Byrd Read online

  Not long after that, she got pregnant.

  “I thought we were being careful,” Roland said.

  Elle said, “The pill isn’t foolproof. It only works ninety-seven percent of the time.” She didn’t lie, she just left out the truth.

  They got married and moved into the new apartment, which she picked out herself.

  “Everything’s tan,” Roland said.

  “Caramel,” she said.

  Roland got a new construction job closer to home. He played out as much as he could, while she waited tables and waited for him to make it—that was how he talked—or get a steady gig at least. Then the baby came and he quit, gave up his music altogether so he could spend his nights with Dusty.

  “Why pay somebody?” he said.

  She said, “Are you sure this is what you want?”

  Pete and Golita argued with him. “Rocker to Sheetrocker,” Pete said.

  Roland didn’t care. Just like he didn’t care that he and Elle hardly ever saw each other.

  She gets up and pulls the sheet off the bed. No need to keep Dusty waiting. She slides his present out from under the bed, throws the sheet over it, and carries it into the living room.

  On Home Alone, the robbers have caught the boy and hung him on a coat rack. Dusty curls up against his father.

  “Don’t worry,” his father says, petting him. “The old man’ll save him.”

  Just then his mother comes out of the bedroom. She is carrying something big under a sheet.

  “Happy birthday,” she says.

  She is standing in front of the TV; he can’t see the movie. She is wearing her dotted pajamas. Her hair stands up on her head. She has spiky brown hair with yellow tips. Her eyes are bright blue like the deep end of the swimming pool. Sometimes when she looks at you it’s like she’s pulling you under; you want her to stop.

  “Don’t you want to know what it is?” she says, holding his present out in front of her.

  He’s afraid he won’t like it. How special can it be, wrapped in a plain white sheet like she was in a hurry?

  “Go on, buddy,” his father says, and pauses the movie. “You’ve waited all morning.”

  Under the sheet is a black case with latches, and inside, his very own guitar, black and brown and small enough for him to hold by himself.

  “A travel guitar,” his father says. “You can take it with you on the road.”

  “It’s from both of us,” his mother says.

  “HE YOU,” Dusty says.

  “You’re welcome, buddy.” His father tunes the guitar, then sets it across Dusty’s lap and shows him where to put his hands. “Hold this string down,” his father says, mashing his pointer finger, “and use this hand to strum. Like this, just these four strings. That’s a G chord. Key of the angels.”

  Dusty practices. Playing guitar is easier than talking and sounds better.

  His father goes to the closet for his own guitar. “Okay, buddy. Ready to rock?”

  His father starts playing. His hand moves up and down the long part of his guitar. He makes a lot of notes. Then he nods at Dusty, and Dusty bangs out his chord.

  “That’s it,” his father says.

  His father plays more notes and Dusty hits his chord again. His father is happy. “We rock,” his father says.

  “REE RAH,” Dusty says.

  His mother is dancing in her dotted pajamas. “I’ll sing,” she says. “I’ll be your chick singer.”

  “This song doesn’t have words,” his father says.

  Milestone

  For the last hour she has been sitting in her front window holding her phone and a Rolodex card.

  Dear Byrd, there are so many questions I’m afraid to ask.

  She dials Janet’s number, hangs up. Dials again, hangs up.

  Have no right to ask.

  She dials again, this time waiting for Janet to answer. “Can you tell me how my son is doing?”

  “Hold on,” Janet says. There’s a scrape of metal on metal as she opens her file cabinet. “I’ve got a letter here, his milestone letter from six years ago. You’ll need to sign for it.”

  “I’ll be right over,” Addie says.

  “Take your time,” Janet says, without a trace of irony.

  Janet hasn’t changed. She looks as tired as ever. Even her dress looks the same—wrinkled, like the dress she wore to the hospital the day Byrd was born. Maybe the same dress, Addie thinks.

  “Here you go.” Janet hands her a plain white envelope. No address, no postmark. Tucked inside is a letter from 1990. “It’s something we require during the first year,” Janet says, “before the adoption is final. A record of the child’s development, his early milestones. All non-identifying, of course.”

