Heart with Joy

by Steve Cushman

  I couldn’t see her and it was as if the fence and shrubs were talking to me.

  “That’s the fifth one he’s killed this year.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “He’s a cat. It’s what he does. I wish he wouldn’t kill them, but we all have to die when it’s our time. Nobody can stop that, not you or me.”

  I leaned toward the shrubs, waiting for her to say something else. After a few minutes, I said, “See you later.”

  When she didn’t say anything, I shook my head and went inside to watch the Food Network before getting started on dinner.

  4

  I was cutting carrots into finger-sized sticks when my father walked in the front door from his second night of running. “What’s on the menu?”

  “Orange-glazed chicken and carrots,” I said.

  “Sounds good, orange poop in the morning,” he said, then laughed and headed for the shower. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard him laugh.

  I flipped the chicken. The first side had seared up nice. I stirred the orange glaze sauce in another pan and dropped the carrots into a pot of boiling water.

  For me the greatest challenge of cooking was when you had three or four different things going at once and you had to work it so they were all ready at the same time. Mom always made it look easy, the way she sort of fluttered around the room, moving a pan this way or that, sipping on her wine, Van Morrison singing about some poor lost soul in a faraway land. And working with my mother, I discovered that I actually liked to cook and enjoyed the challenge of reading a recipe, placing all the ingredients on the counter and turning it into a complete meal. Not that I would confess this to anyone but her. If Dennis, or any of my classmates knew, I was pretty sure they’d give me a hard time about it.

  As the sauce simmered, I walked out onto the back porch. I looked over at Old Lady Peters’ yard as sparrows flew in and out of her shrubs. Why was she so concerned about birds? They were everywhere.

  When I heard the shower stop, I headed back inside and poured the sauce over the chicken, let it sizzle and pop for a few seconds and then set the chicken breasts on our plates and sprinkled some parsley over them.

  “I’m going to have to start paying you for meals like this,” Dad said, as he sat down at the table.

  For some reason, he was trying to be Mr. Funny tonight. “Have a good run?”

  He shook his head. “Got a long way to go. How was school?”

  “Fine. Work?”

  Dad shrugged. He didn’t normally talk about work. Mom had told me not to ask him about it. She said all those sick people took a lot out of him.

  “It was okay except for this one patient of mine, Mr. Parker. He kept peeing in his garbage can.”

  “Why?”

  “When people get old, their mind starts to go. At least he didn’t pee on the floor.”

  “Do you think that’s what’s wrong with the lady next door?”

  “Mrs. Peters?”

  I nodded.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I was just wondering.” I could tell from the look on my father’s face that I shouldn’t have brought her up.

  “Remember we told you to leave her alone.”

  “I know, Dad.” I picked up my father’s empty plate and set it in the sink.

  “Man, that was good.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You have homework?”

  “Not too much.”

  “Don’t stay up too late,” he said, then walked off to his room, limping a little.

  After cleaning up, I decided to go for a walk. Mom and I used to go for walks two or three nights a week. Sometimes we would wait until Dad went to sleep and then just as I was tired and ready to go to bed myself, she would say, “Let’s go see what we can see.”

  On those nights, sometimes as late as midnight, we would circle our block. The majority of the houses would be dark, lit by only a porch light. Mom always wanted to hold my hand. And while it embarrassed me as I got older, I never pulled away.

  I was a mamma’s boy. There, I said it. She made me feel special because of the way she talked to me as if I were an adult like her, as if the things I said were important. She never talked down to me. I was comfortable with her in ways I never was with kids my own age or even my father. When my father and I were together it usually felt like one of us needed to say something and then when we did speak, it sounded forced.

  Plus, I thought my mother was special. I didn’t know anyone else whose mother had written five novels, even if none of them had been published, or who would stand in her living room reading poetry out loud or belonged to a writer’s group that met once a month, on Saturday nights, at the local bookstore.

  I walked passed Dennis’ house. Dennis and I had been friends, and gone to school together, since my family moved here when I was in the third grade. But the year my mother left, at the beginning of 10th grade, Dennis’ parents took him out of our school and sent him to Greensboro Day, a private prep school. Dennis played tennis, was actually really good, and his parents thought that Greensboro Day would give him a better chance of getting a tennis scholarship at a top college.

  Dennis was a nice enough guy even if his major interests in life were girls and playing tennis—in that order. Sometimes I’d see Dennis every day for a week and then not for a solid two weeks. Whenever you were with Dennis, everything was about him, but I didn’t mind. He was the sort of friend I needed since I was shy by nature, preferring to let other people talk and have all the attention.

  I considered going up and knocking on his door but knew he probably wasn’t home. He practiced with his private coach at least two hours a day. I wondered what he would think of me going into Old Lady Peters’ back yard. He was the one who started calling her that in the first place. Whenever he told the story of how she ran over my leg, he would call her Old Lady Peters and the name stuck.

  When I turned the corner, a black dog charged at me. I flinched. At the edge of the yard the dog stopped, let out a squeal. It was Sam, the Sanborn’s shiny black lab. The Sanborns lived two doors down from Dennis. They had one of those invisible fences that shocked the dog if it tried to step out of the yard. Even though Sam had charged me and stopped a hundred times before, it still seemed possible for a moment that this would be the time he would break through and attack me.

