Chapter 7
“And what’s wrong with being a Kirkwood?” I ask.
For the first time in our life together, the bird goes absolutely silent.
“Maggie?”
She turns her head away, but at least she’s not struggling against me, so I pop her into the backpack and firmly zip it up.
“Fine. Enjoy your silence in the Hot-Pink Backpack of Shame.”
“You okay in there?” Hunter calls from outside.
“Just the usual Bird Problems,” I shout back. “You know, like tax fraud.”
I hurry to the photos of young Maggie I saw earlier and hide them all in a drawer.
If she’s right, I don’t want him to put two and two together and figure out I’m her granddaughter.
Not yet. I need to know more about this “Joyce Blakely is my mortal enemy” business, and I want to know more about him.
After I do a quick scan to make sure there’s no other damning evidence of my relationship to the egg-throwing menace, I hurry back to the door.
“Did you turn her in to the feds?” Hunter asks.
“Oh, yeah. She’s already in prison. Ten-to-life for a pyramid scheme.”
He grins and rolls in the cage—which he has already set up on his own! Swoon!
“Where do you want it?”
Those words…could mean something very different, in another context.
But in regard to the actual bird cage, I have not given this topic a moment’s thought. “Over here against the wall would be great,” I say.
He gets it in place and even checks that it’s centered. “Anything else heavy I can bring up for you?”
As much as I would love to watch him carry ten boxes of my junk through the door, I want a shower even more than that.
Plus, I’m Southern. If someone is going to do manual labor for me, I feel obligated to feed them, and I am in no position to feed him anything other than organic parrot pellets.
I don’t even know if the water is still on or what’s in the fridge, although if Maggie died a few weeks ago, I’m not sure I want to find out.
“No, you’ve already helped so much. I really owe you one.” I smile at him hopefully, praying he sees the appreciation and interest more than the wet rat.
He looks down at me—
And his face falls.
“Wait. You’re bleeding. Did you cut yourself moving the cage?” He reaches for my hand, which is absolutely covered in blood, and I feel sparks again.
For a moment, I don’t actually know. Did I cut myself? But then I remember Doris—Maggie—bit me at the waterfall. The water seemed to staunch the blood at the time, but the wound must have opened up again.
“Self-inflicted friendly fire. By which I mean a parrot mistake. You know how they say a falling knife has no handle? A scared bird has no friends. It’s not a big deal. Happens all the time.”
We both look down at the excessive blood dripping to the ground.
“Please tell me this doesn’t actually happen all the time….” He trails off, worried. “Or at least that you’re on good terms with the Red Cross.”
“You’re right,” I say. “It doesn’t happen much. She hasn’t nipped me like that since our first week together. She was just startled, and I forgot about it.”
Hunter turns on the faucet, and I’m grateful to see that it works. “Run your hand under the water, and I’ll look around for a first-aid kit.”
“There’s not one,” Maggie says in my head. “Unlike some people, I wasn’t clumsy.”
“You were pretty clumsy when you bit me,” I mutter.
“What?” Hunter looks up from a junk drawer.
“I don’t think you’re going to find anything,” I tell him, louder. “Maybe just hand me some paper towels? I’m sure it’ll stop bleeding if I settle down.” My heart has been doing jumping jacks since he got here, probably pumping out all sorts of extra blood, which I definitely do not mention.
There’s half a roll of paper towels on the counter, and he brings over several and gently wraps them around my finger. “Compression will help,” he says. “Trust me, I know. I work with a lot of power tools. I have a first-aid kit in the truck—”
“It’s fine,” I say.
He’s still holding my hand, and I want him to stay there.
“I mean, it’s not deep. I’ll wash it with soap, make sure it’s dry, keep an eye on it. I’ve had my tetanus shot.” He still looks concerned, so I add, “Hopefully I won’t get rabies. Or turn into a were-parrot. Caw, caw, I want to suck your blood.”
He grins. “Wouldn’t that be a vam-parrot?”
“Oh, please, no. The last thing we need is a parrot with fangs that will live forever instead of just a century.”
He laughs, and it emboldens me.
“See, here I was just thanking you for helping with the cage, and now I owe you twice, this time for saving my life.”
His answering smile makes my middle go all warm and swimmy. “Maybe you could buy me a drink sometime, if I’m not being too forward? Coffee or wine, as you like.”
It’s like a tiny orchestra begins to swell in my chest. I haven’t felt this way since the first time Billy asked me out in eighth grade, as if the world is a new book just cracking open, full of delicious possibilities and adventure.
