The Nature of Small Birds Read online

Then she pulls her hand out from mine and pushes up her glasses again.

  “Tomorrow’s going to be another late night,” she says. “There’s a home game against Fort Colson I’m supposed to cover.”

  “Busy, busy,” Linda says, getting up from the couch. “I think I might have some popcorn. Anybody else like some?”

  She goes to the kitchen, and within a minute I hear the microwave going.

  “Dad,” Mindy says.

  “Yeah?”

  “Maybe just don’t say anything to Grammy about the Babylift stuff. Okay?” She shrugs. “She wouldn’t understand.”

  “No, she would not,” I say with a bit of a chuckle.

  There are many words one might use to describe my mother. Understanding certainly isn’t one of them.

  CHAPTER

  Two

  Linda, 1975

  If only it had been warmer, I would have rolled my window down and let the sun-kissed breeze whip around me as I sped down the highway. But, as was often the case in Northern Michigan, early April was still on the chilly side—hardly above freezing!—and I wasn’t completely out of my mind.

  So, to make up for the lack of rushing air, I turned up the radio and sang along with B-b-b-Bennie and the Jetsssss, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel along with each bum-bum-ba-da-bum of the piano.

  My cherry-red Dodge Dart may have been fifteen years old and showing its age in rust spots, but it still had pretty good get-up-and-go. Had I been alone, I would have blown the stink off, taking her all the way up to fifty-five on the highway. But since Sonny was in the passenger seat, I decided to keep it down to the speed limit.

  Having a kid in the car was a good reminder to drive safely. Especially when that kid was five going on thirty-five and had absolutely no qualms about tattling on her mommy. And who did this particular five-year-old most like tattling to? None other than my no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners mother-in-law, Hilda.

  The glare of that woman could wither me faster than anything else in the world.

  By the time I pulled onto my in-laws’ street, my hands felt buzzy from the shake-rattle-and-roll of the steering wheel. I turned the radio down and eased off the gas pedal so the muffler might not grumble quite as much.

  The last thing I needed was to add even more to Hilda’s running list of my offenses against her. The first was my stealing of her son from her—he, in fact, married me quite willingly—closely followed by my choice to occasionally wear slacks to church. Other transgressions included not peeling the potatoes before mashing them and serving them with less than silky-smooth gravy.

  Oops-a-daisy.

  My one shining moment, though, was in giving her a grandchild.

  Every moment following Sonny’s squalling entrance into the world, however, was fair game to be added to the list, including my inability to quickly produce a second baby for Hilda to grandparent.

  Not that it was for lack of trying.

  It was a wonder there hadn’t been a full investigation into my single-handed crimes against humanity.

  I parked next to Hilda’s Ford Fairlane wagon—it was, of course, a sensible shade of eggshell and without a speck of dirt or a splatter of bird poop—and put the engine into park.

  Hilda and Ivan’s house looked like it belonged in Better Homes and Gardens. Not because it was anything spectacularly fancy, but because of how well taken care of it was. The hedges were always trimmed just right, the yard tidy, the garage kept cleaner than my kitchen. Everything had a place and was only out of that place if in use.

  There was nary a hint of clutter in Hilda Matthews’s house.

  Bruce claimed it had always been that way, even when he and his brother and sister were growing up.

  It was intimidating considering how cluttered our place tended to get. It seemed we were constantly crowded by a stack of books on the coffee table or a pile of shoes by the door, not to mention Sonny’s Barbie dolls.

  Then again, our house was so small it looked a mess even if merely two things were out of place. It was six hundred square feet filled with a thousand square feet worth of stuff, but it was ours. I had to remind myself often that we wouldn’t live there forever.

  For the meantime, I just had to make the most of it and try to hide the clutter whenever I saw that eggshell-colored Ford pulling into my driveway.

  The moment I cut the engine, Sonny burst out the passenger-side door and bolted for the house, letting herself in without so much as a single knock or ring of the doorbell.

  “Sonny,” I called after her, an act of futility to be sure.

