“I doubt he’d notice, but Patrick would. And speaking of Patrick, you should really change out of that jacket before he gets home.”
Birdie sighs. “I know.”
I’m about to start on the green eggs when there’s an engine rumble from outside. Patrick is back.
Birdie looks at me surprised and then runs upstairs.
I get some water from the fridge and start to head up too, when Patrick comes in.
“I need to get the backyard in order,” he says right away. “I think it’s best if you guys start helping on the weekends.” He pauses, but I don’t know what he’s looking for me to say, and he continues, “I have to get some tools from the garage. Meet me in the backyard in fifteen minutes.”
Upstairs, I tell Birdie.
“But what about our green eggs? And how am I supposed to sew if Patrick’s making us work in the yard?”
“We’ll figure it out. Maybe we can make them at Uncle Carl’s.”
“Oh no! I forgot to take Uncle Carl’s measurements for the bow tie.”
“You can get them tomorrow.” Though I have no idea how Patrick will react to us being gone in the morning. What if he finds us before we get to town?
When we go outside, we find Patrick chain-sawing a pile of large branches he pruned earlier in the week. We wait for him to see us because the noise is so loud. After a minute, the chain saw cuts out and there’s Patrick standing there with a bandanna over his face, staring at us.
Then he comes over with the chain saw, hands me two sets of gloves from his pocket, and tells us to put all the other branches into a big pile. The gloves are huge, which he seems to realize as soon as he gives them to me. Then he puts his bandanna back up and goes to the other side of the yard and continues cutting.
We work for almost an hour moving the branches and raking leaves. Patrick finally stops the chain saw for good and the silence that follows is wide and hollow.
I think Patrick notices it too, because he starts whistling, but stops after a little while.
He has us gather rocks and other stones and a bunch of old bricks. We stack them into a giant pile on the side of the house. He carries all of the large ones and we get into a rhythm where none of us is ever in the same part of the yard at the same time.
Then suddenly, Patrick breaks the silence. “All of these bricks are from an old outdoor oven my dad built when I was ten. But Dad didn’t always know what he was doing with the impulsive projects he’d start, and the oven got unstable and fell apart. But not before we got to make a pizza once.”
My mind races trying to decide what to say. I steal a glance, trying to see if maybe there is actually a smile on Patrick’s face, but his face is the same as it ever is: old, hard to read, and topped with a hat pulled low.
I can’t stand the quiet, so I say the only thing I can think of. “What kind of pizza?”
Patrick stops and then says, “Pepperoni and mushrooms. My mom’s favorite.”
Mama’s favorite too. One of the few times she’d eat meat was on a pepperoni and mushroom pizza.
I can feel this thought swimming around in my chest, ready to come out of my mouth. But I can’t. I can’t talk to Patrick about Mama.
So I keep my mouth closed.
After we are done with the rock and brick piles, Patrick has us sort through a bunch of wood to find good pieces to use as kindling for fires. But we only work for another fifteen minutes because suddenly Patrick comes over to us and tells us that we’re done.
“I’m going out,” he says. “I’ll be back in less than an hour.”
Then he turns around and goes inside the house.
“What is going on with him?” asks Birdie after a couple minutes. “Are we supposed to continue with the wood?”
“I don’t know.”
We hear Patrick’s truck start and then disappear.
We’re washing up inside when the phone rings. I let it go to voicemail because I’m still nervous about answering Patrick’s phone.
But then I hear Janet’s voice blaring on the message: “Good afternoon! This message is for Jack Royland. I’d like to speak to her if phone calls are allowed at the asylum. If she could be so kind as to use the phone and call her dear best friend, I’d be in your eternal debt. Ciao!”
I don’t get to the phone before she hangs up, but I call her right back and after I say hello she immediately says, “Please don’t erase that message. Please have Patrick listen to it and tell me what his face looks like when he does.”
“He’s not here right now, but he’ll be back in a bit.”
“Okay, whatever, whatever. I’m like two minutes from your house. I’m going to stop by, okay?”
“Stop by?”
“Yes. I have something for Birdie—be there soon!” And then she hangs up.
I go outside and here she is, jogging up to Patrick’s fence.
“Please tell me Birdie is here and not in some dungeon somewhere serving out his sentence.”
“He’s washing up,” I say. “Patrick had us doing yard work.”
“Hard labor punishment, huh? You got roped into it too, then?”
“I don’t think we were doing it as a punishment. Patrick was helping.”
“Well, why would he be doing that now? I’ve honestly never seen him do anything to his yard other than maybe cut the hedge in the spring.”
“I don’t know,” I say.
We head upstairs and I go to tell her about moving the bricks when she’s like, “Wow. Look at these bare walls. Talk about stark.”
When we get to Birdie’s room, his books and binders are on the floor, and he’s busy putting them back on the shelves one by one in order of color.
“Birdie, my man,” Janet says, looking around the room. “I heard about your debacle.”
Birdie shrugs, looking down at his Book of Fabulous.