“Sure. Yes. Wine would be great.” I’m smiling so wide my cheeks hurt. “And I won’t be covered in blood and feathers. Promise.”
“There’s a nice vineyard, maybe three miles from downtown. The sunset view is beautiful.”
“I love a good vineyard sunset,” I say. “I mean, I’ve never seen one, but I can’t imagine complaining about it.”
He pulls out his phone. “Would you be okay with giving me your number? I would give you mine, but your hand looks like a mummy’s.”
He’s right—I’d be pretty bad at texting right now.
My phone is in my back pocket, though. Thank goodness they’re waterproof these days.
“Sure, I trust you. And my lawyer already knows your name, so I’m guessing you’re probably not an axe murderer.
” I pause and look up, realizing how ridiculous this sounds.
“Unless he knows your name because you’re an axe murderer? ”
He just grins in a very un-axe-murderer sort of way. “It’s a small town. Everybody knows everybody. If somebody disappeared, believe me: They’d notice.”
I spell out my name and rattle off my number. My phone immediately vibrates in my back pocket, and I jump, making him grin with dimples.
“My last name is Blakely, by the way. I guess I just assumed you already knew. Again—small town.”
I did know. It was seared into my mind like the lines on a Burger King hamburger.
“Got it,” I say, so he doesn’t learn about the searing. “I’ll put that in my phone once the mummification process is complete.”
His phone pings—not me—and he looks down and frowns. “I’d love to stay and chat, but my grandmother is getting antsy. I was just here to toss some wood scraps in the dumpster, but now I’m fifteen minutes late and she’s pretty sure I’m dead. Grandmas, right?”
“Grandmas,” I agree with newfound vigor.
Hunter looks over to the bird backpack, where Maggie is watching us like a pink hawk. “And if you need a vet, you’ll want Mountain Veterinary. The other vet in town, Wag and Purr, overcharges outsiders.”
“I don’t know if I’m an outsider, if my family’s from here—”
“Are they?” He looks at me with curiosity.
I blush at my stupidity. “Maybe. I think so. A long time ago.”
He chuckles. “Then you’re not from here from here, but I’m glad you’re here now.”
With a little wave, he heads outside, shutting the door softly behind him.
I go to the yellowed blinds that Maggie recently mangled and secretly watch through one of the many cracks.
Hunter gets in a black truck parked a few spaces away from my Explorer and drives off.
A black Lab watches me from the open back window, ears flapping in the wind.
I suddenly realize I’m in a bedroom—Maggie’s bedroom. It’s odd, being in a stranger’s personal space, especially when it’s a grandmother you’ve never known and even more especially when she’s currently a cockatoo.
The blinds are as messy as they looked from the alley, and I can see now that a cat was involved in this process. There are even little tooth marks.
“Is your cat still here?” I look around, suddenly worried for soft, feathery Doris, even if she’s no longer exactly my Doris.
“Not anymore,” Maggie says sadly from the other room.
“I had two cats. My familiar, Artemis, and a young tortie named Moon. My trust left everything to my best friend, Diana McGowan, including the cats. And she was supposed to bring Moon to the waterfall, and then I’d be a cat and I’d be laughing about this with Diana right now.
But I’m guessing that after I passed someone else took the kitties in. ”
That stops me. “Wait. Why’d you want to be a cat?”
“Well, I didn’t want to die. No one does, I reckon.
But I figured that your mama was using magic to hide from me and that when I died maybe Diana and I could find her—and any kids she might’ve had.
Diana still had a decade in her at least, and we would’ve found a way to set up my trust—well, honestly, about like it is now.
Keep the legacy in place. So it all worked out, in the end. ”
The bedroom is neat, with a very bohemian feel.
More macramé, more flowers, more crystals.
The walls are painted a soft rose, and the furniture is old-fashioned: a dresser, a blanket chest, and a vanity with a glass tray covered in perfume bottles.
A big rag rug in shades of purple is placed right where bare feet would hit the wood floor every morning.
Flowy velvet robes with fringe drip from hangers on the back of a closet door.
Everything smells of incense and the uniquely crispy, herbal scent of dried greenery.
This room—I would’ve loved it as a child. It would’ve felt so magical, so mysteriously feminine, like Stevie Nicks’s dressing room.
“So you were all in on the witchy-woman thing, huh?” I ask, getting used to the situation.
Because I’m starting to realize that if I can just accept that my grandmother’s spirit has been transferred into the body of my pet cockatoo, I suddenly have a lot more answers to all of my many questions.