  Addie turns the envelope over in her hand, again, again. “So long ago,” she says. “Why didn’t you tell me when it came?”

  “I’m not supposed to initiate contact, not with you, not with the adoptive parents. I thought you understood.”

  “This is the only letter? You don’t have anything more recent?”

  “This is all we require.” Janet smiles her tired, patient smile. “You don’t have to read it here, Addie. It’s yours. You can take it.”

  The letter is written in forward-sloping longhand on lined notebook paper. There is no greeting.

  He was six weeks old when he first smiled.

  He rolled over at four months, sat up at six, crawled at nine. Now, at eleven months, he has two teeth on bottom, one and a half on top. He finger-walks—holds your finger and waddles along beside you and makes this sound: ya ya ya ya ya ya. He loves walking. He’s worn holes in his sneakers.

  Addie pictures the sneakers—blue, with big white rubber toe guards.

  He waves bye-bye. He flails his arm and smiles.

  He’ll imitate you sticking out your tongue, but he likes it best when you imitate him. That makes him laugh. He likes to dance, which for him is bouncing up and down at the knees and turning in circles. He likes being picked up and twirled and dipped. Dipping is his favorite thing. Why do babies like to see the world upside down?

  Addie pictures them dancing in a kitchen where everything is bright and clean and the cabinets have fresh baby latches and the radio plays world music. The mother is barefoot, with wavy hair and a bright, full skirt. She scoops him up in her arms, her baby, and cha-cha-chas him across the floor. She dips him. He squeals at the upside-down refrigerator. He is happy. He knows she won’t drop him.

  The letter has no signature, only this postscript at the bottom:

  His first word was “da-da,” then “ma-ma,” then “bug.”

  Addie wonders: a fly thumping the kitchen window? An ant in the sugar bowl? Or maybe not a bug at all, but something that reminded him of a bug. A raisin squashed in his tiny fist.

  And what about now, she wants to ask the mother. What words does he know now?

  Second Chance

  John Dunn starts asking Addie what her plans are. Not in an unkind way—he would never be unkind—but in a her-own-best-interest way, which is almost worse. She figures he’s tired of being sympathetic, tired of being the one to help her carry her secret around, that heavy, sloshy bucket.

  Also, there’s now a woman in the picture, an English professor who dresses only in black. She comes in the shop every night and leaves with John Dunn at closing. The two of them have been talking about the future.

  Addie remembers thinking about the future. She remembers long-ago afternoons, sitting in Shelia’s kitchen, the air warm and greasy. They played Crazy Eights and daydreamed what their lives would be. Addie never had a clear picture, only that hers would be extraordinary somehow.

  “Have you ever considered opening your own store?” John Dunn asks.

  The thought has crossed her mind. She has insurance money from Bryce and no one to spend it on or save it for.

  “I know of a place for sale,” John Dunn says. “It’s in Raleigh. Second Chance, it’s called.”

 
“Sounds like a pet shelter.”

  Second Chance is in a two-story brick building, plain except for the mural on the side from when it was a hardware store years ago. The paint is flaking off, but you can still make out the giant red hammer, cocked at an angle as if it could come smashing down any minute.

  The store still smells like lime, sawdust, insecticide. Even now, customers come in from time to time looking for household items, usually old women whose husbands used to shop here. They are surprised by the books.

  The manager, Peale, dresses the part, in overalls and a stiff white T-shirt and orange work boots. Like everything else, he came with the place. He is tall and thin, with skin dark as walnut, a deep part incised in his fro. He keeps a pencil tucked behind one ear and red-rimmed reading glasses on a cord around his neck. His smile is quick, bright, self-assured, genuine.

  This morning he’s at the front counter rummaging through a carton of books. He unearths a hardback with a purple dust jacket and holds it up to show Addie. “This poet wrote a whole book about not having children,” he says. “I thought poets were supposed to know how to sum things up.”