Janet looks over at me and I shrug too. She soldiers on. “Anyway, I thought I’d come by with a gift—actually, two gifts—to maybe lighten the sting a bit.” She pauses. “Although in my opinion, you shouldn’t give two thoughts to a person like Teddy Garner. However, I understand you don’t have a hardened exterior like mine yet. But give it time. Anyway, your gifts!”
She hands Birdie a brown paper lunch bag and he opens it up.
“Also, they might jazz up this new prison uniform that Patrick has you wearing,” says Janet.
He pulls out a headband and a pair of sunglasses. The headband is simple. It’s made of bright red wire and it’s in the shape of cat ears. The sunglasses are white, with thick round frames. The lenses are a reflective sky blue.
“I got those from the thrift store ages ago. I kept meaning to give them to you, but never had the chance. I guess I was holding on to them until the right time.”
He just holds them in his hands.
“Well, come on, now,” she says. “Put them on. Patrick isn’t here.”
Birdie does and she brings him over to the mirror attached to his dresser.
“Perfecto!” she says. “Dang, am I good or what? Why am I doing hair? I should be a stylist to the stars.”
Birdie laughs.
Janet turns back toward me. “Listen, I also came by to tell you that I’m heading out of town with my mom. We’re going to go visit her sister in Utah even though she’s always called my aunt a self-absorbed cow. But I guess I have a new cousin or something and my mom is insistent on us going now.”
I nod. But I feel a little bead of abandonment roll around inside me.
This must have been what she felt like when she caught us leaving. But I guess probably worse.
Janet says she better go before the warden returns and then she kind of pushes the back of Birdie’s head, messing up his hair. Birdie just keeps smiling into the mirror.
He looks like Audrey Hepburn.<
br />
All at once, I feel this tidal wave of joy wash over the room.
* * *
• • •
The first tidal wave of joy I ever felt came after Birdie got his favorite purple jacket when he was seven.
Mama found the puffy jacket with its tiny hearts and stars during one of her thrift-store visits. The thing Birdie doesn’t know is that Mama had bought it for me. But when she came home, Birdie found it on top of one of the bags and picked it up. He hugged it to his face even though we hadn’t washed it yet.
Mama and me stood in the kitchen and I said, “I thought you said the purple jacket was mine.”
“I know, but look at him, Jackie.”
Mama could always tell when I was glowering, even if she wasn’t looking right at me. She put her arm around me and said, “I’ll get you another.”
She squeezed me tighter and said, “Imagine all those dark feelings inside of you being swallowed up by Birdie’s joy, his love for the jacket. Joy can do that, you know. Even someone else’s. It can swallow up the bad feelings because you know that joy spreads like a tidal wave.”
I watched Birdie as he put it on, watched him straighten it and pull the shooting-star zipper up and down. It was way too big on him, but he didn’t care. Purple was and still is his favorite color, plus anything “sparkly and amazing” like shooting stars.
“Whoosh,” whispered Mama as she moved her hand in front of me like a wave. As I watched Birdie in the jacket, and imagined the giant tidal wave, I could feel the dark, selfish feeling disappear. Down, down, down it shrank until it was at the bottom of the ocean.
* * *
• • •
Patrick comes back exactly an hour after he left and he has a big jug of liquid garden fertilizer, two bags of compost, and a giant pizza with him. I watch from my window as he puts the fertilizer and the compost near the garage and then comes inside.
I want to write about the pizza in my notebook, but Birdie comes to my door. The headband and sunglasses are gone.
“Patrick brought home a pizza,” he says.
“You saw it?”
“I smelled it.”
“What kind of pizza, I wonder.”
“I’m guessing pepperoni and mushroom,” he says. “But it smells so good.”
Downstairs Duke barks. “Even the dog is excited,” I say.
“Should we go down or wait?”
I breathe in the smell. “Go downstairs.”
When we get to the kitchen, Patrick is nowhere to be seen. I’m just snagging a look at the pizza when he comes in from outside. I instantly let go of the lid and hop back.
“I hope you guys eat pepperoni,” he says.
We look at each other for a second, then he goes upstairs.
I grab a slice and so does Birdie. I stick my nose close to the cheesy heat, breathing deeply. It’s been more than six months since I’ve had pizza that smells this good. Uncle Carl would sometimes buy the frozen ones, but they just don’t compare.
Birdie does the same, closing his eyes as he breathes in. “I probably would have eaten it even if there were mushrooms.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“Maybe even anchovies and monkey brains.”
“Gross.”
“Pizza is the best thing in the world.”
As I take my first bite, the salty savory amazingness that is cheese and pepperoni and sauce hits my tongue and I think that maybe pizza can solve every problem on the planet. Like if we just had enough pizza it would be all right.
After finishing the first slice, I pause and take a long drink of Sprite, which is another new thing Patrick brought home. I take a second slice from the box.
Patrick comes down and doesn’t say anything, but he seems to move about the room with lightness, which is also new.
“Don’t eat those frozen pizzas from Grocery Plus,” Patrick finally says. “If you’re going to eat pizza, you have to get it from Vincent’s over the hill. It’s the only pizza worthy of being called pizza in fifty miles.”
