Birdspell Read online

I’ve learned over the years that there are always people willing to pay for odd jobs, even in a barely-middle-class building like this. So I grabbed a sheet of paper and wrote, “Help with errands or chores. Corbin Hayes, Unit 2H.” I added a border with highlighter to make it more noticeable and took it down to the laundry room.

  All laundry rooms smell the same. I like them best when they’re warm and the air is moist and soapy, which was the case when I stepped inside and looked around for a bulletin board. I had tape in my back pocket just in case, but it wasn’t needed. An old cork board was on the wall over the line of four washers, two of which were running.

  A girl with a bright green lip spike was leaning back against one of them holding a cell phone about three inches from her face. Next to her, and blocking my access to the board, was a stroller with a little girl, judging by the outfit. She looked at me immediately. The girl with the phone very deliberately did not.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  She did something squinty with one eye, like a bit of lint had just gotten into it, while raising the eyebrow over the other. It was an impressively bored gesture.

  “Do you mind if I move your baby for a sec?” I said. “I just need to reach this board.”

  “My baby? What are you, insane? I’m fifteen,” she said.

  She leaned forward, grabbed the handle of the stroller, and gave it a slight push. It was just enough to send it banging into a table in the center of the room. The child started to cry.

  “Nice,” the girl said, like I was the one who’d shoved the stroller.

  I stretched across the washer and stuck my ad up with a yellow pushpin while the girl sighed loudly, stuffed her phone into a pocket and crossed over to the howling child.

  “What did that BAD boy do?” she said, while she scooped the kid up and hugged her. The crying stopped as abruptly as it had started.

  “BAD!” said the toddler.

  “Hey, I didn’t do anything,” I said.

  “BAD!” she repeated. She looked to the older girl for confirmation and received an approving nod.

  “That’s right, pea pod,” she said.

  I noticed her look changed while she was holding the kid. The hostility was still there, but it had dropped to about four out of ten, where it had been a solid eight before.

  “Well, then,” I said, addressing pea pod. “I’m awful sorry and I promise to never do such a dastardly deed again.”

  There might have been a twitch at the corner of the mean girl’s mouth, I’m not sure. She shifted the kid to her other hip, ignoring me, and said, “Maybe we’ll think about forgiving the BAD boy, huh?”

  “BAD!” said pea pod happily.

  My cue to leave.

  Six

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK you’re doing? What the H-E- double hockey sticks is this?”

  Mom doesn’t believe in cussing. Ever. Even in the throes of a spit-flying, insanely angry rant, she’ll never go beyond her own brand of expletives. Some of them would be enough to make me laugh if I didn’t know better.

  I’d barely stepped through the door into our apartment when this particular question came flying at me. It sent me into rapid-process mode, where my brain started lining up the facts.

  1.) School just got out, which means Mom should still be at work.

  2.) She’s holding a piece of paper, which is obviously the source of her anger at the moment, so I need to get closer to it.

  “You don’t need to think for one second that you can pull this kind of stunt in my house and get away with it,” Mom said. Her eyes darted at me, dark and full of challenge.

  3.) The paper in her hand looks familiar, but I’m not sure …wait, is it …

  “Whatever you’re up to — and I’m not sure I even want to know, Corbin — I can tell you right now, it’s going to stop. Stop in its flipping flapping tracks. So don’t expect to smooth talk your way out of this one.”

  4.) Yes it is! She’s holding the ad I stuck up in the laundry room a few days ago. Which makes me wonder how long she’s been home and what she’s been up to.

  “I’m just going to check on Sitta,” I said. And I moved fast, but not so fast that I was going to set off her chase response. Except, I miscalculated.

  The paper dropped from her hands and she was in motion, heading toward me. I broke into a run, skidded around the corner into my room, and almost had the door pushed shut when she crashed into it, sending me flying and almost falling herself. Thankfully, she grabbed the doorknob and regained her footing.

  “Do not walk away from me when I’m talking to you,” she warned, using her sepulcher voice. The one that makes the skin on my neck crawl.

  “Mom —”

  “Don’t you ‘Mom’ me you little sneak. Slinking around, cooking up your schemes, thinking you can get ahead of me.” She laughed, and the sound was more chilling than the voice.

  Sitta’s cage looked undisturbed. The cover didn’t appear to have been moved since I’d put it in place before school.

  “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

  “Sorry.” I edged closer to the cage and tugged the cover off. Sitta looked around, turning his head side to side. The twist in my gut loosened. And what had I been thinking anyway? Mom wouldn’t hurt an innocent bird. I get scared about nothing sometimes.

  This particular innocent bird knows that when the cover comes off his cage, food is on its way. He doesn’t wait patiently if it isn’t.

  “I’ll be back with some grub in a minute buddy,” I told him.

  Sitta had no interest in hearing promises. He wanted food that very second and when it didn’t come he let me know he was displeased. The demanding screeches he sent up weren’t exactly calming to Mom’s mood.

  “Where do you think we’re going to get the time or resources to screen all those people?” Mom demanded as I edged past her. “It’s not like I have the right connections. Not anymore.”