  Addie wishes she could be as opinionated about anything as Peale is about everything.

  He’s the one who came up with their new window display, “Women Who Write Too Much: The Books of Joyce Carol Oates,” because suddenly they seemed to have at least five copies of everything she had published.

  Addie has been trying in small ways to make the store hers. She replaced the thick clanking cowbell on the front door with a small cast-iron garden bell that goes ca-chink ca-chink. She made a reading area for customers, with a plump sofa and an antique floor lamp and a red armchair. She has other ideas, too: Persian carpets, when she can afford them; glass-front barrister cases; a new name, when she can come up with the right one.

  On the second floor—a vast, open storage area with brick walls and casement windows and oily plank floors that groan—she has carved out a small corner apartment. When she’s lying in bed she can hear pigeons gurgling in the eaves, and mice thumping around, making nests in old boxes of wing nuts and washers—things that came with the store that she has no idea what to do with.

  Peale leafs through the childless poet’s book. “Where to shelve this? ‘Fictional memoir,’ it says. ‘Truer than true.’”

  “Memoir, I guess.”

  “We’re out of room in memoir. Besides, if we call it memoir, people will think it’s true. The regular kind of true, with facts.” He slaps the book shut. “Fiction.”

  “I don’t know,” Addie says. “People will think there’s a plot.”

  She is having coffee on the bench out front, in the shade of the awning. Across the street, a beggar takes up his post by the hotdog stand. He’s there every day in his feed cap and grimy T-shirt, rattling his soup can, singing his song. Wanna get me a hotdog, uh-huh (clank clank clank), quarter short. The sycamore tree in the background is full of crows—Addie saw them fly in but she can’t see them now; they’re hiding in the fat leaves. She imagines them hunched together, spying on the beggar, waiting for him to spill one of his coins.

  This is her favorite time of day: Hillsborough Street waking up. Down the block, three girls sleepwalk into the coffee shop. A couple comes out buzzing. A woman in high-heeled sandals trip-trops down the sidewalk, chattering into a cell phone. A man in an SUV rolls up to the traffic light and lowers his window. He is bald, with a pink bullet-shaped head—probably he shaves it so that people will think going bald was his idea. “Hey, sweet thang,” he calls, and the cell phone woman looks up, but she isn’t the one he means. He’s calling at a cop reading meters.

  The cop calls back, “Why don’t you get your hair cut?”

  An ordinary day. An ordinary life. Exactly what she never thought she wanted.

  Lullaby

  Dusty’s mom talks while she drives. She says, “You can’t let your heart stay broken your whole life.” She says, “You have to know when to cut your losses.”

  They are on a long highway, driving with the windows rolled down because there’s no air conditioning and it’s night and his mom says he should try and go to sleep but he never sleeps in the car. He likes to look at things. Besides, how can he sleep when she keeps talking?

  “When to hold and when to fold,” she says. Her hair is sweaty and flat, the little spikes all wilted. The tattoo on her neck looks like a polka dot. A ladybird, she calls it.

  What Dusty wants to know is when his dad will catch up with them. Already they are far from home.

  “When to walk, when to run.” His mom is singing, sort of.

  They are on a long highway and she is driving fast with her eyes straight ahead, not looking at him. Sometimes they stop and buy Cokes and M&Ms out of machines. They go to the bathroom and she brings out wet paper towels and they dab their faces. This is the hottest night that has ever been. His mom drives fast, trying to cool them off, but the air coming in the windows is hot and smells bad. At one place the smell is so bad he has to throw up, but his mom says this does not make him a baby. She says the smell is cows being killed and from now on they will never eat another hamburger. “When we get to Reno, we’ll be vegetarians,” she says. “You and me.”

  Sometimes the highway is dark, sometimes it’s lit up by cars, sometimes by big colored signs. He likes the signs that flash. He hopes his mom will change her mind about driving all night and stop at one of the flashing motels. He hopes it will have a swimming pool, and his dad will come, and they’ll all go for a swim, and afterwards his dad will take them out for pancakes even though it’s still dark outside, and his mom and dad will be glad to see each other, and they’ll let him have extra syrup.

