians.

  “Oh, no,” someone behind me said. “They’re swarming again.”

  Swarming? I looked around, expecting to see a cloud of some kind of insect and ready to throw myself between it and the twins. But no one else seemed alarmed, and I realized that the speaker was pointing to the ball field. One of the Clay County Yankees had gotten a decent hit, and several of our Red Sox were competing to see who could reach it first.

  In fact, the first, second and third basemen, the left and right shortstops, and the left and center fielders were all running madly in the direction of the ball. I understood what the other mother meant by swarming. The only players not involved were the right fielder, who appeared to be taking a nap; the catcher, who was so weighed down by his protective gear that he could barely walk; and Timmy, who was watching a bug crawl up his arm.

  “Play your positions! Play your positions!” the coach was shouting.

  “Jason! Get back on first base!” one mother shouted. “Jason, I mean it! Now!”

  Other mothers and a few fathers shrieked equally futile instructions. The kids were ignoring them, and had ended up in a small, writhing heap in the general vicinity of where we’d last seen the ball.

  The Yankee runner had reached first base and was watching the action, perhaps wondering if she should try for another base. In a real ball game, she’d have been crazy not to. By this time, three of the Red Sox were wrestling for the ball, while the coach and one of the fathers tried to separate them, and the rest of the team stood watching and cheering them on. The Yankee batter could probably have made two or three circuits of the bases by the time one Red Sox player emerged holding the ball.

  But in T-Ball, there was either a rule or a longstanding tradition that you only got one base when you hit the ball, so after looking longingly at second, the runner sat down on first base to untie and retie her shoelaces half a dozen times.

  “Positions!” the Red Sox coach shouted, giving various players gentle shoves in the right directions. “Positions!”

  But it took a while for the game to resume, because one of the players who had not won the fight for the ball ran off the field to be comforted by his mother, and another sat down in the outfield and refused to get up. And when the Red Sox coach finally got all his players upright and back where they belonged, someone finally noticed that there were two Yankee runners on second base. It took several minutes to sort out which one belonged there and which one should have continued on to third when the batter got her hit.

  “Coach really needs Sammy,” one of the mothers behind us said when the game finally resumed. “Keeping those kids in line is tough enough without being shorthanded.”

  “Well, don’
t count on seeing Sammy for a while,” another mother said. “Chief’s got him pretty busy with this murder investigation.”

  “He’d be here if this wasn’t the very first day of the investigation,” the first one said.

  “I hope you’re right,” said the other. “Because if the chief kept him on overtime until they could check out everyone Parker Blair ever fooled around with, the season would be over before we saw him again.”

  “The season?” The other mother snorted. “Are you kidding? Our kids would be in college before we saw him again!”

  The two of them cackled together.

  I glanced at Francine. She was frowning, lips pursed. Evidently she shared my feeling that too much hilarity at the expense of a murdered man was in poor taste.

  “Good God,” one of the mothers at the top of the bleachers stage-whispered, pointing at the field. “What do you suppose those two are up to?”

  “No good, that’s for sure,” another muttered.

  Chapter 6

  I looked to see what the two mothers were talking about and winced. Terence Mann, Francine’s husband, was the third-base coach. But he wasn’t watching the game at the moment. He was talking intently to Mayor Pruitt.

  I studied Mann. He was tall, a little over six feet, but gave the impression of being taller—partly because he was rail thin and narrow shouldered, and partly because he had a slight, habitual stoop, as if he spent far too much time courteously bending down to listen attentively to much shorter people. He had the sort of face most people called handsome mainly because it was symmetrical and you couldn’t put your finger on anything in particular that was wrong with any of the features.

  He was stooping even more than usual to reach down to Mayor Pruitt’s level. Why, I have no idea—considering how red the mayor’s face was, and how wildly he was waving his arms, he was probably shouting loud enough for Mann to hear him without stooping. In fact, stooping probably put Mann much closer to the mayor’s bellows than I’d care to be.

  And even from the bleachers I could tell that the mayor wasn’t using language you’d want five- and six-year-olds to hear. Someone should go over and tell him to clean it up in front of the kids.

  I was standing up to do it myself when the Red Sox coach dashed over and shooed them off the field. The mayor ignored him, but Mann began loping off the field almost before the coach arrived. To keep haranguing him, the mayor had to scurry in his wake, like a ping-pong ball chasing a praying mantis.

  “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” one of the mothers said. Several others tittered.

  Francine shot a quick glance in their direction and then fixed her eyes on the field. Her face looked grim, but I had to admire her presence of mind. I’d have been tempted to confront the two gossiping mothers if they’d said something like that about my husband.

  Then again, maybe she wasn’t angry at them. Maybe she was at least a little upset with her husband. I had a feeling she wasn’t just annoyed because his inattentiveness had contributed to the melee on the field.

  I patted her arm.

  “Don’t let it get to you,” I said, softly enough that the others wouldn’t hear.

  She glanced up and smiled, briefly.

  “I’m used to it,” she said, in a similarly quiet tone. “Of course, this whole shelter thing is making it worse than ever.” She pronounced shelter more like “shelteh,” causing me to mishear it, just for a second, as “sheltie,” and spend a few anxious moments racking my brain to recall if we had a sheltie at the house, or if there had been some kind of sheltie-related incident in town. Clearly I had dogs and cats on the brain.

  “It’ll blow over,” I said.