His voice is kind of serious, but he’s tipped his hat back a little and I can see his bushy eyebrows.
I think that this might be the perfect time to ask Patrick about going to the library to meet Krysten tomorrow for our project and then visiting Uncle Carl, but I just can’t get my mouth to form the words. I don’t want to change the air in the room. So I keep silently chewing, along with everyone else.
True, it isn’t green eggs, and it is a long way off from being a tidal wave of joy, but it is better than nothing.
It is definitely better than nothing.
**Observation #783: Inner Colors
Birdie is the color of a cloud, but one with secret rainbows like the cupcake ring & the cat ears headband & the giant round sunglasses.
Patrick used to be black. Or white. Something clear-cut, plain & obvious.
But now he looks gray.
What color am I?
CHAPTER 12
CRACKS IN THE ICE
I wake up thinking of two things: green eggs and Uncle Carl.
The sun is just beginning to rise when I find Birdie downstairs on the couch. He’s wrapped in a blanket with a novel open on his lap. He has the stupid plain black sweatshirt on. Across the room, in a small bed by the wood-burning stove, Duke is sleeping.
“Patrick is outside,” Birdie says without looking up. “He gets up early even on a Saturday.”
“I know. I saw him doing something in the silo shed.”
“So our plan is ruined.” Birdie sighs. “No Uncle Carl’s now.”
I peek out the window. The light is still on in the shed. “Have you eaten breakfast yet? Leftover pizza?”
“No, but I did try to get Duke to come onto the couch,” says Birdie. “It’s like he’s hibernating or something, because I scratched him behind the ears and he still didn’t move.”
“I’m surprised he’s not outside with Patrick.”
“He was, but then I overheard Patrick at the back door telling Duke to go inside and get warm. He walked right over to his bed and went to sleep.” Birdie tugs at the collar of the new sweatshirt.
“Guess what? I came to make good on a promise.” I hold up the little bottle of blue food dye.
“Really? What about Patrick?”
“What about him? He never said we couldn’t scramble some eggs.”
We go into the kitchen and while I get everything together, Birdie goes to the back door and looks out the window. “I think Patrick is making a garden. He’s got a big bag of flower bulbs. And you should see this thing he has.”
I go over to the window, and when I do, some kind of machine Patrick holds blasts on. He pushes it along the yard and it turns the dirt over as he walks.
“I think it’s a tiller,” I say. “I guess he is making a garden. I saw him take some plants out of the shed.”
I scramble the eggs and then add three drops of blue food coloring. I mix it all together until it’s a perfect peppy green. I keep thinking Birdie is going to watch me work, but he just stays at the window spying on Patrick.
When the eggs are finished, Birdie comes over and breathes deeply.
“They’re perfect,” we say at the same time.
We sit down to eat and for a moment, I wonder if we should say or do anything, like a prayer. But I have no idea how to do something like that, so I hold out my fork and say, “Cheers!” and we clink forks and dig in.
They are perfect—salty, buttery green eggs.
All of a sudden, I realize now how worried I was that they weren’t going to turn out right, even though I’ve made scrambled eggs about a thousand times.
Birdie eats while smiling and humming quietly. It’s the first I’ve seen him eat this way in a long time. Even last night with the pizza, it was more like he couldn’t be
lieve our luck and was worried that maybe it would just suddenly disappear. Honey Bunny Buns are the only thing I see him eat at Patrick’s and still stay relaxed. Which suddenly reminds me.
“Oh yeah, I have some bad news,” I say. “So you remember that I promised you the rest of my Honey Bunny Buns when we were at the mall with Patrick getting your new clothes? Well, I kind of ate them all. Except one.”
Birdie taps his fork on the plate.
“But I still have one,” I say, playfully elbowing him. “It’s all yours. I’ll go get it.”
“No, it’s okay, Jack. You can have it.”
“But I promised, Birdie. You should take it.”
“Yeah, but . . .” He stands up from his chair and tugs on his collar again. “You need them too.”
He only has one bite of egg left. He leaves his toast on the table and brings his plate into the living room.
Ten seconds later, I hear, “He did it!”
I stand up, but Birdie runs over to my plate, steals a small bit of egg, and then disappears into the living room again. “Come look!”
I follow and what I find is Duke sitting up in his bed, licking Birdie’s hand. “He loves it! He loves green eggs!”
* * *
• • •
Somehow, Birdie convinces me to donate the rest of my eggs to Duke. He lies under the table at our feet, just like he does with Patrick, and Birdie drops eggs to him, one little piece at a time.
I make extra pieces of toast and Birdie tells me about the bow tie he’s making for Uncle Carl.
I’m in the middle of wondering how I can get Patrick to let us go to Uncle Carl’s when the back door suddenly opens and Patrick comes in. He looks surprised to see us and glances at our plates and then at the large bowl with raw green egg streaking down the sides and the dirty pan.
“What is that?” he asks.
Duke stands up and walks out from underneath the table. Patrick frowns at him as he appears.
“It’s egg? Scrambled egg?” I say, sounding uncertain, and I hope he doesn’t think I’m lying.
Birdie and Me Page 10