It turned out he knew I was the daughter of the woman who owned the store. Understandably, he was just confused about my name.
I explained that my mother called me Birdie because my name used to be Robin. This required mentioning my dead father, to which he responded, “Oh. So I guess that wasn’t your father in the Honda?”
“What Honda?”
“Or maybe it was a Toyota. I’m not particularly interested in cars.”
“What car?” I was getting agitated. “The silver Honda or maybe Toyota that came to pick up your mother after you left on your bike.”
I couldn’t think of one single person we knew who drove a silver car.
I sat down on the rickety bench we kept in the alley, where Swoozie would come to get some fresh air, which really meant smoke a cigarette.
He sat down next to me. He smelled both sweet and sharp, like something I knew but couldn’t quite place.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Did I say something I shouldn’t have?”
“No.” I took Hum off my shoulder and held him in my lap. “It’s just … she’s supposed to be here. Working late.”
“Well, adults can’t always be counted on to do what they say they’re going to do.” He picked at the hole in the knee of his jeans. “At least not in my experience.”
Already I was having a longer conversation with this boy than I’d had with any boy my age since the days of Aaron Finklestein. I was guessing he was my age, or maybe a little bit older.
“How’d you get that cut on your cheek?” I asked. “It wasn’t …” I looked down at Hum in my lap.
“No, no, of course not.” He reached up to his face. “This is nothing. Just me being clumsy. Your rat”—he reached over and tickled Hum under his chin—“is a gentle soul.”
I couldn’t stop stroking Hum’s head. Only an hour or so had passed between when I noticed him gone and finding him in this alley, but that was enough to make me particularly appreciate the feel of his fur between my fingers.
Emmett held out another orange scrap and Hum took it greedily.
“Tell me that’s not cheese,” I said.
“I could tell you that, but then I’d be lying.”
“Please don’t feed him cheese. I know everyone thinks that’s what rats eat, but cheese is bad for rats.”
“It’s not bad for your rat.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Well, cheese is bad for some rats, just like cheese is bad for some people. But he tolerates it fine. See?” He fed him another piece. This time I noticed a green fleck in the orange, which I recognized as coming from the wedge of Cotswold I’d left in the alley at closing.
“Just because he’s eating it doesn’t mean it’s good for him,” I said.
“Yes it does. Rats are careful about what they eat. I know they get a bad rap for eating everything, you know, like Templeton in Charlotte’s Web?”
Of course I knew; it was my favorite book. And I’d seen the movie more times than I could count.
“But actually,” he continued, “they won’t eat anything that makes them sick. They’ll try a bite, give it time, and if they feel fine they’ll eat more. I gave Hum his first bit of cheese an hour ago.” He handed him another piece. “And he keeps coming back for more.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“Just because I don’t know anything about cars doesn’t mean I don’t know anything about rats.”
We sat in silence for a while, something I wasn’t able to do with my friends who were girls. I had no idea if he knew what he was talking about, but I knew I liked hearing him talk.
It was getting dark. I needed to get home so I could beat Mom back. She’d return to collect her car, and she hadn’t done that yet, so I had at least a little bit of time left. I didn’t feel much like leaving, but I stood up and started to lure Hum back into his cage.
“So, what are you doing hanging around back here, anyway?” It should have been the first thing I asked him.
He looked at me like I’d said “What color is the sky?” or “What is two plus two?”
“The food,” he said. “It’s delicious.”
He walked me to my bike in front of the shop and watched as I put on my reflector vest.
“You can never be too careful.” He smiled at me. “It’s a dangerous world out there.”
“See you around,” I said as I rode away.
“Yeah, see you around, Robin,” he called.
the tin man
“His body was all done living.”
That’s what Mom used to say. It must have been something she read in a book. Or something a psychologist told her to tell a young child who sought some explanation for the sudden disappearance of her father. When I pushed Mom for more information about what part of his body was all done living, she told me it was his heart. It just stopped working.
I don’t know what book or psychologist told her it was a good idea to tell a young child that her father’s heart stopped working, because I used to think that if only I’d given his heart more reason to work, it would never have gone and shut down.
But it did.
He was dead.
And I was too young to miss him. Or at least to remember missing him. I told myself as I grew up that I was lucky. I had my mother to myself. I didn’t have to share her with anyone else. Those poor kids, I’d think. How do they get by, how do they even hear themselves think, with all those other people in the house?
My mother kept a picture of him on her dresser. His red hair mussed from sleep, holding his bundled baby with her dull brown hair on his bare chest. Their bedside lamp didn’t give off enough light to show him clearly, but he looked peaceful. Happy. His heart full of reasons to keep beating.
When I thought of him, which wasn’t often, I didn’t think of that picture. I thought instead of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. A creaky shell of a man with no heart at all.
But then I found his Book of Lists, and he slowly came to life again.
Careers I Never Want to Attempt: coal miner, executioner, proctologist. (I had to look that last one up, and it wasn’t pretty.)
Pet Peeves: people who have pet peeves.
Greatest Loves: my electric blue Schwinn Cruiser, my cream-colored Fender Telecaster, my Lizzie Aberdeen Solo, and our little Birdie.
