Chapter 3
BIRDIE
February came bitter and icy, and March only reluctantly lurched into a wet, gray truce with the coming spring.
April came with rain and the curled buds of new leaves and something like hope. The big coats were put away for good, Lent was over, and I’d actually had time to work on a new statue, a Madonna and child cut from basswood.
Isobel had stayed after a studio session to thank me for teaching the class my guiding principle for sketching, which was to let whatever you were drawing speak for itself—as true for drawing fruit as it was for drawing a bird in a cage.
Don’t draw an apple stem; draw the lines and shadows in front of you, and trust that it will show itself to be an apple stem.
Don’t force your idea of stemness upon it; let it speak for itself.
After she’d thanked me, I’d retreated to my car and felt like maybe I wasn’t a failure at this teaching thing after all.
Maybe the Virgin had chosen to answer at least one of my prayers.
Hope, that guttering flame, had been burning steadily for a few weeks since, which was how I should have known to expect the worst.
I walked into the studio that day nearly smiling.
The sun was still out, and I knew there’d be a fresh pomegranate on my desk, just as there had been every class day since the first pomegranate.
Money had been a little easier since I hadn’t heard from Busy lately, and I’d been able to linger over the pomegranates lately instead of devouring them, arriving earlier and earlier to the arts building just to take my time plucking and savoring the seeds.
I still didn’t know who was leaving them for me, but I also didn’t know how to find out, short of camping in the building all day.
Maybe I could find a way to leave a note on the desk Wednesday night or Thursday morning, although there was no guarantee one of the other teachers who used this room wouldn’t move it or throw it away before my anonymous benefactor could see it.
Plus, while Kaitlyn’s house wasn’t terribly far from Evelyn, I had to be mindful of how much gas I used, and I couldn’t really justify the extra drive just to catch my fruit giver.
Maybe they’d reveal themselves at the end of the semester. That would be nice.
My hopeful mood vanished the minute I saw someone sitting on top of my desk, a lit cigarette in her mouth and my new pomegranate in her hand.
“This thing for you?” She somehow kept the cigarette filter trapped between her lips as she spoke. “It’s fucking huge.”
“Busy.” My voice was a panicked whisper. It sounded like a hiss. It didn’t sound like my own voice at all. “You can’t be here.”
Her brows pulled together. “Why the fuck not? Am I excommunicated or something?”
“You’d have to be communicated with the Church first, and also you know why. This job depends on my having ‘moral clarity.’ That’s in my employment contract. You—”
She cut me off as she ashed her cigarette into a disposable coffee cup sitting next to her.
From the hiss it made, I gathered that there was still coffee in it.
“Your job depends on you having the appearance of moral clarity, and as long as Princess Kaitlyn doesn’t bestir herself to leave her legal throne room, you’re fine.
No one else in this self-righteous dump knows who I am. ”
I looked at her, cross-legged in boots and an old jacket stolen from a boyfriend several boyfriends ago, her eyeliner smudged, her hair loose and messy down her back, and I pressed my lips together.
Then I gave a response anyway. It was an unkind one, a judgmental one, and I hated myself for it the moment I said it, but I really couldn’t lose this job. “You don’t look like moral clarity, Busy. That’s the problem.”
She didn’t take offense at that. She gave me a mocking smile instead.
And that was my same face smirking back at me, a face pale and freckled, apple-cheeked with a slightly cleft chin.
Those were my not-dark-enough eyelashes and my too-thick eyebrows.
We had the same eyes: a light blue in the middle and a dark blue like a storm-choked sky around the outside.
We had the same hair, penny red and indecisively curly.
That was about all that was the same about us now.
Her hair was nearly to her waist, and mine was only just below my shoulders—long enough to wear it back but short enough that two pencils could hold it in place.
She had tattoos up and down her arms, a septum ring, and a piercing in her lower lip.
And while we were both too thin for what our bodies were built for, there was something rangy about her body now, something that spoke of nicotine and vodka and potential felonies.
She reminded me of a stray cat, underfed and mean, and every now and again, you could catch it in her eyes, a reflected stare from the back of a wet alley, a creature that would survive no matter what it took.
