The Milk of Birds (13 page)

Dad's grass is so green. Sharon subscribes to ChemLawn. If a donkey ate it, he'd probably keel over and die.

Nawra didn't say anything about being raped, but then I
wouldn't either. Imagine washing out your bloody pads and hanging up them up to dry. Here even hamburger comes with a disposable wrapper. I know, I know, there's nothing shameful about menstruation. Emily thinks it should be “womenstruation.”

“How's the book?” Mom asks.

“It makes me want to bark.”

She rummages in her purse. “I've still got
Sudan and the Crisis
—”

“Boring. Why doesn't anyone write about people like Nawra?”

“You could,” Mom says.

Right. I turn back to my page. The hound has now treed a squirrel.

I suppose I should be grateful for Mom's library purse. Once Dad dragged me to a sales presentation and handed me a pad of a thousand colored sticky notes and a pen because he forgot to bring anything for me to do. I laid them like tile all over the carpet—a really cool pattern. But he was pissed, especially when he was peeling them off the floor.

Dad drives up with Sharon in her red Mazda. We stand, everybody stiff as straws. Dad gives Todd and me fist bumps. “How was the, uh, lecture?” He raises his eyebrows.

“Interesting,” I say.

“Hi, guys,” Sharon says. She's carrying a pint-size shopping bag with gold handles and gold stripes.

“Wednesday,” Dad says to Mom, “I can't pick them up until seven thirty.”

“Should I feed them?”

“We'll go out to dinner,” Sharon says.

“K. C. has a math test on Thursday,” Mom says.

“In summer?” Sharon says. “That is too cruel.”

“Exactly,” I say.

Dad unlocks the door, and Sharon darts inside to punch in the alarm code.

On the step, Mom hands Dad a brochure. “From the neuropsychologist I told you about.”

Dad glances at the brochure, then fans himself with it. “Too damn hot,” he says. “Come inside.”

That's a new one; usually Mom doesn't cross the threshold. In the living room she gives us our good-bye hugs; in other words,
Adios, you two, and run along.
But Todd and I want to know what's up, so we plop on the sofa, which is always fun since Sharon plumps the cushions to a high poof.

“How much?” Dad asks.

“Two thousand,” Mom says. Standing by the TV, Sharon shakes her head.

“You're kidding,” Dad says.

“Ten hours of tests and interviews,” Mom says. “Then the neuropsychologist meets with us and writes a report for the school system with recommendations. There's tutoring, too.”

“At, what, three hundred bucks an hour?”

“Eighty-five,” Mom says.

Great. Now Sharon's going to hate me. She's this big cruise person from when she was single, knows all the ships; she's been trying to get Dad on a Princess tour of Greek islands.

“Won't the school system test for free?” Dad says.

“They told me to wait and see how the first marking period of high school goes,” Mom says.

“They know,” Dad says.

“They've been telling me to wait and see for five years,” Mom says. “They can't blame the stress of divorce anymore.”

“What about the stress of living with you?” Dad says.

Mom doesn't say anything at first. Sometimes I think she has skin made out of elephant tusks. Very quietly, she says, “This isn't about us. It's about our daughter and her enormous, untapped potential.”

For a moment I imagine myself a big pile of shale waiting for someone to drill through the cap layer and strike oil.

“I'll do her homework for a grand,” Todd says. “I already do half of it.”

“You do not,” I hiss at him. Emily does.

The look Mom gives him shuts him up fast. Then she smiles this sad smile at me. She deserves a better daughter. She deserves an Emily. They could read the
Washington Post
and go to the Smithsonian together, and then Mom could dress up for the awards assembly at the end of the year and watch her collect prizes. “You're doing an amazing job,” people would tell her afterward.

“Hire some kid to tutor her,” Dad says. “That's what most people do.”

“We'll take this up another time,” Mom says, her voice tight as a rubber band.

“What's the point?” Dad says. “We're finished right now.”

“Bye, kids,” Mom says. “Have fun.” She hurries out the door so fast I know she's going to cry and beat the steering wheel all the way home.

Dear Nawra,

You got my first letter—finally—yahoo!

Don't worry, I'm not a compulsive liar or anything. Just a few things Mom doesn't need to hear. Most she probably knows, or suspects, but I don't want to rub her face in them.

