Buddy

by Brian McGrory

  “Great,” Pam said, sounding relieved. “These things are all the rage at school right now. Everyone’s got them. She wants the tie-dyed bands, probably animal shapes. They should sell them at the Paper Store right in the plaza next to the supermarket.”

  I looked at my car clock—7:40 P.M.—and immediately sensed trouble. I was about twenty minutes away from where I wanted to be, and my guess is that the Paper Store, sort of an all-purpose clearinghouse of stuff that no one actually needs but once you’re around it, you inexplicably want, would shut down at 8 P.M. That did not feel right.

  As I pulled into the parking lot, relief flowed through me at the sight of the brightly lit store. A couple of women were inside, one behind the cash register, another prettying up the displays and shelves. So far, so good.

  But when I merrily pulled on the doors, they didn’t budge. I looked into the store, and neither woman—one middle-aged, the other a teenager—even glanced in my direction. I tried the doors again in that pointless way that people do, thinking maybe they were just caught on something the first time. They weren’t. I checked my phone and saw that it was 8:03.

  Dread started pounding every cell of my very being. I pictured the scene. Brian: Sorry, Caroline, I got there too late and the store was closed. Caroline: utter silence, her head down as she skulks away, disappointed that this cretin named Brian had failed her yet again. The next day, Caroline would be the only member of her first-grade class not to be proudly sporting Silly Bandz, and a fight in the cafeteria would ensue. I knocked, probably a little too firmly, desperation getting the better of me. But neither the teenager nor the older woman would look up from what she was doing. I wanted to pound on the damned door at that point, but that wasn’t going to get me anywhere. No worker is going to approach and say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that you were crazy and aggressive. Let me unlock this door now and allow you inside.” I moved a few feet away from the door, called 411, got the number for the store, and rang through.

  I could hear their phone ringing in stereo—live and through my headset. I saw the younger woman pick up a portable phone as she was moving potpourri around a display table.

  “The Paper Store,” she said.

  “Hi, I’m wondering if you carry Silly Bandz,” I said.

  I saw her glance toward another table and say, “Yeah, we’ve got a ton of them. Every kid has to have them.”

  “Great,” I said. “What time do you close?”

  “We already are. We’re open tomorrow at nine.”

  Nervously, I went in for the kill: “Listen, I’m standing right outside. I’ve got a desperate six-year-old at home who all she wants is a pack of Silly Bandz tonight. Is there any possible way you would be willing to sell me a package? I guarantee you that I’ll get in and out in less than a minute.”

  She hesitated. Hesitation is good. My entire career as a newspaper reporter, columnist, and editor taught me to work with hesitation, and I was no novice at turning the hesitant into the adamant. Through the window, I could see her turn to the older woman behind the counter, point in my direction, and say something. Suddenly they were both peering at me, so I gave an absurd little half wave, trying to look as genial and unobtrusive as possible, the kind of guy you’d let in your store after hours because you’re fairly certain he’s not going to bind and gag you and then ransack the place of all cookbooks, stationery, and figurines.

  Her voice was in my phone again. “We don’t have any change. The cash register is all locked up.”

  “I have change,” I said, maybe too abruptly. As I said this, I was doing a mental inventory of my pocket and couldn’t picture anything other than twenties, but that was a small price to pay for the ultimate prize.

  Silence. She looked again at the older woman. “I’ll be quick,” I said pleadingly, a little bit pathetically.

  I could see the two of them talking, the older woman looking above her reading glasses at the other, the younger woman saying something back, the older woman shrugging, the younger one nodding her head. There were some restaurants in Boston that would fire up a wood-burning oven after closing hours to feed me if I showed up late, and here I was at the total mercy of two shopkeepers who pretty much controlled the direction of the rest of my life.

  Finally I watched the younger woman take a step in my direction. I ended the call and put the phone away as I watched her pull keys from a pocket in her long sweater. When she opened the door, I heard a chorus rain down from the heavens singing “Hallelujah.” I stepped inside, thanked her profusely, and she said, “They’re right back here.” Her tone was one of sympathy more than empathy. Triumph.

