13. Piper
PIPER
"Chickens," Marcus said.
He set the word down on the workbench between us and let it sit there, accusing me all on its own. He had a gift for that, for turning a single noun into a full cross-examination without bothering to attach a verb.
"Hens, technically," I said. "Six of them. Birdie's. And don't make that face. Too late, you've already made it, I watched it land. This is for the children's literacy fund, Marcus. Books. For kids. You're not against books for kids, are you?"
"I'm against chickens."
"There's no such thing as anti-chicken, Marcus. It isn't a position a person can hold."
He picked his coffee back up, which was his version of conceding the floor, and looked out the window to where I'd already staged the whole beautiful thing in the side yard.
A little corral of straw bales. A hand-lettered sign.
A folding table where, come the weekend, half of Pinewood Ridge would pay two dollars to guess how many eggs were in the basket and the closest guess won a pie.
It was, if I said so myself, a perfect segment.
Wholesome. Charming. The kind of thing that won over strangers online and thawed a town toward the loud woman who'd bought its haunted house.
"Today's just the test run," I said. "I film the setup, we make sure the girls are comfortable in the pen, and Birdie picks them up before dark. Twenty minutes. You don't even have to talk. You stand there being large and weathered and the internet does the rest."
"I have a door to hang."
"And you'll hang it. After you help me carry a crate of chickens forty feet. Think of it as cardio."
The look he gave me could have stripped paint, which, given what we'd spent all morning doing, felt thematically rich.
We had primed the entire front of the house.
Both parlors, the hall, the grand staircase Sully rebuilt tread by tread with his own two hands, all of it wearing a fresh coat of bonding primer the color of skim milk.
The fumes had chased us out to the workshop.
The windows stood propped to breathe. And the front door I had left open to the morning, wide on its hinges so the new coat could cure.
We carried the crate up together, one of us at each end, the hens grumbling and shifting their weight in that disgruntled way hens have, like a committee that has not been consulted.
Dozer escorted us. Three legs and an opinion, that dog, and the opinion today was that six clucking strangers in a box were the most interesting thing to ever happen to him.
He hopped alongside the crate with his ears up and his whole back half wagging, which on a tripod dog is a feat of engineering.
"Keep him back," Marcus said.
"He's fine. He's curious."
"He's a dog. They're birds. There's a long history."
"Dozer would never. Look at his face. That is a gentle soul."
We set the crate down by the straw bales. I crouched to unlatch it, phone already up and rolling, my voice sliding into the warm bright register I keep for the camera.
"Okay, friends, gather round, because today the Hartwell House is hosting some very special guests.
Six hens, on loan, here to raise money so that the kids of Pinewood Ridge can have all the books their hearts desire.
Say hello to the ladies. We've got Henrietta.
We've got Nugget, which, sorry, dark, but accurate.
We've got Beyoncé, obviously, the one giving you attitude. And this is Marcus, who is thrilled."
I panned to him. He did not perform thrilled. He stood with his arms crossed and his jaw set like a man waiting out a weather event, and the comment section, I already knew, would lose its collective mind over exactly that.
Then three things happened so close together that my brain only filed them as separate later, slowed down and frame by frame.
Dozer barked, one joyful cannon shot of a bark. I lifted the crate lid. And Beyoncé, who I want to stress had attitude, took one look at the open sky and the barking dog and decided that the safest place in the entire world was the large dark rectangle in the front of the house.
She went up and over the straw bale in a beat of wings, hit the porch steps running, and vanished through the open door into my freshly painted house.
There was a pause. A held breath. Even Dozer froze.
"Don't," Marcus said.
"I'm not doing anything."
"Don't let the others"
The other five let themselves. That's the thing nobody tells you about hens.
They have no individual ideas, only weather, and when one of them moves the rest become the same moving thing.
Henrietta went next, then Nugget, then the three I hadn't even finished naming, a feathered stampede of pure mob instinct, up the steps and over the threshold and gone, into a hundred-year-old Victorian wearing fresh primer on every surface a bird could reach.
I looked at Marcus. Marcus looked at the door. Somewhere inside the house, something fell over.
"So," I said.
He was already moving.
I have replayed the next ten minutes more times than I will admit, and I still cannot tell you the exact order, only that it was the funniest thing I have witnessed in my one wild life, and that I was, throughout, completely useless.
I would like to apologize to no one. You try being helpful while a man built like a retaining wall sprints into a parlor after a chicken.
He went through the door at a dead run and pulled up short, because you cannot run flat out in a room you have just painted without consequences, and the consequence was Henrietta, who he very nearly stepped on.
She exploded out from under his boot in a spray of feathers.
He twisted to avoid her and put one broad hand flat against the wall to catch himself.
The wall was wet.
He came up with a perfect white handprint stamped across his palm and a look on his face of such pure betrayal that I made a sound I have never made before, a sort of wheeze with a hiccup riding it, and that was the end of me.
I went down onto the porch steps. I could not stand.
I had one job, which was to film, and I filmed the entire thing from a seated position because my legs had resigned.
"You call this helping?" Marcus said, from inside, in the flattest voice a human has ever produced.
"I'm documenting."
"Piper."
"For the children. The books. I have to."
Beyoncé had gotten herself up onto the windowsill and was strutting the length of it like a runway, leaving a tidy trail of three-toed prints in the primer.
Nugget was under the sawhorse. Two of the unnamed hens had found the staircase and were ascending it with great dignity, one riser at a time, as if they'd been invited.