  “I doubt it,” she said. “I’ve even thought of taking some kind of speech lessons so I blend in more. Do you think maybe your husband would know someone at the drama department who could teach me how to speak more like the locals?”

  “Probably,” I said. “But why would you want to? A lot of people pay good money to get rid of southern accents—why would you want to learn one? Especially since in a year or two—”

  I was about to say that in a year or two, they’d probably move someplace else when her husband took another job. Probably not a tactful thing to say. What if she was hoping they’d settle down and lead the rest of their lives in Caerphilly? Or what if she was thinking, like many of the locals, that her husband might not last a few more months in his job, let alone another year or two?

  “In a year or two, people will stop noticing your accent so much,” I went on, changing my course. “They won’t pretend to think of you as a native—I’ve lived in Caerphilly for years now, and they have yet to forget that I’m not from around here. To some locals, you’re an outsider for life if all four of your grandparents weren’t born in Caerphilly County. Don’t sweat it.”

  “I just wish—” she began.

  But whatever she was intending to say was drowned out by an abrupt howl from Josh. I began digging through the diaper bag.

  “Hell of a set of lungs on that kid,” one of the mothers said. She sounded cross and superior, as if to imply that as infants, her darlings had always asked softly and politely for their meals.

  “Just stop your ears for a second,” I said. “I’ll take care of him.” Jamie joined in.

  “Can you handle both at once?” Francine asked.

  “Not easily,” I said. “Would you mind doing one?”

  “I’d love to!”

  I handed her Josh and a bottle, and picked up Jamie to do the honors with him.

  “You’re not breastfeeding!” one of the mothers exclaimed. “Don’t you realize how important breast milk is for babies’ health! You should—”

  “I completely understand the importance of breast milk,” I said. “That’s why I pump as much of it as I can, divide it in half so each boy gets his fair share, and top it off with enough formula to fill them up, since by now they’re each drinking slightly more in a day than I can produce.”

  “Well, that’s all right then.” The woman pulled back slightly. Had I snapped at her? My tone had sounded perfectly civil to me, but I was running on even less sleep than usual, so I wasn’t necessarily a good judge of the finer points of human interaction.

  “Sorry if I snapped,” I said. “My dad’s a doctor, you know, so I get rather a lot of free medical advice from him.”

  “I’m sure,” she said.

  “He and my cousin Rose Noire are in complete support of what I’m doing,” I said. Although Dad and Mother were only part-time residents of Caerphilly, he commanded a certain amount of respect in the county. So did Rose Noire, though in somewhat different circles—but if any of these women shared my cousin’s interests in alternative medicine, organic nutrition, and holistic child-rearing, they’d probably feel reassured.

  “Oh, well that’s great, then,” the mother said. She was edging farther away from me.

  Had I made things better or worse? I couldn’t tell. Either way, if I’d made her wary of publicly reproaching bottle-feeding mothers, maybe that wasn’t a bad thing. Not everyone had a choice about how to feed their babies. What if I was one of those mothers who couldn’t produce milk at all, or whose babies couldn’t easily feed? Or an adoptive mother? Couldn’t she imagine how someone in one of those situations would feel? Her words stung me a little, even though my only problem was that my kids outnumbered me and had healthy appetites.

  And why did I feel so compelled to defend myself to these women I hardly knew? When had motherhood become so damned competitive?

  At my side, Francine was shaking her head and chuckling slightly.

  “Honestly,” she whispered, rolling her eyes. “Some people.”

  I felt reassured. I settled Jamie in a comfortable position and checked on the game. The Red Sox were at bat now. Timmy and his teammates were having a competition to see who could pull his batting helmet down the farthest over his eyes.

  “How many innings do these games run?” I asked.

&
nbsp; “Only three,” Francine said. “Feels like nine, though.”

  “That’s because it takes about as long as nine in the majors.” I sighed and tried to find a more comfortable position on the unpadded metal bench. I was probably in for a lot of hours on these bleachers. Both Michael and my father adored baseball, so if either or both of the boys showed the slightest shred of athletic ability, they’d undoubtedly be playing T-Ball in another five years.

  So I’d get a head start planning how I was going to cope. For example, figuring out how to volunteer for a cushy job before getting assigned an impossible one. I didn’t want to be bench coach, for example. It was like playing a game of whack-a-mole with live preschoolers. Not an assignment I should take on.

  But the mother who was sitting beside a grocery bag of snacks and a cooler full of cold treats, guarding them lest the team begin pigging out prematurely—now that was the job to have. Snack Mom.

  Or perhaps even better, the job of the woman who came up and exchanged a few words with the snack mom before scribbling a few things on the paper on her clipboard. Snack Coordinator.

  “I hope she brought something my monster will eat,” one mother muttered behind us.

  “I think it’s more important that the snack be healthy,” another mother announced.

  As I listened to the ensuing debate over the relative merits of organic trail mix and Cheetos, I decided that any job connected to the snacks was too controversial.

  Base coach. You stood out in the field, you made sure the runner ran when the ball was hit, and in the right direction, and you tried to keep the baseman awake and pointed toward the game. And you stood far away from the bleachers and their gossiping occupants. My kind of job.

  A job Terence Mann seemed to have given up on. He and the mayor had retreated to a more private place near the edge of the woods that surrounded the athletic field and were still having a visibly heated conversation. Mann seemed to be getting the worst of it—most people did when they argued with the mayor. But the mayor didn’t look happy either.