  It’s kind of amazing how few Silly Bandz you get for $20, but no matter. When I got back into the car, I realized I was sweating, even though it was a cool autumn night. When I got to the house, it occurred to me that Caroline could have already lost interest in the way that kids often do.

  But when I put them on the kitchen table, she furiously turned over the bag and shrieked at what she saw. “Abby, animal shapes!” she yelled.

  Pam smiled that easy smile of hers, her blond hair pulled back into a lazy ponytail. “You’re a big hit,” she told me, adding “I hope it wasn’t any trouble.”

  No, no trouble at all. Why would any of this be any trouble?

  9

  For the first few weeks of her fussed-over life, the chicken was known to me only through excitedly told stories about her unfailing cuteness and the photographs the kids were constantly shooting of her. The chick lived at the kids’ father’s house. Pam and her kids were still living in their rental house. I was still living in Boston. Everything was about to change.

  There’s no denying it, the chick did look cute in the way that chicks always look cute, which isn’t much different than how bunnies or puppies or kittens have universal appeal. The pictures showed her as a tiny yellow fluff-ball, her little feathers constantly tousled on top of her miniature head, her beak almost taking on the appearance of little lips.

  “She is soooooo cuuuuute,” Abigail would constantly say, with Caroline chiming in her agreement.

  Then, one otherwise uneventful evening, my very first hackle rose—not high, mind you. Rather, it stood out a little bit, just barely sensitive to the fact that something might have just started to go ever so slightly wrong. It was a school night, and Abigail was on the phone with her father in their regular prebedtime call when I heard her ask, “How’s Buddy?”

  “Who’s Buddy?” I asked unassumingly when she got off the phone.

  “My chick,” she said, plain as day.

  The chick had a name.

  “That’s nice,” I replied, kind of absently. The truth is, I had been somewhat absent, at least emotionally, of late. Most of my energy was still directed at the Globe, at the budget cuts that were hurtling down the pike, at the people I might be forced to lay off, at the fact that I could lose my job in all this as well, which was making me think of what else I could and maybe even should do. There were more than a few moments when I allowed myself to think how nice it would be to work in an industry that was growing rather than dying. The only problem with that was the only problem in my entire professional life: it was the only thing I’d ever wanted to do. When I was in the fifth grade at the Abigail Adams School in Weymouth, Massachusetts, we launched a student government. Some kids ran for president, other kids ran for the Senate. I opened up my own newspaper and criticized everyone seeking office. It was pure heaven. All through high school and college, all I wanted to do was get a job writing for a newspaper. When I got out of school, my most daring dream was to land a job at the Boston Globe, my hometown paper. When I got there at age twenty-six, it was better than I had ever imagined. I traveled the country and the world. I met senators, presidents, and prime ministers. I chased a congressman from office. We got prominent politicians indicted. I gained an appreciation for readers as smart, engaged, and filled with common sense. I had been doing this for more than twenty years, and all
I wanted was more. And now someone was trying to shut it down, to take it all away.

  Whatever little remaining attention I had was directed toward the inevitable move from Boston to suburbia and the house that Pam and I needed to spur it. Pam’s rental was too small, and it was old, meaning that things were breaking down and I didn’t have the slightest idea how to fix any of them. Beyond that, we were in the throes of the Great Recession. People’s finances were generally a wreck, mine being no exception. Fear trumped hope. The housing market was in shambles. Standing in the kitchen that night, I was about to ask Abigail what the plan was for Buddy the Chick after she outgrew her little cage, but something stopped me and I’m not entirely sure what that was. Maybe deep down, I already knew Buddy’s fate but was protecting myself from knowledge I couldn’t handle. Or maybe I just didn’t want to concede in any way at all that this seven-year-old blue-eyed blonde standing all of about four feet high had more say over my life than I was about to have. At that point, it was impossible to know what an ornery presence Buddy would grow up to be, at least toward me. But I feared what a bizarre addition she would be to the already unfamiliar environs of a suburban house and lawn.