  She was five and cute, but that didn’t mean she would get away with breaking and entering.

  I rapped my knuckles on the door that Sonny hadn’t bothered to close behind her, proving that she was, indeed, born in a barn.

  “Hello?” I called, stepping inside and feeling a sinking sensation of dread.

  “In the kitchen,” Hilda answered. “Make sure you shut the door behind you, for Pete’s sake.”

  If I could have been sure she wouldn’t see it, I might have rolled my eyes. But I could have no such certainty. Unreasonable as it may have seemed, I was convinced that nothing—but nothing—escaped the notice of my mother-in-law.

  Instead, I shut the door and hung my purse on the coat-tree in the entryway before heading to the kitchen.

  Hilda stood at the stove, moving her wooden spoon through something thick and bubbling in her blue enamel pot, and I chased away the images of every witch from the Grimm Brothers’ tales.

  “Did Sonny come through here?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “She must have found Father in the living room.”

  I knew she meant my father-in-law, Ivan, her husband of just over thirty years. It gave me the heebie-jeebies when she called him that.

  “What’s for supper?” I asked. “It smells great.”

  “Sonny’s favorite,” Hilda said. “My spaghetti.”

  I tried not to let her emphasis on “my” sting me. We both knew that my daughter wouldn’t touch any spaghetti I made with a ten-foot pole. I thought of the last time I’d tried feeding it to her. The evening ended in tears and tantrums, not all of them on Sonny’s part. She’d gone to bed that night without taking a solitary bite.

  When Hilda had heard about it, she told me that I must never, ever allow my child to rule the roost like that. She’d said that was a lesson learned better sooner than later.

  I hadn’t learned that lesson at all.

  Instead, I’d learned to never tell her things like that again.

  Hilda held out her wooden spoon with a dab of red sauce on it, holding her hand under to catch any drips. “Would you taste this and let me know if it’s missing anything?”

  “Sure.”

  It was perfect. Of course. That show-off.

  The first Friday of every month was family dinner night at Bruce’s folks’ house. They’d put the leaf in the dining room table and grab the spare chairs from other rooms so the seven of us could all have a seat.

  Before long we’d have to find a high chair for my sister-in-law’s soon-to-arrive little bundle.

  Never in my life had I seen a pregnant woman quite as adorable as Dana. Never had I known an expecting father as smitten and nervous as her husband, Chris.

  Under the table I pressed a hand against my stomach, wishing I could have just one more, thinking of how many times I’d begged God to give Sonny a brother or sister, just to be disappointed whenever my time of the month came along.

  “How much longer do you have?” Bruce asked his sister from across the table. “You look like you’re ready to pop.”

  “Bruce,” I scolded, drizzling sauce on top of my pasta.

  “It’s all right,” Dana said, rubbing her hands on the dome of her tummy. “I am very ready to have this kid. But I’ve got a week left yet.”

  “I smoked four cigarettes a day when I was expecting each of you,” Hilda said, handing the basket of dinner rolls to Chris. “I neve
r got that big.”

  She pointed with her eyes at Dana.

  “Well, I think she’s the most beautiful girl in the world,” Chris said, plopping two rolls onto Dana’s plate. “More beautiful now than ever.”

  Dana leaned toward him, planting a kiss on his cheek that earned an eye roll from her mother. Hilda wasn’t one for displays of affection.

  Out of the corner of my eye I spied Sonny on the other side of the table, sneaking her grandpa the entirety of her green beans. The little stinker. And he put them all—every last one of them—directly into his mouth to conceal their little exchange. The big stinker.

  Sonny put a hand over her mouth, watching Ivan—or Grumpy, the name she’d called him since she started to talk—chew his way through the waxy veggies. I decided that I would need to have a conversation with her later about pawning her beans off on a man who she knew could never refuse her a single thing.

  “Anybody read the paper today?” Bruce asked, twisting his fork in his pile of spaghetti.