  “Sam, knock that off.”

  I looked up and Lucy Sanborn was standing at her front door. She had on grey sweat pants and a blue T-shirt, tied into a knot, so that a couple inches of her stomach were exposed. She was holding a book, a paperback of some kind. She was sixteen, only one year ahead of me at school, but she seemed to be part of another world, way out of my league. Lucy drove a green Jeep Wrangler and as a freshman she had dated a senior named Zeke Cole who ended up going to UNC on a basketball scholarship.

  The first time I ever saw Lucy was two days after we moved in the neighborhood. My mother and I were out on one our walks. The city had replaced a section of the sidewalk, and the cement was still wet. Up ahead, we spotted a girl with long hair squatting down, writing in the cement with a stick. When she saw us coming, she threw the stick down and ran away, as if we were the sidewalk police.

  She had drawn a little flower with her name, “Lucy,” beside it. My mother laughed, asked if I wanted to write something. I said no, I didn’t think I should. I didn’t like to draw attention to myself and with a name like Julian it would be clear who’d written in the sidewalk.

  “Oh, Julian, live a little.”

  But you weren’t supposed to write in wet cement. My mother bent over and added, with her index finger, a heart and the date below Lucy’s name and flower.

  “Lucy,” she said. “That’s a good name for a girl. We need to find you a girlfriend.”

  “You’re crazy, Mom.” I was only eight.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  I never felt comfortable around girls and doubted most guys my age did. I’d only had one real girlfr
iend, Heather Swinterbach. She had red hair and a forehead full of freckles. We’d dated the previous summer mostly because Dennis was dating Joannie, her best friend. Think of it as dating for convenience. It was fun for a while and we kissed a lot but never did end up doing it. The closest we ever came was one hot afternoon in August when we’d laid in her bed naked, running our hands across each others’ body, feeling for wetness and excitement. She even had freckles on the inside of her thighs and I’d taken great pleasure exploring them with my fingers like some scientist charting a constellation I was discovering for the first time.

  But after the summer, Dennis and Joannie broke up and soon after Heather and I split up too. And then my mother left, and the thought of dating a girl was the furthest thing from my mind.

  “Sorry about that,” Lucy said, referring to Sam, who was still pacing back and forth along the perimeter of his yard.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  She waved to me, said, “Goodnight.”

  I headed home, propelled by the cool spring air and the thrill of a black dog and an inch or two of Lucy Sanborn’s exposed stomach.

  5

  Mom called every Wednesday and Saturday night at seven o’clock sharp. I usually answered on the first ring. Dad and I had already eaten and he was in his bedroom when the phone started ringing.

  “Hey, Julian.”

  “Mom, how ya doing?”

  “Good. Hot. Made it into the low nineties today.”

  “Only sixty here,” I said. I didn’t care about the weather. I wanted to ask her the same question I always did: why did you really leave us? But, like every previous phone call, I chickened out.

  She asked about school and if the trees were in full bloom yet. I told her school was okay and that everything was in bloom—the red buds, the cherry trees in the neighborhood, and the white dogwood in our backyard. Pollen was everywhere, like a yellow curtain covering our lives.

  She started talking about her novel, how she might have finally figured out the best way to finish it. I listened but knew this ending probably wasn’t the right one either. She’d told me fifty other times how she’d figured out the ending, each different and the correct one. But she never let me read the thing. She said she wanted to wait until she was done, until it was really polished.

  After she’d left, I found little notes everywhere—in drawers and cabinets, even in her recipe box—that didn’t make sense to me: Dean should be happy at the end. Make Carl cuter. Would Shelly really fall for a guy like Bob? What’s the conflict here? Why bother!!

  When I asked my father about them, he said they were notes for her novels and the kind of things writers asked themselves about their characters.

  As she talked about her novel, I wanted to tell her what had happened with Old Lady Peters. I thought she’d get a kick out of it. I knew she’d appreciate it more than Dad.

  Then she asked what she always did toward the end of our conversations, “How’s your father holding up?”

  “Good,” I said. “He’s decided to run a marathon.” I knew it was something he should probably tell her, but they didn’t talk much when she called. If they did talk, and this was usually on Saturdays, he’d get on the line and go out on the back porch to talk to her for a few minutes before handing me the phone, so I could say goodnight.

  I heard her take a deep pull on her cigarette. “Is he really?”

  “He started training a couple days ago.”

  “Good for him,” she said. “Does he go by himself?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maybe you should go with him.”

  That had never occurred to me. “I’m not much of a runner.”

  “Neither is your father,” she said, which made me laugh. “Maybe you could ride beside him on your bike. Just in case he gets hurt or something. Keep him company.”

  “He’s fine,” I said. But I liked that she was asking about him and even sounded concerned.

  “Well, I better go.”

  “All right then. Love you, Mom.”

