All stories › Humor › Hello, Mother › Episode 3
Page Nine
Episode 3 of 3 of Hello, Mother by Sean Mulroney · free to read
The real estate agent had walked through my mother’s house on a Tuesday, while my brother Ted was minding her parrot, Fergus.
We learned this after the call, at the kitchen table. On the call itself, I told Mom it was the exterminator.
Mom did not have bugs. By the end of the call she believed she did. She asked if they got the attic.
“You had a real estate agent in Mom’s house,” Maureen said.
“He walked through it,” Ted said. “He didn’t list it.”
I looked past him at the stairs, at the second railing he had put up in the spring.
“When did she fall?” I said.
Ted didn’t answer right away.
“March,” he said. “Second step from the top. She made me promise. I just wanted to know what a one-floor place would cost her.”
Maureen sat down.
Nobody said anything. The new bird said nothing either. I could feel him filing it.
Here is what I worked out at that table. Mom hid a fall to protect our hearts. Ted hid an agent to protect hers. The three of us hid a bird to protect hers. Everybody in this family had been guarding somebody’s heart.
“We are not doing this,” Maureen said quietly.
For the first time since the driveway, she meant the lying.
Monday, Mr. Lindqvist knocked.
“Your bird said ‘Where’s my boy?’ this morning,” he said. “Five o’clock, in your mother’s voice. I almost went out to answer.”
Ted had the dawn feeding. Fergus ate on the roof of his cage, watched Ted’s hand, and went back up.
That night I reread page nine. Cage, food and water we had done every dawn and dusk for twelve days. Call me, we had never done once.
Mom did not fly home on Tuesday. Maureen talked her out of it for an hour, in the voice she used on seniors who wanted to leave early.
Sunday.
It was the last call before she docked. Mom looked tired. The sun hat was gone.
“Where’s my boy?” she said.
The new bird puffed up, rocked once, and said, “Hello, Mother.”
It was perfect. Low, a little tired, pleased about it. It was my father coming in from the garage.
It was me.
Mom put her hand over her mouth. “There he is,” she said. “There’s my Fergus.”
I could have left it there. She would be home in six days. We could tell her sitting down, the way we planned.
I turned the laptop toward me.
“Mom, that’s not Fergus,” I said. “That’s a bird we bought from a woman in a driveway. That isn’t Dad’s voice either. It’s mine. I said it to him two hundred times a day until he got it right.
“Fergus got out on the Wednesday of my week. I took the screen out of the kitchen window. He has been in Mr. Lindqvist’s oak for eighteen days. He comes down to eat and won’t step up for any of us. This morning he called for you.
“We didn’t tell you because of your heart. Ted didn’t tell us about the stairs because you made him promise. You didn’t tell us because of ours. I’m sorry. I should have done all of page nine.”
Mom didn’t speak for a long time. She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist.
“Is he alive?” she said.
“He does your microwave every morning.”
I was already standing. I carried her out the back door and across the yard. Maureen came behind me with the ladder. Ted came with a walnut. Fergus’s cage was already under the oak for the dusk feeding, door open.
“We are doing this,” Maureen said.
Mr. Lindqvist came out onto his porch.
I stood under the oak and held the laptop over my head with the volume all the way up.
“Okay, Mom,” I said.
“Where’s my boy?”
For a while there were only leaves and a car two streets over.
She said it again, louder, the way she said it down the hall at bedtime.
From the very top of the oak, in her own voice, Fergus said, “Here I am.”
He came down like a grey, one branch at a time, climbing more than flying, beak first, stopping to complain. He passed his cage without a glance. He dropped the last few feet and landed on the top edge of the laptop screen, the way he did at home.
Mom was crying and laughing at once, which on ship internet looked like a buffering problem.
Fergus leaned over, looked at her upside down, and said, “Hello, Mother,” in Dad’s voice.
Through the kitchen window, which still had no screen in it, the new bird answered in mine.
“When I’m home on Saturday, all four of us sit at that table,” Mom said. “We talk about the stairs. Ted, bring the agent’s number. Nobody is returning that bird. Kevin, put the screen back.”
Fergus stepped off the laptop onto my wrist. He whistled the three bedtime notes at me, very close to my face.
I tried to whistle them back.
Nothing came out. He stayed anyway.