The Hummingbird House

by Donna Ball

  Brunch visitors liked to sit and chat and sip mimosas here on Sundays, gazing at the serene mountain view or laughing at the antics of the hummingbirds. Paul and Derrick made it a point to have cocktails here every afternoon, weather permitting, usually a nice sherry with a mild local cheese, or, if they were feeling experimental, an hors d’oeuvre from a recipe they’d found online. Paul brought the tray with sherry and cheese to the patio at six, just as Derrick came around the corner from the vegetable garden, lugging a wicker basket piled high with the largest tomatoes, zucchini, eggplants and yellow squash Paul had ever seen.

  “Good lord,” exclaimed Paul, setting the tray on one of the lacquered bark tables. “What are we, Lilliputians?”

  Derrick set the basket on the patio and began to unpack it. A single tomato overflowed his hand, and there was an eggplant the size of a soccer ball. “Do you think they’re edible? I’ve never seen vegetables this size. And so many of them! It’s like Jack’s beanstalk gone wild over there.”

  Paul balanced a green pepper the size of a small pumpkin on his palm. “Amazing. You could throw a vegetarian dinner party for sixteen on the contents of this basket alone. What do you suppose she did to make them grow this big?”

  The previous owner had planted the vegetable garden in the spring, and they had enjoyed the fresh lettuces, spinach, and carrots when they first moved in. They continued to care for the garden according to the instructions Lindsay had given them, but they were quite sure even Lindsay had not expected a harvest like this.

  “A better question,” Derrick said, removing his floppy straw hat to dab at his damp brow with a folded handkerchief, “is what are we going to do with it all?”

  “Take it to the girls, of course,” Paul replied, “To make up for our beastly behavior of late.”

  Derrick regarded the bounty with a tilt of his head. “You do realize, of course, that they have a vegetable garden twice as large as ours?”

  “True,” Paul admitted. He picked up a tomato with both hands. “But their produce isn’t nearly as grand as this.”

  Derrick said, “And this is just the beginning. It seems criminal to waste it all. Isn’t there a way to preserve fresh produce?”

  “Bridget would know.”They looked at each other for a moment, but said nothing. Paul returned the tomato to the basket. Derrick poured the sherry. They took their chairs and watched the hummingbirds while the breezy late afternoon shadows shifted and danced across the stones.

  Paul said, “I miss Fashion Week.”

  Derrick might have pointed out that since Fashion Week was in February and it was now only July, he had not yet had a chance to miss it. Instead, he sipped his sherry. “I miss Sotheby’s.”

  Paul sighed. “I don’t think this is turning out entirely the way we planned.”

  “I don’t recall having a plan.”

  “That may be the problem.” Paul watched the hummingbirds and sipped his sherry for a moment, his legs crossed, his free foot swinging restlessly. “But if we did have a plan, I suspect it would be for something a bit more significant than sitting in the sun on a Saturday evening watching the birds.”

  “Ah,” agreed Derrick, inclining his head sagely, “a life of significance. The ultimate quest of every human being from Plato to Bon Jovi.”

  “Retirement,” clarified Paul sourly, “an invention of the young to reduce the lives of their betters to rusty dreams and small ambitions. The devil of it is, they make it sound so damned alluring, anyone is likely to fall for it.”

  Derrick said quietly, “We were significant, you know. We had our moment. We were giants in our fields.”

  “Now we’re just two old farts puttering around in the garden.”

  “Well, that’s the way of things, isn’t it?”

  Paul glared at the sherry in his glass. “Why isn’t this bourbon? I need a drink.”

  Derrick said unhappily, “You know what the worst of it is?”

  Paul slammed back the sherry as though it was, indeed, bourbon, and poured himself another. “There’s worse?”

  Derrick looked at him. “The girls were right. We could do this if we wanted to.”

  Paul sipped his sherry, studiously avoiding his partner’s gaze. “What if we fail?”

  “What if we don’t?”

  “There’s always mediocrity.”

  “Even worse than failure,” Derrick admitted. “But why are those the only choices?”

  Paul slid a glance his way. “Our dream house was swallowed up by our swimming pool,” he reminded him. “We lost most of our life savings on carrara marble and imported statues we never saw. We don’t exactly have the best track record with ventures of this sort. I think it’s safer to take things slowly, think it through.”

  “You may be right.” Derrick helped himself to a bit of the soft cheese, spreading it carefully on a toasted cracker. “There’s no point in rushing. We’re retired, after all.”

  Paul gazed out over the garden solemnly for a long moment before replying. “That,” he agreed heavily, with a sigh, “we are.”

  ~*~

  TWO

  The only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.

  Oscar Wilde

  His name was Joshua Whitman. He was named for a warrior and a poet, he was twenty-seven years old, and he had a degree—well, most of one, anyway— from Harvard. He had been on a waiting list for the most prestigious preschool in New York before he was even born. He’d been to Europe twice by the age of ten, attended one of the finest private schools in the country, and vacationed in Martha’s Vineyard every summer until he was eighteen. Now he was standing outside a men’s room at a truck stop in Las Vegas, waiting for a burly trucker who had smiled at him inside the diner. He had three dollars and twenty-seven cents in his pocket, and two of those dollars had been swiped from a tabletop on his way out of the diner.