  What I said was “Well, I’m sure Buddy loves you very, very much.”

  Abigail smiled and replied, “She really does. She’s the best chick ever.”

  Nice work, Bri-Guy. I was really helping the cause.

  It was Abigail’s eighth birthday party. I had just walked into their house carefully balancing a pair of oversized boxes holding an overpriced cake and many duplicate cupcakes and vaguely noticed something that hadn’t been there before. I was too wrapped up in the magnitude and majesty of what a child’s birthday party was in towns like this one: God help us all. This must have been what it was like in Rome in the days before the empire fell. Maybe it was what the United States was in the hours before the market crash of 1929. When I was growing up (a phrase I never thought I’d use), birthday parties basically involved a few cousins, a couple of neighbors, a Duncan Hines cake, and a rousing game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey. We never wanted more. We never needed more. We never knew there was more.

  In this town, among this class of kids, there’s always something more. My introduction to this culture came when Pam asked me to stop by a bakery in Newton, a town nearer to Boston, on my way out from work and pick up the birthday dessert. I’m thinking old-fashioned bakery with a guy named Ernie in a flour-covered apron, display cases filled with sugar cookies, hermits, and homemade breads, all of it tended to by matronly older women who looked as though they’ve sampled more than their share of the fare.

  Not exactly. I walked into the place, and the first thing I noticed was that there was no display case. There were no cakes, no cookies, no nothing. It ended up you don’t just whistle through the door, casually pick out a cake from the dozen or so that are waiting, and ask them to write “Happy Birthday Trevor” in blue frosting. Ended up, that would be like driving up to Augusta National because you feel like playing a round of golf. What I did notice was a conference room off what they call the “showroom.” I quickly learned that if you want a cake from this particular bakery, you sit in that consultation room with the confectionary advisers at least a week ahead of time, plotting out exactly how you want everything to look and taste for little Jessica’s birthday or Nathan’s bar mitzvah. At the very least, you’ve probably sent an email with a PDF of a rough sketch of the masterpiece that’s on your mind.

  I gave Pam’s name, and a nice man appeared from the back with two large boxes.

  “I think we just had one cake,” I said.

  The woman laughed as if I had just cracked a very funny joke. “You have a cake and then some matching cupcakes,” she said. Of course.

  The cake was, by every possible measure, stunning, which perhaps is what the man and woman were waiting for me to say as they held the box open for me to inspect and admire it. The frosting portrayed young girls in sleeping bags watching a flat-screen TV, matching the theme of the party, which was a movie and a sleepover.

  “Be kind of funny if you made the TV a big old clunky Magnavox and none of the kids knew what it was,” I said.

  No one laughed with me. They were too busy preparing the whopping $150 bill. For a birthday cake. For eight-year-olds.

  When I would chide Pam about the lengths she traveled for her kids’ parties, she would tick off the various portable petting zoos, limousine rides, expensive restaurants, magic acts, and traveling bands that were the focal points of other kids’ soirees. The fact that she was also having manicurists and pedicurists straight from a Boston day spa, complete with all their various instruments and a rainbow of polishes, still meant she was doing it on the cheap, she said. I was just smart enough not to push the point.

  I arrived at the house a couple of hours ahead of the starting time, and everything was all decked out with balloons and bowls of M&Ms and a hallway lined with the requisite swag bags that each attendee would take home. That’s the other thing about modern birthday parties in gilded suburbs: gifts aren’t just for the birthday boy or girl, they are for everyone, just as trophies aren’t just for winners but for the kids who come in last. As I came through the door, I nervously balanced the two cake boxes in my arms. There was so much visual stimulation, so many jangled nerves over the possibility of dropping the precious cakes, that I missed Buddy’s cage.

  In fact, it didn’t register until young Caroline grabbed my hand in the kitchen and said in her adorably squeaky voice, “Come meet Buddy.” The next sound was my heart clanking on the floor. I swear, if anyone else was in the room, they’d have been scurrying around on their knees looking for whatever it was that just fell. Come meet Buddy. Everything that had been concealed for weeks was coming out into the open—every vague fear, every ounce of trepidation, every outspoken outcome that had been lurking in the furthest reaches of my mind.