  Elle is exhausted. She sinks onto the edge of her bed and the chenille spread slides around underneath her. Dusty is asleep in the other bed. His face is not peaceful like a child’s but tired like a man’s.

  Her aunt’s guest room—her old room—has green wallpaper with tiny white flowers, baby’s breath. Baby’s breath is for remembering. She wishes she could remember something about Roland that would make her time with him not seem like a waste. Anything, just one small memory to rub around in her mind and put a shine on, like a lucky penny.

  She has to go back eight years, before Dusty, to when Roland called her and said, “You want to try again? I miss you.” The way he said “miss,” it sounded like love. He came for her in his van and loaded her things and moved her back into his apartment, and she walked in expecting to be relieved and happy, expecting the place to look different somehow, but it was just as dingy and sad as before. Only one thing had changed: he had emptied out a drawer in his bureau to make room for the clothes and things she’d always kept in a box. He had made a space for her.

  That can be her penny. His empty drawer.

  Dusty, pretending to sleep, watches her through his eyelashes. She’s sitting on her bed with her head in her hands. Her hair is brown with yellow tips and her hands are in it like she’s feeling around for something, and she’s rocking back and forth, back and forth, making a little sound with her throat. Her bedspread is slipping, but she keeps rocking, and he’s getting tired but he can’t fall asleep because then who would watch her, who would hear her sing?

  Red Hammer

  Sometimes it takes a new person to call you by your true name.

  William Glass, Peale’s friend, is a mural artist. He wants Addie to hire him to restore the big flaking-off hammer on the side of her store. Addie wonders if they shouldn’t have a new image, something to do with books. “No,” William says. “Absolutely not. This place is the red hammer.”

  And there it is, the name she’s been casting around for, so obvious it never occurred to her: Red Hammer Books.

  Peale approves, even if it wasn’t his idea.

  “You don’t think it sounds too hardware-store?” Addie says. She has rejected all of Peale’s names—Buddenbooks, Wrinkly Reader, Tome Main, Dustjacket Sins.

  “We are a hardware
store,” Peale says. “We’re the hardware store of used bookstores.” He tells a story about a man who recently called asking for a book he’d seen in new arrivals. The man couldn’t remember the title or the author, only that the book had a green cover. Dusty green, like a chalkboard.

  “Fiction or nonfiction?” Peale had asked.

  The man didn’t know. He didn’t want the book to read, he wanted it for the cover. He wanted to paint his house that shade of green.

  “Book green,” William says.

  “Used-book green,” Peale says.

  William’s hands are knobby, his fingernails outlined with paint. He smells faintly of solvent. He is tall, but bows his head like he’s trying to reduce the distance between him and everyone else. Broad-shouldered, with silver-brown hair. Handsome in an arty, unkempt way. He and Peale look to Addie like older versions of the Mod Squad guys.

  “If I dye my hair blond,” she says, “can I be Julie?”

  It isn’t just a matter of dabbing paint in blank spots. William takes photographs. He makes sketches. He scrapes off loose paint. He draws outlines in chalk so that he can erase his mistakes with wet rags.

  The street people are curious. Every morning they come pecking around him like pigeons. He hires them to sweep up paint chips, hand his rags up and down, move his ladder. He pays them with footlongs and pink lemonades from Snoopy’s.

  When it rains, the street people huddle under the stairwell at Cooper Square to keep dry; William comes into the store. He leans on the counter and rifles though just-arrived books. He likes to collect things he finds in them—receipts, business cards, pressed flowers. He collects inscriptions, copying them into the blue spiral notebook he carries around everywhere.

  He shows Addie this one from Sister to Sister: Women Write about the Unbreakable Bond.

  Christmas 1995. Maybe this book will help explain our friendship. Read it when you need encouragement. My sister = my best friend. I love you. Love, Leslie