  It was three a.m., which meant nothing in places like this except the counter in the diner wasn’t as crowded as it might have been a few hours earlier or later. Josh had spent a dollar he could ill afford on a cup of coffee and sat midway down the row of stools, scoping the place out. There was a loud, brassy haired blonde working the counter who looked at him like she knew he was trouble, but he gave her his baby-faced smile and she left him alone. A couple of truckers and a droopy-eyed businessman were eating eggs and bacon that smelled so good they made Josh light-headed. At the end of the counter a funny-looking bald man in plaid trousers was reading the newspaper, smiling and nodding to himself as he turned the pages.

  The trucker a few seats down from Josh was slope-shouldered and scruffy-faced, and he kept sliding Josh looks as though he didn’t know quite what to make of him. Josh kept his eyes to himself, but managed to see enough with his peripheral vision to note that when the trucker took out a bottle of aspirin and unscrewed the lid, the capsules inside were not sold over the counter. Josh figured there had to be a couple of hundred dollars worth of amphetamines inside, easy.

  He watched the guy toss back a couple of the little eye-openers, and when the trucker saw him watching, Josh smiled at him. The other man deliberately replaced the cap on the bottle, tucked the bottle back into his jacket pocket, and then he smiled back. A few minutes later, he paid his bill and left. Josh watched through the big glass window as he went around the corner of the brightly lit building toward the showers and restrooms. He waited another thirty seconds, and then slid his fingers into his jeans pocket, touching the photograph there for courage. He got up and followed the man.

  Now he stood with one shoulder leaning against the cool concrete wall where a half wall that hid the dumpsters offered a pool of shadow and a semblance of privacy, listening to the rumble of engines and breathing diesel fumes, his heart like a big pulsing lump in his throat. He watched as the man came out of the men’s room, noticed him, and altered his course toward him. Josh smiled, and his hand tightened on the switchblade in the pocket of his windbreaker.

  I am Joshua Whitman, he thought,
I was named for a warrior and a poet. This is not who I am.

  Nonetheless, he tilted his head in a friendly way toward the stranger and he said, “Hey man, you got an aspirin?”

  The trucker came close, close enough that Josh could smell the old sweat that clung to his clothes and the piney soap he’d used to wash his hands. He had dead snake eyes that flicked Josh up and down without revealing anything. He said, “Yeah, I might.” Close, and closer still, into the shadows. “What you got for me?”

  Josh pulled out the knife. “This,” he said, and that was when someone grabbed him from behind.

  It all happened in a matter of seconds, of thundering heartbeats and flashing adrenaline. Josh didn’t hear what was said. He was too busy calling himself every kind of fool for falling for the setup. There was laughter and somebody grunted something about “stupid punk kid” while the big man lunged at him and grabbed a hunk of Josh’s hair, grinning a grin that showed two rotting front teeth. The other man twisted his arms behind him and the knife went clattering to the concrete floor.

  Josh rolled his eyes back in his head let himself go limp, knees sagging to the floor. He felt the men’s surprise. The first man let go of Josh’s hair and the one who had his arms pinned shifted his weight to support him. It was enough to allow Josh to drive his elbow fiercely backward into his captor’s gut; he heard the whoosh of air that left the other man’s body even as Josh twisted and ducked and tore out of his jacket, swinging a roundhouse kick that smashed into the first man’s kneecap and doubled him over. He ran.

  Josh was small and lean, and he did not have a chance against the two men if they caught him. But he was also fast, and he had no intention of being caught. He slid between two trucks and made himself hold his breath, listening. Voices, angry, barely discernible above the growling hum of truck engines, but coming closer. He ducked under one of the trucks, pressing himself deep into the shadows beneath the wheel well, and watched a set of booted feet pass by, pause, and turn back. He made everything in his body go still. The boots stopped not six inches from his face. He didn’t even blink. The boots moved on.

  He waited, not breathing, until the boots were out of sight. Then he waited some more. He waited until he heard more footsteps, the cab door open, and the roar of the engine exploding to life. He barely rolled out of the way before eighteen wheels pressed him into the pavement.

  Josh scrambled to the shadow of another truck and peeked cautiously around its edge toward the building. He saw the truck driver with another guy—probably the one who had pinned him from behind—and a cop. Maybe it wasn’t a cop, maybe it was a security guard. It didn’t matter. He knew the story they were telling, and the only thing he couldn’t believe was that they had the balls to tell it. And in the end who would be believed, the truck drivers who made this a regular stop on their route and sprang for steak and eggs each time, or the kid in the run-down sneakers who could barely afford a cup of coffee?