And Dozer, who had finally squeezed through the door, was doing frantic loops of the hall, barking encouragement at everyone, a three-legged cheer section that knocked a drop cloth loose as he went.
We did not catch the chickens with dignity. We did not, it turned out, catch a single thing with dignity that whole autumn.
Marcus lunged for Nugget under the sawhorse and Nugget simply was not there anymore, and his hand closed on a paint tray instead, which flipped, which is how he got the long stripe of primer up the forearm to match the one on his palm.
He cornered one of the nameless hens against the baseboard and she went straight up the front of his flannel, claws and all, and launched off his shoulder, and he turned in a full circle after her with his arms out like he was trying to catch a falling vase, and I want it on his gravestone, the man never once swore.
He just kept making this low growl, this rumble of profound disagreement with his entire afternoon.
"There's one on the stairs," I called helpfully, from my step.
"Two."
"Two," I agreed, dabbing at my eyes. "I stand corrected. You're doing amazing."
"Get the door at the top. Don't let them in the bedrooms."
That got me up. The bedrooms weren't primed yet, and some shred of the renovator in me could not let a hen roost on the one mattress I owned.
I took the stairs two at a time past the ascending poultry, who regarded me with the calm of creatures that had never been late for a thing in their lives, and I got the door, and I turned around to watch from the landing as Marcus Webb conducted the worst orchestra in Colorado.
He got Henrietta first. Scooped her clean off the floor with two hands and the gentleness of a man who restores things for a living, and tucked her against his chest, and she settled immediately, traitor that she was.
He got Nugget with a slow patient corner-and-cup that I would have admired if I weren't busy dying.
The shyest of the lot he caught by basically apologizing to her until she gave up.
He moved them out to the crate in shifts, primer to the elbows, a single white feather stuck to his stubble that he did not know was there, and that feather, somehow, was the thing that kept me wrecked.
Which left Beyoncé.
She had abandoned the windowsill for higher ambitions.
By the time we cornered the last of them, she had flown the length of the hall and set herself down, with the serene entitlement of visiting royalty, directly on top of the newel post. Sully's newel post. The piece of the staircase he had been proudest of, that swooping hand-turned curl of black walnut Marcus had spent two full evenings stripping and oiling back to life with a rag and a patience I didn't know he owned.
And on top of it now sat a chicken, fluffed and gleaming and deeply pleased, a feathered hood ornament surveying the wreckage of her own making.
"No," Marcus said to her.
Beyoncé blinked.
"That's hand-oiled walnut."
"I don't think she knows that," I said.
"She's about to."
He approached her the way you approach the last of anything, slow, hands low, talking in that low murmur I had to lean over the rail to catch.
Easy. Easy now. There you go. And she let him get close, closer, his big primer-streaked hands rising on either side of her like a man about to cradle something fragile and tell it a secret, and at the last possible second she did not fly.
She simply stepped sideways off the post into his hands and let him have her, the way she'd meant to all along, and the fight just went out of the afternoon.
He stood there holding her against his chest. White everywhere.
Primer in his hair, a stripe down his jaw, that one absurd feather still riding his stubble.
Both of us breathing hard. The house wrecked and quiet around us, drop cloth askew, three-toed prints tracking up the windowsill and across the hall like a treasure map drawn by someone deranged.
I came down the stairs still wiping under my eyes, and I knew without checking that the mascara had gone everywhere, that I looked like a raccoon who'd lost a fight, and I did not care even a little.
"You," I started, and couldn't finish, because the laugh came back up and I had to brace a hand on the rail. "Your face. When the wall was wet. Marcus. Your face."
"I'm aware of my face."
"There's a feather. Right here." I touched my own cheek. "It's been there the whole time. Through all of it."
He didn't reach up to find it. He was looking at me.
The laugh in me thinned out into something I had no name for.
I'd wiped my eyes and crossed the hall to him without deciding to, near enough now to see the primer drying pale in the creases of his knuckles where they held the hen, near enough to feel the warmth coming off him after all that running.
He smelled like cedar and paint and the cold air still hanging in the open door.
He looked from my eyes down to my mouth and stayed there, and the whole wrecked house went very still and very loud at the same time.
I stepped in.
I want to be clear that I stepped in. Not him.
I closed the last of it, chin up, breath gone shallow, every joke I owned packed up and left town, and his eyes came back to mine and held, and there was none of the gruff in him then.
Just a question, sitting open between us, that neither of us had yet found the nerve to ask out loud.
"Piper," he said. Just my name. Low. Like the start of something he'd been holding closed for weeks.
I felt the warmth of him at my mouth. I felt the breath go out of him.
Then Beyoncé, pressed between us, decided she had been handled quite enough.
She detonated.
There is no gentler word. She came out of his arms in a full-throated explosion of wings and feathers and outrage, a white storm bursting straight up between our faces, and we sprang apart, both of us, his hands flying open and mine flinging up, the hen rocketing past my ear and over the rail and down the hall in a clatter of indignant clucking and one last drifting feather that took its sweet time coming down.
We stood there. Six feet apart now, where a breath ago there'd been nothing. Chests heaving. Staring at each other across all that ruin and noise, the almost between us finally too big to keep pretending away, both of us knowing it now, neither of us able to say a word.
The feather touched down.
Somewhere out in the yard, Birdie's truck honked twice, cheerful, right on time.