  “You’re right. I wasn’t thinking,” I said.

  She followed as I turned left into the kitchen and tugged open the cupboard where the bag of birdseed was. I grabbed it and some green leaves from the fridge and started back to my room.

  “Stop that!” Mom said. “How am I supposed to get to the bottom of this with you running around all over the place?”

  My laundry room ad was still where she’d dropped it. I let the bag of feed slip to the floor and scooped up the paper as I retrieved it.

  “I’m just going to feed Sitta,” I said. “Could you pick out something for supper while I’m doing that? And then I’ll be able to totally focus on what you’re telling me.”

  She hesitated, then agreed and began to look through the cupboards while I hurried to my room, shoved food into the cage, told Sitta I’d be back soon to let him out, and dashed back to the kitchen.

  I’d been gone two minutes at the most, but Mom had already assembled a can of beans, an egg, ketchup, three cheese slices, a box of frozen waffles, and a blueberry bagel on the counter. As I looked them over she added two packages of ramen noodles, a nearly empty jar of sweet and sour sauce, and a whisk.

  “Not bad, huh?” she said, waving her hand over it like a game show model.

  “Great selection,” I said. I could tell she’d already moved away from the imaginary problems my ad was going to cause. “How about you relax for a bit while I fix our supper?”

  “I have no time to relax,” she snapped. “There are things to be done.”

  “You’re not tired from work?” I asked casually. I already knew what the answer was going to be, but I no longer try to avoid hearing it. I did that a lot when I was younger — tried to keep the subject on anything else as long as I could, clutching a thread of hope that it wasn’t happening again.

  “Nope!” she said. “I quit my job!”

  There it was. As usual, she made it sound li
ke a huge, exciting announcement. Wonderful. Thrilling.

  I put the waffles, cheese slices, and egg back into the fridge. Beans on toast was about all I thought I could handle right then.

  “Well?” Mom’s hands floated up and out, palms toward me. “Aren’t you going to ask me why?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “Because —”

  Big dramatic pause. I knew I was expected to look over, which I did, while tapping the beans into a small pot.

  “I’m going out on my own!”

  “Wow, Mom! Doing what?” I stuck two slices of bread into the toaster and shoved it down. As I did that, it struck me that it was way too early for supper. Mom being home had thrown me off. I popped the bread up and out, stuck it back into the bag, and turned off the burner the pot of beans was sitting on.

  Mom had been talking the whole time. I tried to focus.

  “… which is why there’s such a shortage of people who want to work. Now, with my agency, people will be guaranteed a living wage and all the benefits. You can’t have people going outside the country for some of these things. I can’t fix that, at least not right away, but it could be a focus of the second stage, once the parent company is established and hits the top one hundred list.”

  Clearly, I’d missed the first part of her plan — not that it mattered.

  What did matter was that Mom’s paychecks would stop coming and I’d have to somehow persuade her to apply for assistance and try to make sure the rent got paid and food got bought until this crisis had passed. And I knew there was almost no chance I could talk her into doing any of that.

  Sitta wasn’t the only one I was going to have to worry about feeding.

  Seven

  “I WAS THINKING I’D come visit Sitta after school today.”

  Izelle’s face was pink and bright. Moisture circled her eyes, making it obvious she’d been crying. Of course I knew why. She missed the bird. And why wouldn’t she? He’s more excellent than I could ever have imagined. Whenever he and I have the place to ourselves he’s about the best company a bird could be, hopping around on my shoulder, leaning over and looking right in my face, talking in bird-speak, and just generally being entertaining. Plus he’s a great listener.

  It hadn’t even been a full week since he’d moved in with me, but I wasn’t surprised she was anxious to see him. The problem at that moment was, I couldn’t let her. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. With Mom not working, she was in and out, trailing wild energy and scattered thoughts behind her. There was no way could I risk Izelle meeting my mother, not while she was blasting around in overdrive.

  “Uh, yeah. I really wish you could,” I told her, meaning it. “But my mom’s home sick this week and I can’t take anyone there until she’s better.”

  “What is it, like, a cold?”

  “No, it’s quite a bit more serious than that,” I said, in case next week was a problem too. It’s hard to predict how long Mom’s manic stages are going to last.

  “Oh.” Izelle’s expression was instantly solemn. Caring, even. “I’m really sorry. Is she going to be okay?”

  “We hope so,” I said in a sad, ominous tone. Izelle blinked a couple of times before reaching out to give my hand an awkward pat. Then she turned and disappeared down the hall.

  I knew if I had to, I could probably build on this lie and drag it out until she gave up on seeing Sitta. Or we moved. That could solve a lot of future problems. But it seemed a pretty low thing to do and I made up my mind to leave it as a last resort.

  The apartment was empty when I got home and for a minute I wished I’d taken a chance and brought Izelle along. That thought disappeared less than five minutes after I’d fed Sitta, which is when the door flew open and Mom sped in carrying a large shopping bag.

  My heart sank.

  “Corbin, quick love, come help your mother!” she called.

  I was already moving toward her, wanting to know what she’d wasted whatever small amount of money we had on, and hoping to find the receipt so I could sneak anything returnable back for a refund as soon as I had a chance.