  Crouching low, he moved between the rows of vehicles. He tried the handle of a Subaru; it was locked. He checked out the bed of a pickup truck but there was nothing to hide under; he’d be spotted in an instant. When he glanced back toward the building, all three men were coming his way, moving with a determination that suggested they had seen something in the shadows that gave them reason to move in that direction. His throat went dry. He scurried around the corner of a battered tan and white Winnebago, circa 1970, and pressed himself flat against the door. To his very great surprise, the door gave a little with his weight, and when he turned the handle, it opened. He lifted himself inside and closed the door quietly behind himself.

  The interior smelled like old socks and barbecue-flavored corn chips, which oddly enough made his stomach growl again. The shades were drawn over the tiny windows. That was good because no one could see in. It was bad because he barked his shin twice stumbling across the narrow floor space. As his eyes adjusted, he saw a small table and a built-in bench, some overhead cabinets, and a shelf-like bunk near the ceiling. He was about to check the cabinets for food—he really was starving—when the driver’s side door abruptly opened. He dived to the floor, but not before he caught a glimpse of the driver in the brief illumination of the door lights. It was the weird little man in the plaid pants from the diner. With his bald head and big, funny-looking nose, he reminded Josh of a garden gnome.

  He was humming an off-key tune as he climbed in and fastened his seat belt. He cranked up the engine and glanced in the rearview mirror. Josh stilled his breathing and tried to make himself invisible. Slowly the vehicle started to move, and when it made a turn, Josh took the opportunity to scrunch himself into a corner behind the table where, hopefully, even the flash of passing headlights wouldn’t pick him up.

  The vehicle creaked and groaned and shuddered its way through the gears, finally reaching a more or less steadily swaying speed that indicated they were on the highway. Traffic rumbled through the thin metal walls, dishes rattled in the cupboard, and highway lights danced on the floor. After a few moments, Josh peeked cautiously out from under the table, trying to assess his situation.

  He met the eyes of the driver in the rearview mirror.

  “So, young man,” said the gnome cheerily, “where are you headed?”

  ~*~

  After her second hip replacement at age ninety-two, Annabelle’s daughter Marion had done everything but bring in a lawyer to try to get Annabelle out of the brick Tudor on the outskirts of Dallas in which she had lived for the past fifty years and into one of those nice, safe, gray-carpeted and wood-veneered assisted living units over at Magnolia View. Annabelle informed her loving daughter that if she was going to die anyway, she’d just as soon do it in a place where she knew where all the light switches were and could watch Pay-Per-View whenever she damn well pleased. Marion wept and wailed and stomped her foot and pleaded, but in the end Annabelle prevailed as she always did.

  She did concede, however, that all those stairs were getting to be a bit much for her, so she remodeled the downstairs sitting room and adjoining bath to her bedroom suite, complete with cable TV and a newly converted walk-in closet, because being over ninety was no excuse for not dressing for the occasion. She’d closed off the upstairs and hadn’t even missed the other half of her house … until tonight.

  It was almost four o’clock in the morning and after laboriously making her way up two flights of stairs, Annabelle felt she more than deserved the shot of well-aged bourbon from the bottle she had almost forgotten was stowed away at the back of a middle shelf in the closet next to the box she had come to retrieve. Her balance wasn’t what it once had been, and a pair of dusty red stilettos and a painted tin box of costume jewelry clattered to the wood floor, making a noise like three devils fighting in a metal cage, before she reached what she wanted.

  Less than five minutes later, Megan appeared at the doorway, looking rumpled and distressed in her pink polka dot boxer pajamas, her feet bare and her curly dark hair spilling out of its braid. “Gram!” Her voice was a mixture of relief and exasperation. “You scared me to death. I thought the place was haunted! What on earth are you doing up here?”

  Annabelle examined her granddaughter critically. “You really could use a good haircut, sweetheart,” she said, “and a few blonde highlights wouldn’t hurt. The biggest mistake a woman can make is to let herself go the minute she turns forty. That’s why there are so many divorces these days.” She added innocently, “How is that nice young fellow of yours, anyway?”

  “Not so young anymore,” Megan replied, “like me.” She came forward and knelt to scoop up the photographs that had spilled from the box on her grandmother’s lap. “Now, what are you doing up this time of night? And didn’t we talk about the stairs?”

  Annabelle sipped bourbon from the Dixie cup she had found in the bathroom. “I’ve always liked him,” she went on complacently. “There aren’t many husbands who would let their wives just drop everything and fly across the country to keep an old woman company.�
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  “Gram, this is the twenty-first century.” But Megan studiously avoided her grandmother’s eyes as she gathered up the photographs. “A woman doesn’t need her husband’s permission to do what she wants to do.”

  “We didn’t need it in the twentieth century either,” replied Annabelle, “but it’s always polite to ask.”

  Megan gazed for a moment at the handful of photographs she held without seeing them. Then she said, “Nick and I are separated.”

  Her grandmother said nothing, but the compassion Megan could feel in her gaze made it difficult to look at her, even for a moment. She managed one quick glance as she added quietly, “Six weeks ago.” She swallowed hard. “Mother doesn’t know. No one does, really. I’m okay with it.” She swallowed again. “Really.”

  “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  Megan shook her head as she stood to return the photographs to the box. “Not yet.” Her voice was hoarse.