All stories › Humor › Hello, Mother › Episode 1
The Kitchen Window
Episode 1 of 3 of Hello, Mother by Sean Mulroney · free to read
The hedge clippers would not fit through the screen, so I took the screen out.
Mr. Lindqvist stood in the flower bed outside my mother’s kitchen window. It was the third week of her six-week cruise, my week with the bird.
“You could use the door,” he said.
“The door is two rooms away.”
“You’ve had them since June.”
“I’m returning them by the shortest route.”
Behind me, Fergus sat on his cage, doing his out-of-cage hours. Mom had left a binder on the counter with a laminated cover and eleven tabs, which was more than she had left for any of us.
Fergus was an African grey, thirty-three years old, which meant he had been in the family longer than my driver’s license.
“He still doing my microwave?” Mr. Lindqvist said.
“Yours is three beeps. He does Mom’s, four. He does Mom. He does Dad.”
“And the Sunday thing?”
“Every Sunday at six.”
Mom video-called the kitchen laptop. She said, “Where’s my boy?” Fergus said, “Here I am,” in her voice. Then “Hello, Mother,” in Dad’s, the way Dad said it every night coming in from the garage. Dad had been gone six years.
She said she called to see the bird.
She called to hear Dad.
I passed the clippers out. Something gray went past my ear like a thrown sock.
Mom had stopped clipping his wings in April, on the vet’s advice.
The vet had never seen our window.
Fergus cleared the fence and went up Mr. Lindqvist’s oak, the tallest tree on the street. At the very top, he did the microwave.
Mr. Lindqvist looked at his house.
“That’s not mine,” he said.
Half an hour later, my sister Maureen stood under the oak in her work lanyard. She was the oldest of us and a high school vice principal, and she looked at the tree the way she looked at a hallway.
Our younger brother Ted was halfway up the ladder with a walnut.
“He loves walnuts,” Ted said.
“He loves walnuts in the kitchen,” Maureen said. “Get down before you scare him higher.”
She whistled Mom’s three bedtime notes. From the top of the oak, Fergus whistled them back perfectly and stayed where he was.
“Kevin, you try,” Ted said.
“You know I can’t.”
“Try anyway.”
I had never been able to whistle. I was forty-four.
What came out was air with an opinion.
Fergus went higher.
I opened the binder to Emergencies. Page nine.
“Read it out loud,” Maureen said.
“If he gets out, he will only come down for me. Put his cage under the tree with food and water at dawn and dusk. Call me. Do not chase him.”
We all looked at Ted on the ladder.
“I was reaching,” Ted said. “Reaching isn’t chasing.”
“So we call her,” Maureen said.
“She’s on a ship,” I said.
“Ships have phones.”
“She had a stent put in last fall,” Ted said. “This trip is for rest. We call, she flies home from some island in a panic.”
“We do the rest of page nine,” I said. “Cage, food, water, every dawn and dusk. We tell her when she’s back. In person. Sitting down.”
“And Sunday?” Maureen said.
Nobody answered. Three Sundays left, each one opening with my father’s voice. The voice was in a tree.
In our family I was already the one who lost things. Three wallets and a canoe.
“There are other greys,” Ted said.
Maureen turned around very slowly. “We are not doing this.”
At dusk we set his cage under the oak, door open, with pellets, water and chopped peppers. He climbed down to the roof of it and ate a walnut while we stood perfectly still.
Ted held out his hand. Fergus went back to the top.
Saturday, four o’clock.
The woman selling the bird was moving to an apartment that allowed nothing bigger than a fish. She asked us not to change his name. We changed it in her driveway.
He was the right size. Red tail, black beak, rain-cloud gray. “Babies have dark eyes,” Maureen said, checking. “They go pale yellow in the first year. Mom would spot dark eyes from the middle of an ocean.”
His were pale yellow.
“Does he talk?” Maureen said.
“When he’s ready,” the woman said.
“When is that?”
“For me it was about a month.”
Mom’s next call was in twenty-six hours.
He was twelve hundred dollars, cage included. We split it three ways, four hundred each. Ted paid in twenties. I paid and filed the receipt under Emergencies.
That night Maureen and I set his cage in Fergus’s spot in the kitchen.
“Page seven,” I said. “Greys learn fastest what they hear said with feeling.”
“We are not doing this,” Maureen said, tightening a perch.
“We are clearly doing this.”
“We are not doing this,” she said to the water dish. She said it, with enormous feeling, to the window I still had not put the screen back in.
The new bird watched her the whole time.
At dawn Fergus came down to the cage again, ate, and would not step up.
The new bird had not made one sound since the driveway.
At five fifty-nine on Sunday, the laptop started ringing.