Two things occurred to me, studying these lists.
One: Life is short. I’d done my fair share of thinking about life span and how Dad, dead at thirty-three, helped keep down the average. But I hadn’t stopped and thought about Hum, had never even wondered about the life span of a rat, which I came to learn averaged two years. So if my rat was lucky enough to be average, he was already halfway to his grave.
Two: Someone who keeps a list of all of these facts about himself is probably keeping it for a reason, so that someone can know him when he’s no longer there. Dad must have been aware that his heart would stop beating, that his body would soon be all done living, or else why keep the list in the first place?
word games
I didn’t see Emmett again for days, though it wasn’t for lack of looking. I took the trash out hourly, causing Swoozie to glare at me like she’d just tasted a cheese of questionable freshness.
“The trash? Again?” She leaned in close. “Girl, you better not be smoking cigarettes on my bench out there or Lord help me, I will put you over my knee.”
“No, Swoozie. It’s nothing like that. I’m just trying to stay busy.”
This wasn’t entirely untrue. Business was slow. I was still boycotting Nick. He continued to make his spinach linguini and tomato spaghetti and saffron fettuccini without my help. Occasionally he’d shoot me a look, something like an exaggerated pout, but I’d turn the other way. It wasn’t the worst thing, I figured, letting him miss me a little.
My frequent visits to the Dumpster produced nothing other than a spectacular waste of perfectly good garbage bags. Emmett wasn’t hanging out in the alley, he wasn�
�t waiting for food, and he certainly wasn’t waiting for me. Yet everything we left out back at closing disappeared by morning, so I guessed he still came by the shop after hours.
Since I’d patched the hole in my backpack and rewired the latch on Hum’s cage, I had no reason to return to the alley at dusk. Even if I could have manufactured a reason, there was the problem of Mom, and sneaking out of the house unnoticed, because for the next several days after my visit to the alley, Mom came home and stayed.
I still had no answer to the mystery of the silver car. When she walked into our kitchen late the night I met Emmett, I took the casual approach. I knew from my own experience, and from the habits of my rat, that nobody likes to be backed into a corner.
“How was work?” I asked.
“You know,” she answered. “Work is work.”
“You were at the shop?”
“Where else would I be?”
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
At this point Mom walked over to where I was sitting with my legs dangling off the counter and she pulled me to her, kissing the top of my head.
“I’m knackered,” she said. She put both hands on my cheeks. “Too tired for word games, Birdie. I’m turning in.”
She left the room and I sat there, my heart racing. My cheeks, right where she’d touched me, burning. She’s lying.
I replayed our conversation in my head and realized, as I took it apart piece by piece, that actually, she hadn’t lied at all. That she was, and maybe always had been, the master of word games.
Work is work. Where else would I be? A game of words.
This too: His body was all done living.
I didn’t follow her up the stairs of our tiny house and pound on her door, demanding an explanation. I was pretty sure that was the job of a mother, not a daughter. I decided instead to file this incident away. That I might need it later. That there might come a time when I would want to show her how she hadn’t always been honest with me. How everyone is capable of lies or mistakes or untruths or even clever games. I wasn’t exactly planning or plotting anything, I was merely filing.
And I was collecting. A small piece of a puzzle.
That night I went up to bed in a silent house, safe in my role of the girl who doesn’t break the rules, who doesn’t upset the natural order and demand explanations from the adults around her. I slept late and then I went to work. I took out the trash, and I did this over and over again until finally, on Monday, when I went out to the Dumpster with my first garbage bag of the day, I found his note.
I might have discarded it like another piece of trash if he hadn’t thought to turn the scrap of paper into something eye-catching.
It was on Swoozie’s bench, facing me just as I came out the back door. The same spot where I’d held Hum and Emmett had fed him Cotswold, where we had talked about silver cars.
It was a paper bird that I didn’t recognize right away as a crane.
His namesake.
I unfolded it carefully, with the uncomfortable feeling of destroying a work of art. I wouldn’t have taken it apart at all if I hadn’t noticed my initials written on its tail.
DRS
The crane slowly turned into a square of paper, revealing this note, in tiny, perfect writing.
Dear Robin —
I hope that vest got you home safely and that Hum has been a good boy. I’m guessing he has, since I haven’t seen you in your burglar costume lately. If you don’t have to work tomorrow, meet me at Garfield Park at noon.
P.S. What’s the cheese with the red marble in it? Weird but tasty.
a day off
It was port wine cheddar, and it wasn’t for everyone, but I adored it. Truth be told, it could have spent another day in the case, but I’d taken it out to the alley wondering if Emmett might like it too.
I called the shop in the morning to tell Mom I wouldn’t be coming in, which felt easier than telling her the news to her face. She might have asked me what my plans for the day involved, and I wasn’t as good a liar as she was.
Nick answered the phone.
“The Cheese Shop.”
“Lizzie Solo, please.”
“Drew?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Nick.”
Of course I knew it was Nick. “Hi.”
“Where are you, kiddo? I’m feeling some squid ink coming on.”