  “I’m on the verge of something so big,” Mom said as I lifted the bag from her arms and looked inside. “Son, we are going to be rich!”

  “I’ll put this in the closet for now,” I said. “So nothing gets bent or wrecked.” At first glance, I’d seen presentation folders, name tags, pens, and various other office-type supplies. It was easy to picture it falling victim to a frenzy of enthusiasm — shuffled and spread across the floor, stepped on, crumpled, torn, and marked up. In other words: non-returnable.

  Mom didn’t argue, mainly because she was busy telling me about all the money we were going to have. We were going to be rolling around in piles of cash morning, noon, and night. Not the safest way to store our imaginary future fortune.

  “Won’t that attract burglars?” I said.

  “No silly, because we’ll be living in a gated community and have all kinds of security for our mansion!”

  Mom laughed, head back, mouth round and turned upward as though she was letting sound bubbles rise and escape. It was infectious and I couldn’t keep from smiling at her delight.

  She grabbed my hand then and whirled me around, her eyes snapping with joy and excitement. Even with a familiar feeling of dread snaking its way through me, I found myself laughing and joining in with Mom’s enthusiasm.

  Before I knew it we were galloping around and around, naming all the things we planned to buy and singing snatches of “If I Had a Million Dollars.”

  “You know what?” Mom said, stopping abruptly. “We should celebrate!”

  “Pancakes!” I said quickly. “Yes!”

  “I was kind of thinking we’d eat out,” Mom said.

  “Letter pancakes!” I said. “We can do some with our initials and some with dollar signs. They can be green.”

  She was wavering, but not quite sold.

  “Please?”

  “Oh, all right. I want to tell you the whole plan anyway and we can’t risk someone overhearing it.”

  And she did. She told me about it while we made the pancakes and while we ate. She was still going on afterward, while I hunched silently on my cushion in the corner of the living room. The details morphed as she talked, swelling and stretching into new shapes. Her words tumbled and rolled. The landscape of Mom’s plan, as always, was shifting, rushing into mountainous slopes before swooping down, leveling, and rising up again.

  The plan itself was actually simple.

  “I will have the only employment agency that insists on its clients being paid a wage well above the minimum amount imposed by law!” she proclaimed. “It’s brilliant. Brilliant! Clients will flock to me in droves because no one else will be getting them a decent income. And that’s just the start — the tip of the iceberg. There will be branches everywhere before long, with vast franchise earnings.”

  She talked on and on and almost made it sound possible, even plausible. I didn’t bother pointing out the obvious flaw. Arguing is always pointless. It’s begging for trouble. And anyway, it was just one of many such ideas. Another cloud of hope, its form drifting apart before you can even see the edges. If Mom’s plans have anything in common it’s this: they have the substance of mist.

  My head was aching by the time I finally persuaded her I needed sleep for school the next day. It was almost two in the morning and even the city’s shadows looked sleepy, stretched across my floor as I flopped on my mattress.

  “Night Sitta,” I whispered, eyes closed. “I hope I didn’t make a mistake dragging you into this mess.”

  He was silent, but I sensed him shuffling a little, as if he needed to rearrange himself in order to accommodate my presence in the room.

  “Things probably look bad to you right now,” I told him softly. “But you might as well know, it’s probably going to get wors
e before it gets better.”

  Better, but not good. Never actually good.

  Eight

  I’D STASHED THE BAG of office supplies in my closet and then waited a couple of days to see if Mom mentioned it. She didn’t, but there was still a problem with taking it back.

  The receipt wasn’t in the bag. It also wasn’t in the pockets of the jacket or pants she’d had on that day. There wasn’t the slightest chance anyone was going to give me a refund without it and we needed that money. Badly. Enough to make me look through Mom’s purse, even though my stomach feels sick when I have to do that. I’d checked her wallet to see how much cash she had and it was less than thirty bucks — at that time.

  “There should be one more paycheck coming,” I told Sitta as I spooned seed into his bowl after school that Friday. The truth was, I really wasn’t sure. Employers all had their own systems which made it hard to keep track of Mom’s pay schedules.

  Sitta cocked his head and whistled. I laughed.

  “Yeah, well, if there is another check, it sure won’t be worth whistling over,” I said. “But it would help.”

  “Call! Call!” Sitta said.

  I blinked. Izelle had told me he could talk a bit, but this was the first time I’d heard him say anything that sounded like an actual word.

  “Who should I call?” I asked. Sitta had no answer for that, not that I’d really expected he would.

  The cage door was open and I’d put some spinach on the floor next to where I was sitting, cross-legged. So far, rummaging in the dumpster of a family-run grocery store a few blocks away had been solving the problem of getting him produce, but the birdseed wasn’t going to last forever and it was a definite must. I’d also attempted to sprout a bit of popcorn and barley, but neither had worked out.

  Sitta ventured out after he’d eaten some seeds. He gobbled up the slightly wilted, but well-rinsed spinach.

  “You like that, huh?” I said.

  “Call!” he answered.

  “Believe me, pal, if there was anyone to call, I’d do it,” I said.