  I shot him a pleading look. Nothing good could come of a conversation that started like that. In fact, such topics as politics, Vietnam, and religion had been banned from Hilda’s table since the year before when Nixon resigned the presidency. About such things there were as many opinions as there were behinds in the chairs.

  But, of course, he took no notice of my silent begging. Either that or he ignored it and relished the idea of stirring the pot.

  “A plane leaving Vietnam crashed just a minute or two after takeoff,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Bruce . . .” Hilda said, her tone one of warning that made my skin raise in goose pimples.

  “It was full of kids they were bringing to the States to be adopted,” he went on. Then he sighed and rested the fork against the rim of his plate. “Imagine that. Putting a kid on a plane to fly, what is it, five thousand miles over the Pacific . . .”

  “Seven thousand,” Chris corrected.

  “All right then. Seven . . .”

  “I don’t know why you’re talking about this at my dinner table,” Hilda said before taking a bite of her roll.

  “Because it matters, Mom,” he said. “Why were they even bringing them here in the first place? Because they think we can raise them better than the people in their own country? Or are we just trying to make ourselves feel better for what we’ve done to them?”

  “Hey, I’m sure there’s a good reason,” Chris said, putting his hands up as if surrendering. “If you’d seen all the kids there, lots of them living in the streets on their own, you’d understand.”

  Chris never said much about his thirteen months in Vietnam, and I guessed it was hard for him to think about, let alone articulate. Dana had confided in me that he often jumped at loud noises—a car backfiring or a popped balloon—and that he had trouble sleeping most nights.

  She’d made me promise not to tell Bruce about it, though. Chris was so embarrassed and would have been mortified if everyone knew. But I sometimes thought that maybe it would make Bruce go easier on him.

  But Bruce was twenty-eight and full of ideals and beliefs. It was just that sometimes they got away from him and he carried on just to win the argument. I tried clearing my throat to get his attention so I could give him my “chill out” face. He didn’t hear me.

  “How’d they become orphans in the first place?” Bruce leaned forward, arms resting on either side of his plate. “That’s on us, isn’t it?”

  “Well, we aren’t fighting a war all by ourselves,” Dana added. “There’s the North and the Vietcong and . . .”

  Ivan leaned toward Sonny, whispering something in her ear. Then he picked up their plates, letting her grab the silverware, and the two of them headed to the kitchen, where they could shut the door and enjoy a bit of lighter and undoubtedly sillier conversation.

  “Maybe this whole thing would have blown over long before now if we’d just kept our noses out of it,” Bruce said.

  “Bruce, honey . . .” I said, trying to get through to him. “Not at the table. All right?”

  No one acknowledged me.

  “Right. Great idea, Bruce,” Chris said, nodding his head. “We should have just let the Communists take over another country on their way to invading us.”

  “I don’t know why you boys insist on going on so at my dinner table,” Hilda said, slapping the edge of the table with every syllable like a confused Morse code.

  I considered for a full minute taking my plate and retreating to the safety of the kitchen and the blissful ignorance Sonny and Ivan enjoyed. But then I realized that if I left there would be no one to rein it all in if the arguing got out of hand.

  Blessed are the peacemakers.

  Even if all they want to do is run away.

  “You know, Bruce,” Chris started, “it’s sure easy to sit there and talk about a war you didn’t have to fight.”

  “Well, it’s not like I ran off to Canada.” Bruce crossed his arms. “All I did was get into college.”

  “While your brother enlisted.”

  “If I could have gotten him out of it, I would’ve.”

  “He didn’t want out of it,” Hilda said. “He wanted to serve his country.”

  “He could have served in other ways.”

  I lowered my eyes, thinking of the American flag folded into a triangle that Hilda kept in her cedar chest along with Dale’s dog tags. Bruce believed his brother’s life was wasted over there. I bit the inside of my cheek, praying that he wouldn’t say as such out loud.

  “So you would have gone in his place?” Chris asked. “I don’t think so, buddy.”

  “Come on,” Dana said, putting a hand on her husband’s arm. “Let’s all settle down a little.”