  “Love you more,” she said. Before she hung up, she walked outside and held the phone up to the Florida night. I could hear wind and imagined palm trees swaying gently and the swell of the ocean less than a mile from the motel. Imagine one of those sea shells you put up to your ear and hear the ocean. This was like that, only magnified and distorted through phone lines.

  After hanging up, I walked to my father’s door and considered knocking, telling him that Mom said hi and had asked about him, even confessing that I’d told her about his running. But the music had stopped and there was no light leaking under the door, so I figured he was probably asleep.

  6

  On Friday afternoon, walking up my driveway, I heard Old Lady Peters again, “Young man, come here.”

  Had she been waiting for me to come home? Maybe another bird was trapped beneath her house. The cat greeted me again at the gate with a soft nip at my shoes.

  Old Lady Peters sat at one end of a wooden table on the patio. A carton of milk, a silver tea pot and two coffee mugs were in the middle of the table. “Thirsty?”

  I wasn’t but said sure as I sat at the opposite end of the table. Beside the milk, there were a half-dozen sugar cookies on a paper plate. I assumed she meant for me to take a cookie, so I did. It was funny, milk and cookies. Did she think I was five years old? I imagined telling my mother I’d had milk and cookies with Old Lady Peters.

  “Tea?”

  “No, thanks.”

  She poured me some milk and a cup of tea for herself. As she sipped her tea, I drank the milk, not sure what I was supposed to do or say. A sparrow landed on the table between us. I jumped back. “Settle down,” she said. I didn’t know if she was talking to me or the bird. It took a couple steps towards Old Lady Peters. She broke one of the sugar cookies into four pieces and held one out for the bird. It took the cookie from her hand and flew away.

  Because I could think of nothing else to say, I said, “My name is Julian Hale.”

  She smiled. The blue lines across her face moved. “I know your name. I assume you know mine.”

  For some reason, I was surprised she did know my name. Besides the day she ran over my leg, we’d probably said a dozen words to each other in the years we’d been neighbors. “Mrs. Peters.”

  “Yes, it’s Evelyn, Evelyn Peters. You can call me Evelyn or Mrs. Peters. That little flea-infested, bird-killer is Lucky.”

  The sparrow landed on the table again. It chattered, opened and closed its mouth, hopped this way and that, as if it were walking on hot coals. She held out another bit of cookie and the bird took it, flew away up into the dogwood above us. Old Lady Peters kept sipping her tea as if nothing out of the usual was happening.

  “Can you do me a favor?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “I think I strained my back the other day, trying to get that bird out from under the house. Could you change my birdfeeders and the water in the birdbaths?”

  I nodded.

  “The bird seed is over there,” she said, pointing to a five-gallon bucket over by the porch steps.

  I carried the bucket into the yard while she stayed at the table, sipping her tea. The feeders were cylinder-like green tubes about a foot long and almost empty. There was a small, plastic cup inside the bucket for scooping out the bird food, which was a combination of sunflower seeds and different types of nuts, even a few raisins.

  By the time I filled the second feeder, a dozen of those sparrows had landed on the first one. Old Lady Peters stared off into the shrubs. After the feeders, I turned the hose on, rinsed out the dirty water in the birdbaths and filled them with fresh water. She didn’t say anything, so I assumed I’d done it right.

  When I got back to the table, she said, “Look over there.”

  “What?”

  “The birdhouse.”

  I noticed for the first time that in the wall of shrubs, which separated our two backyards, there was a birdhouse attached to the fen
ce. There were two sparrows sitting atop the birdhouse. One would fly inside for a few seconds and then fly back out. Then the two birds would stand face to face, opening and closing their beaks as if talking.

  “They’ve been at it a couple weeks now. The one with the black square under his chin is the father. Mom spends most of her time sitting on the eggs. He brings her food. In a couple weeks, the babies will hatch. Come on, let’s get a better look. Bring that bucket.”

  I grabbed the bucket and followed her. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to bother the birds but I was curious. As we reached the birdhouse, I could see a feather sticking out.

  We heard this shrieking sound and the father sparrow flew down, as if telling us to get away. “Well, maybe not today,” Old Lady Peters said, backing away from the birdhouse.

  “Okay,” I said.

  She turned to me. “Do you think you could help me out for a week or two, until my back feels better?”

  I shrugged. “Sure.”

  “I’ll pay you.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said. “But what about your son?”

  “What about him?”

  “Won’t he want to do it when he comes over?” I was starting to not make sense, even to myself. “I don’t mind doing it, really. I just didn’t know if he would want to.”

  “Trust me, young man, he won’t. I’d rather he not know I hurt my back. Simon says that the disarray of my garden is further evidence of my decreased mental capacity. I know he’s a lawyer, but is that any way to talk to your mother?”

  I shook my head. His name was Simon? “Really, it’s no problem. I’d be glad to.”

  “Thank you. Would you like to see the rest of my garden?”

  “Sure,” I said, although I thought I could see it from where we were.

  “Lucky, show us the way.”

  Lucky headed down the brick path that split the yard, or garden as she called it, in half. The path ended at a pair of bushes at the back of the yard. “These are my butterfly bushes. They don’t look like much now but by the middle of summer they’ll be ten feet high and covered with little white and purple flowers.”