“Relax,” she finally said, uncurling her legs and letting her feet drop off the desk. She bounced the thick heels of her boots against the metal front of the desk. Clung. Clung. “I won’t stay long. I just wanted to see how you were doing.”
“Can we catch up after class? Tonight?”
She blew out some smoke as she tapped her cigarette on the coffee cup. “At darling Kaitlyn’s house?”
“No, but maybe a Denny’s or something. A Waffle House.” I could afford that, especially if I only got coffee.
“I can’t do tonight, I’m afraid,” she said. Clung. “I’ve got to be on the road to Odessa by eight or nine.”
“Odessa.”
“Midland. Whatever. I’ve got a job there. But I need gas money.”
I didn’t want to be cynical; we are called to share everything we have after all. But it took a second to force out the answer I knew God would want me to give. “Of course,” I said. “How much do you need?”
She gave me a small smile. It was real and apologetic. “It’ll probably be a few hundred to get down there.”
A few hundred. I tried not to blanch. “I’ll need to stop by the ATM,” I said. “After class.”
“I guess I can come back around then.” She tapped her cigarette again, hopped off the desk, and, still clutching the pomegranate in one hand, walked over to me.
She was slightly taller in boots, enough that I had to look up the slightest amount.
“I really am sorry to ask. But you know, if you moved back to the farm, you’d have whatever you’re paying Kaitlyn to live in her shitty house. ”
“The farmhouse is basically a ruin,” I explained for the hundredth time, my hand coming up to press against my chest. “And I don’t want to live in the hill house any more than you do.”
The farmhouse had been our grandparents’ when they’d been alive, passed down from farmer to farmer since our family had immigrated to Kansas in the 1880s.
But before my grandparents had inherited the farmhouse from the previous generation, they’d built another house on the family property, a long ranch-style rectangle that was called simply the hill house.
It wasn’t on the hill, where the farmhouse was, but in the hill, all the way at the bottom, almost to Stranger Creek, which twisted through our farm like a vein dodging tendon and bone.
The nearly windowless hill house was where Busy and I had grown up, the house she’d run away from at seventeen, the house I’d made myself stay in until last year, when I finally decided it was time to sell it all.
The farm—or more accurately the handful of unsold acres left around the farmhouse, the hill house, and barn—had been left to me, and the trailer at the lake had been left to Busy.
It had been smart of our father to put that plan in place before he died, and our mother hadn’t been in any state to change it when she died two years later.
Not that she would have cared to. It was Cooper land, and by the end, she’d become convinced that the Coopers had never wanted her, had always resented her for not being the practical, cheerful farmer’s wife their son should have had.
In those final, miserable months, she’d believed that even the hill itself hated her, even the trees, even the creek.
They call this place Stranger because I’m here, she’d laugh bitterly before lighting another cigarette.
“Still no luck finding a buyer then?” Busy asked.
“The real estate agent thinks it’s the farmhouse,” I answered tiredly. “It’s a liability, and it’s not cute enough to be worth the work to renovate. The hill house is dated and dank and…you know.”
Busy’s mouth twisted up around her cigarette. She knew.
“Mom sold all the productive land after Dad died, so all that’s left are the hill and the trees and our stretch of the creek.
And who wants to move out to where we grew up?
” People wanted to live in Kansas City or Lawrence or Topeka, not in a town whose most visible business was a tombstone shop run out of an old gas station.
“Then they need to pay you better here,” Busy said, pulling her cigarette away from her mouth and exhaling. “You’re worth so much more than whatever tiny paycheck they’re giving you. But still, thank you. I think this Odessa job is going to be really good. Turn my luck around, you know?”
“Of course,” I said—a habit because I didn’t really know. And then I was pulled into a hug of creaking leather and wreathing smoke, awkward because she was still holding her cigarette, the pomegranate in her other hand, and even more awkward because I could feel her shaking, like she was terrified.
I went still. “Busy? Are you okay?”
She jerked back. “I’m fine,” she snapped.