“I’m not going to make it in today.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
A pause. “Are we okay?”
A wave of warmth for Nick washed over me. His crooked smile. His sea-green eyes. His messy blond hair. I’d tried being angry with him, tried hating him for loving the girl in the peasant skirt, but I could feel now that it wasn’t sticking.
I had to give myself credit. Any girl could admire a boy like Nick—crooked, sea-green, messy Nick—but in the end what I liked best about him was his kindness. He was, always, so very kind to me.
“Of course we’re okay,” I said.
“Good. Because work is boring without you. And my ravioli is chewy.”
“I’ll be back tomorrow. Tell Mom I need a day off, will you?”
“Will do.”
“Thanks.”
“And Drew?”
“Yeah?”
“Enjoy your day off. Paint your toenails. Or eat a banana split. Do something for yourself. Something that’s not about your mom, or the shop. Something just for you.”
We hung up and I stared at the phone for a good minute or two. I wanted to pick it up again. To call someone and talk. To read aloud the note from the paper crane and then read it again. To ask what I should wear. Hair up or down? I didn’t have that person in my life. I might have called Georgia, but we didn’t have an international calling plan,and even if she’d still been in town, I might not have called her anyway.
I needed someone. At the very least, I needed someone to tell me where to find Garfield Park.
I’d lived here all my life. Maybe when I was a baby I had graced Garfield Park with my drooly presence, but now I couldn’t figure out for the life of me where to find the place. The only parks I knew of were the ones where I used to play soccer, and I’d given up the sport years ago.
We kept a map of the state of California in the car, but Mom had the car. Anyway, our town barely made the map—we weren’t Los Angeles, we weren’t San Francisco, we were merely a dot in between.
I put Hum in my bag, hopped on my bike, and rode over to see the one person I knew who knew everything. Well, maybe not everything. I wouldn’t have asked her about Geraldine Moore, for example, but when it came to finding out anything about this town, that person was Mrs. Mutchnick.
If I thought things were slow at our place, then they were dead, gone, packed in ice at Mrs. Mutchnick’s fabric store. I entered through the back door, hoping my visit would go unnoticed by anyone staring out the window from Mom’s shop across the street.
P&L Fabrics felt like a different universe from the Cheese Shop. Everything was heavy, dark, covered in dust. The old wood floors creaked. The sink in the bathroom dripped. Clearly, a store selling fabric wasn’t held to the same standards as one selling food.
Mrs. Mutchnick stood when she saw me and rubbed her hands together like an excited child.
“Ooooh. Let me see him. Give him here.”
I unzipped my bag and took out Hum’s cage. He made his happy clicking sound. I had a feeling Hum knew Mrs. Mutchnick, knew she was the one responsible for delivering him to his new life with me, for rescuing him from his fate as a boa constrictor’s lunch.
He leapt into her outstretched hands.
It was summer, the days of endless light, but her store felt like a place you’d settle in for a long winter’s nap. I’d never seen a customer at P&L Fabrics, but I wasn’t sure Mrs. Mutchnick cared too much about actual sales. She’d bought the building and opened the store with her husband, the L of P&L, over forty years earlier. He’d been dead for the last ten
of those years, and the shop gave her someplace to go.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?” she asked.
“Hum missed you. He’s always begging me to bring him by for a visit.”
“He’s a prince, our Humboldt Fog.” She scratched him between the ears.
She asked me about the cheese business. She’d heard most of the Euclid Avenue merchants were having a rough time of it, though the diner was going like gangbusters. When times are tough, people turn to comfort: a cup of tomato soup, blueberry pancakes, a chocolate malted.
“Things seem okay to me,” I said. “Maybe a little slow.”
I made a note to myself: We should start making the ultimate comfort food: macaroni and cheese.
“Do you know Garfield Park?” I asked.
“Of course I do. I used to take picnics there with Mr. Mutchnick. A lifetime ago. It’s lovely.”
“Could you tell—”
“It’s named after James Garfield, of course. Our twentieth president. He was shot by a disgruntled lawyer, as if there’s any other type of lawyer. Do you know about Garfield, or did you assume the park was named for that asinine orange cat? Sometimes I wonder about your generation. If you’re getting any education at all.”
It was a challenge, keeping Mrs. Mutchnick on point, and she seemed not to know or care whether anyone was remotely interested in what she was saying. This might have had something to do with why nobody seemed to shop there.
“Mrs. Mutchnick—” I reached over and put my hand on her forearm. “Can you tell me where Garfield Park is? I’m meeting a friend and I’m already late.”
“Yes, dear. But it’s a hike. You have to go to where Capri Drive dead-ends and there’s a trail you can catch through the brush. I’ve been after the fire marshal forever about it. It’s a hazard, all that dry brush. Anyway, the trail will lead you to the park. It’s a good half-mile straight uphill, but well worth it. The views are to die for. Are you picnicking?”
I nodded. I’d gone to collect food for Hum and then decided it wouldn’t hurt to bring along some cheese and bread and what was left of the fruit tart Mom had baked last night.
The Summer I Learned to Fly Page 4