  “Bruce, I know you think you served your country by holding up a peace sign in DC.” Chris snorted. “But you don’t know the first thing about sacrificing for freedom.”

  “Oh, so riding around on a tank, blowing up villages, is how we promote freedom?”

  “Bruce,” I said, surprised he would ever say such a thing in front of his mother.

  “I will not have this talk at my table!” Hilda yelled.

  I froze, not daring to take a breath for fear of her wrath turning in my direction. Bruce, on the other hand, threw his napkin on the table and crossed his arms, and Chris proceeded to tear his dinner roll into tiny pieces.

  No one said another word.

  If a pin had the nerve to drop, the sound of it would have hit like the clattering of a cymbal.

  Hilda sat on her throne at the head of the table, sitting ruler straight, and I imagined she was just waiting for someone to say something else. I prayed that Bruce would keep his yapper shut.

  The door to the kitchen opened a crack, and Ivan peeked in.

  “Who won?” he asked.

  “Who do you think?” Hilda asked.

  “That’s my girl,” Ivan said with a crooked grin. Then, when he closed the door, he declared, “Sonny, I was right. Grammy won. Pay up.”

  Dana and I met eyes. She rested a hand on her stomach and blew out a stream of air. For half a second I worried that all the fighting had sent her into labor. But then she picked up her fork and spun it in the pile of spaghetti on her plate before shoving a huge mess of it into her mouth.

  “Now, are you all finished?” Hilda said, dabbing her napkin at the corners of her lips.

  “Sorry, Mom,” Bruce said, his voice as sheepish as I’d ever heard it. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “I forgive you,” Hilda said. “Now, apologize to Chris.”

  “I’m sorry.” He glanced at Chris out of the corner of his eye.

  “Christopher?”

  “I’m sorry, Bruce,” Chris said.

  The only sound in the room was the clinking of silver on Corelle dishes.

  It wasn’t the first time we’d finished family dinner with a few bruised feelings, and I doubted it would be the last.

  I just hoped that Hilda had something g
ood for dessert.

  Once we got home and Sonny into bed, Bruce showed me the headline on the very front of the paper about the airplane that crashed in Vietnam. I tried my best to read it but couldn’t get past the first paragraph without my eyes becoming too blurred with tears.

  “These were kids who already had families here in America ready to adopt them,” Bruce said, handing me the hanky from his pocket. “It’s clean.”

  “Thanks,” I said, rubbing it under my eye, blackening the cotton with my running mascara. “Did it get shot down? Does it say?”

  “No. They’re still trying to figure it out.”

  “How awful.” I sniffled. “Haven’t they already been through enough there?”

  My eyes cleared up long enough to look at the picture they’d placed above the fold of the paper. In the top righthand corner were two palm trees growing tall on the hillside. I let my eyes focus on them a moment before moving them lower.

  Billow of smoke over rage of fire. Shattered pieces of the plane lay strewn among the grass and in the mud. Two Vietnamese men stood, in uniform, looking at the mess of tragedy around them. Only one of them was turned toward the camera, the expression on his face completely helpless.

  “They don’t know a whole lot yet,” Bruce said, quieting his voice. “There may have been a hundred who died. Mostly kids. Some of the orphanage workers. It’s horrible.”

  I left the living room, standing in the hallway until I was able to collect myself. Then I turned the knob on Sonny’s door as quietly as I could, sneaking in and hoping not to wake her.

  She lay in bed, her sheets a tangle around her legs and arms, half her stuffed animals on the floor. Even in sleep that child was in motion.

  Doing my best not to disturb her, I pulled the covers up so they’d keep her warm, at least until she started thrashing again. I found her very favorite rag doll under her bed and looked at it for a moment.

  It was the doll Hilda had made for Sonny’s first birthday. The brown yarn hair had seen better days and the bangs stood up on end from years of being smooshed and pulled.

  The doll had eyes the color of Hilda’s, a deep and chocolatey brown instead of a blue-green hazel like Sonny’s. All through my pregnancy, Hilda had insisted that the baby was going to have her eyes. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d prayed for it.