“Hi,” came a clear voice. “Sorry, I’m know I’m early, but the coat closet is officially closed for the season, and…”
Busy and I turned to the door at the same time, and with some degree of mortification, I realized it wasn’t just any student witnessing my cursing, smoking sister.
It was Bell. Sunny, friendly Bell, who’d paused, his eyes bouncing between the two of us in a way Busy and I knew well.
A brain puzzling over similarities that should not exist and then remembering the uncommon solution to the puzzle.
Then his face creased into that mile-wide smile, and he came forward with his hand extended.
It was so warm and mannerly that Busy—who thought shaking hands was for funerals and politicians—reflexively accepted the gesture, tucking the pomegranate into her armpit and taking his hand.
The stacked rings on her fingers glimmered in the slowly fading light of the April afternoon.
“Ryan Bell,” he said.
“Mary Geraldine Cooper,” she answered. “Named after one grandfather while Birdie was named after the other. You can call me Busy.”
“Busy and Birdie.” The corners of his forget-me-not eyes crinkled as his smile grew. “Like a children’s story.”
Busy let go of his hand and took a drag off her cigarette, the ash of which was now growing dangerously long. “Sure,” she said.
Bell turned his gaze to mine, the full force of his smile bent on me, and I was conscious of a grimy kind of smallness, an unbeauty to me and to Busy, not only in our features but in our lives too. Our scrabbling lives, nicotine stained and directionless.
I prayed then, a quick prayer to the Virgin Mary, asking for the courage to be humble, for my ego to be taken away from me. It was only a proud person who cared what other people thought of them, and I didn’t want to be proud.
But oh God, as Busy strolled over to the coffee cup and tipped her cigarette inside, I was ashamed. And then mortified as she said, “All the boys you teach this cute, Birdie?”
“Busy!” I said, shocked. “Mr. Bell is my student!”
“College student,” she said, like I was being an unmitigated prude. “And it’s not like you’re a real professor. Maybe the scenery makes up for the bad pay, hm? You could ask him to model for one of your carvings.”
A flicker of something over Bell’s face—discomfort, I thought at the time—but it was gone the minute it came, and he gave an easy laugh.
“Any one of the fine arts students here would pay Birdie to be one of her models, just so we could take a look at the inside of her studio. She doesn’t let anyone inside.
Did you know that? Only the people delivering the blocks of wood for carving. ”
He tried to make it better, to make what she’d said into conversation and not insinuation, and that seemed to amuse her. She snorted and then held up the pomegranate. “I’m taking this,” she told me. “And I’ll be back after you can swing by the ATM. I’ll meet you in the parking lot later.”
She left, and Bell and I stood there and listened to her booted footsteps fade away.
“I’m so sorry about that,” I mumbled. I was looking at the ground, so unclear as to what the protocol would be here. This well-behaved, incredibly polite student, and Busy had made things feel so…seedy. “What she said…it was wildly inappropriate—”
A warm hand came to my upper arm, and I jolted like a frightened animal. Bell dropped his hand.
“Sorry,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you that it’s okay. I know she didn’t speak for you.”
My own hand came up and covered the spot he’d just touched. It was only after he’d pulled his hand back that I’d become aware of how large it was. He could spread his thumb and cover my upper arm from shoulder to elbow.
“Thank you,” I said, still holding my arm. I dared to look up at him. His expression was gentle, friendly. “I am sorry, though, because ultimately, it’s my responsibility. She’s my sister and she said that in my classroom. If you want to tell the department chair or Father Alvarez—”
“Birdie,” he said kindly, “it’s okay. Truly.”
“Okay.” My voice was so stupidly soft. I suddenly felt like crying.
In a quick, easy gesture, he checked the watch in his pocket and then replaced it. The other students would be arriving any minute now. He stepped past me, went to the desk, and then threw the coffee cup in the trash can.
Through the lingering smell of cigarette smoke, I caught the scent of him, and it was like smoke too but a rich, heady smoke that made me think of incense. Intoxicating and sinuous as it floated through the church rafters up to the ceiling and eventually to the Sunday sun beyond.