All stories › Humor › Hello, Mother › Episode 2
Four Beeps
Episode 2 of 3 of Hello, Mother by Sean Mulroney · free to read
The laptop rang four times before Maureen reached past me and answered it.
Mom filled the screen. She sat on a deck chair in a sun hat tied under her chin, and behind her was more blue than I had ever seen in one place.
“Where’s my boy?” she said.
The new bird looked at her like a stranger who knew his name, and said nothing.
“He’s tired,” I said. “Big week.”
“What did he do?”
“Flying, mostly.”
Maureen stood on my foot.
“He looks thin,” Mom said. “Is he plucking? Greys pluck when something’s wrong.”
“No plucking,” Maureen said. “We counted.”
“Fergus. Baby. Where’s my hello?”
The new bird stepped along his perch, studied the screen, and said, in Maureen’s exact voice, “We are not doing this.”
Mom laughed until her hat came untied.
“That’s Maureen,” she said. “That is exactly Maureen. When did he learn that?”
“I take school calls here,” Maureen said.
“Thirty-three years, and he never once did any of you.”
This was true. Fergus did Mom, Dad, the microwave and the phone. He had never found the rest of us worth the effort.
“He’s branching out,” I said.
“Next Sunday I want my hello,” Mom said. “Kevin, do your father’s voice at him. You always sounded like Dad from the next room.”
She blew a kiss at the cage. The screen went dark.
Maureen sat down and put her forehead on the binder.
“I said it all night,” she said into page seven.
“You said it with feeling.”
After the oak, nobody trusted me alone with a bird, so we rotated by the day and I was never alone.
Dawn and dusk, whoever had the day carried Fergus’s cage out under the oak with fresh food and water. He came down every time. He ate, he looked at us, and he would not step up for anyone.
Every morning I stood in front of the cage and said “Hello, Mother” the way Dad said it. Low, a little tired, pleased about it. Two hundred times a day. I kept count on a tally clicker.
The new bird listened to all of it and said none of it.
In the car I practiced whistling. At a red light, a woman in the next lane rolled her window up.
At the house I practiced in front of the cage, which was a mistake. Page eight was very clear about exact sounds.
Thursday, Mr. Lindqvist met me at the mailbox.
“Four beeps at five this morning,” he said. “Then the phone. He does my ring now too, half a second after it. I’ve answered the oak twice.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I keep the clippers on the porch now,” he said. “Nobody needs to open anything.”
Inside, Ted was at the foot of the stairs with his phone, one hand on the second railing he had put up in the spring for no reason he ever explained. He was talking low and fast.
“Please don’t call here again,” he said. “Nobody knows you came to the house.”
He saw me and hung up.
“Dentist,” he said.
Ted had gone to the same dentist since he was six. That dentist had never once made a house call.
I would have asked, but Maureen came in with groceries, and within ten minutes we were having the argument we had been saving since the oak.
“You took out a screen to avoid walking twenty feet,” she said.
“You whistled him higher.”
“I whistled him correctly.”
“You wanted to call her.”
“And you two overruled me.”
“Ted overruled you.”
“Can we not do this in front of him?” Ted said.
We all looked at the cage. The new bird had not said a word in four days. He was listening to every one of ours.
Sunday.
“Where’s my boy?” Mom said.
The new bird opened his beak and made the sound of a man trying to whistle at a red light.
Mom leaned in. “Is he wheezing? Kevin, is he wheezing?”
“That’s me,” I said. “He’s doing me whistling.”
“You can’t whistle.”
“He knows.”
She didn’t laugh this time. She looked at him for a long while through the screen.
“He’s not right,” she said. “Two weeks and no hello. The ship stops at a port on Tuesday. I could fly home from there.”
“Mom, no,” Maureen said. “Your heart.”
“My heart isn’t the one acting strange.”
Ted got up off the couch to come into the frame and help.
The new bird turned toward him, puffed once, and said, in Ted’s low hallway voice, “Nobody knows you came to the house.”
The kitchen went quiet. Ted stopped halfway across the floor.
On the screen, Mom set down her iced tea.
“Who came to the house?” she said.