  As Caroline guided me toward the living room, Pam appeared with a smile and said, “Wait until you see how cute she is.”

  Oh, I’d like to wait. I’d like to wait until some nice country farmer in a pair of faded overalls sends us a picture of Buddy fitting in beautifully with an extended flock of happy chickens, and gosh be all, she certainly is the championship egg layer of his whole impeccably well-kept henhouse. But no, I didn’t have to wait; I was about to meet Buddy exactly then.

  As we approached, Buddy was sitting on a bed of shredded papers in what had probably been a small bunny or hamster cage, sitting still and softly chirping at nothing at all. She was a little ball of yellow fluff with a tiny bill and miniature stick legs. If I hadn’t known any better, if I couldn’t have heard the faint chirps, I would have assumed she was just a little stuffed bird, some nice girl’s favorite bedtime toy. It’d be a lie of omission if I didn’t confess that she really was adorable.

  “Hold her,” Caroline said as she expertly flipped the cage open, gently pulled Buddy out, and deposited her in my hands before I could object. Suddenly I felt the soft tickle of her scratchy little feet gently moving across my palms—a mild sensation until the adorable little creature opened her tiny bill and bit my thumb.

  “Jesus!” I yelled in surprise.

  Caroline laughed. At that exact moment, Abigail skipped into the room and exclaimed, “Buddy, my favorite little girl!”

  She scooped her out of my hands. The two kids placed the creature back into the cage, Abigail giving her a kiss on the top of her yellow head in the process. As we headed back to the kitchen to admire $150 worth of cake, I asked the kids, “Um, how long is Buddy here for?”

  After a frighteningly lengthy pause, Abigail said, “Mom said maybe for a while.” After she said it, she flashed what I took to be a sinister and hopeful little smile.

  It’s tough to define “a while,” but apparently, “a while” Chez Bendock means at least two weeks. A fortnight later, young Buddy was still every bit at home in Pam’s house. Her circumstances had changed. Gone was the tiny cage with th
e shredded paper on the console table, replaced by what had been a dog crate situated smack in the middle of the living room floor that allowed her all sorts of room to roam. I wouldn’t exactly have billed her as a freerange chicken at that point, but she was certainly aspiring to it.

  Pam filled the crate with soft straw. She put in a log upon which Buddy perched. She placed a fuzzy stuffed chick up against the log, and Buddy spent inordinate amounts of time pressed up against the toy. Maybe she thought it was real. Maybe Buddy wasn’t that bright. Maybe it doesn’t matter. There were little food bowls and a water bottle and constant activity. Buddy flitted around. She chirped. She slept soundly. She seemed to love every moment of her young life.

  She especially loved the attention lavished on her by the two kids, who would constantly pull her out of the crate, cradle her in their arms, and place her in between them on a towel on the couch as they watched iCarly and Wizards of Waverly Place on TV. They cooed at her, fed her little bits of oatmeal, and gently stroked her soft, fuzzy feathers. Buddy cooed her constant approval in return.

  Her comfort began coming at my expense, most noticeably on a May weekend when Pam’s kids were off to their father’s house. I had visions of a quick getaway trip to Maine, dinner at our favorite Portland restaurant, running the dogs along a beautiful stretch of Goose Rocks Beach. At the very least, Pam would come into Boston, as she almost always did, and we’d walk the dogs in the city for hours at a time and stop for something to eat in any number of great places in the South End.

  “I can’t,” she said on the phone Thursday afternoon.

  “Huh?” Literally, I was shocked.

  “Buddy,” she said.

  Buddy.

  “Is there any such thing as a chicken sitter?” I asked. I’d later come to learn that in fact there is, and they are expensive.

  But for now Pam said, “I wouldn’t feel right leaving her. She’s just getting used to the new crate and all that. Why don’t you come out here? We’ll grab a pizza and watch the baseball game.”