All these weeks between your news and my news really bug me. You're talking to me back in May, but what's going on right now in July? Emily says I should think of your letters as stars; what we see is the light they gave off eons ago. I'm writing this at fourteen, but you'll probably be reading it when I'm fifteen.

I wish I could call you, the way Emily just called me from genius camp. Ha. Probably the long-distance charge to Sudan would be so big that even Dad would notice it on the bill. Certainly Sharon would; she writes the checks now. Dad gave me and Todd cell phones two Christmases ago, but I lost mine last summer, and since Mom didn't approve anyway, she won't let him buy me a new one until I bring home a report card with nothing less than a C+ on it.

All Todd does is send text messages. Me, I'd rather hear a voice than stare at a screen.

You must be in the middle of the rainy season. I hope the trucks are getting through with food. How do I know that?
Mom took us to a lecture about Darfur, and guess what—the speaker was a stove guy!

Don't buy a mud-and-poop stove, no matter what Saida Julie says. They're a good idea, and they do block the wind and smoke and all, but by the time somebody trains somebody else trains somebody else to make them, the design usually isn't even half as efficient as the original.

If you've bought one already, don't worry; you can cut grooves in the side, which gets more air circulating to help the combustion of the fire. But this guy recommends sheet metal.

When he came home from Sudan with his surveys about how people prefer round-bottom pots, etc., he sicced his students on the puzzle, and they designed a wind-resistant metal stove with a little grate that costs only ten dollars to make in Darfur and saves a hundred and sixty dollars a year in fuel! You've got to know how to use it, though, so after he gets the elders on his side, he's organizing demonstrations in the camps, including contests to see who can cook the best food with the least fuel. Don't listen to Adeeba—you could win. It even matters which way you split the wood.

Then we went to a Sudanese restaurant, but probably it was Sudanese fast food. I hope this is not going to make your mouth water. The tabouli wasn't very good; I've had better in Richmond. Your friend Walida would have liked it, though, since it was crunchy with sand.

Consider that my greeting. You're right: Greetings should be longer than wars! I don't know many greetings, though, other than, How are you?—which you're never supposed to answer honestly. Americans usually just say hi and get down to business.

My dad says that people don't want chitchat anymore; they
want you to acknowledge that their time is valuable. You can tell he thinks his time is valuable. Years ago when Mom went to Florida because Grampers was sick, I got a fever, so Dad dragged me along to a presentation. He talked about a hundred miles an hour, why SuperOffice was going to save this company a gazillion dollars while making life easier for the frontline people, yadda yadda. It was mostly ladies in the audience, and they were lapping it up. Plus, he brought doughnuts.

“Did you know that if you eat a doughnut while you're saving your employer money, it has no calories?” he asked.

He stole that from my mom, who has a whole list of calorie-free situations for eating chocolate. I was lying in my kitty snug sack on the floor in the back of the conference room, playing with sticky notes, and even though I was feeling really crummy, wishing Mom were home so we could snuggle on the couch sipping ginger ale and watching stupid game shows on TV, I was impressed by my dad. When he got his promotion, Mom had helped him organize his points, but he made them fun, joking about bean counters and casual Fridays, teasing someone who yawned, telling disaster stories he'd heard from the purchasing manager for a Big Four accounting firm.

“How'd you like that job, explaining your receipts to a bunch of auditors?” Dad asked his audience.

Hey—maybe that was Sharon, Dad's new wife. She works for a Big Four accounting firm.

Mom won't talk to us about the divorce, at least beyond set lines, like, “Your dad and I will always love you” or “You two are in no way responsible for what happened between Dad and me.” Ha. Todd was always disappointing Dad, and I was always
disappointing Mom. I remember one fight—Todd quit Little League just when Dad had signed up his company as a sponsor.

And then my report cards. Mom always scheduled extra teacher conferences, but Dad always spaced out and missed them.

“Give K. C. a break,” he said. “I got lousy grades all through school, and look at me.”

“I am looking at you,” she said.

Where was I? This happens a lot. Mom tells me I think like a kite, flying over a lot of stuff, so people can't figure out how I reach my destination. She says writing is more like driving than flying. The readers are riding in the car behind. I have to slow down and stick to the road. When I'm making turns, I need to signal.

My dad never signals.

In his presentation—that's where I was—he joked about all the traffic tickets he gets. Dad can make a whole room laugh. He gave little pop quizzes about his products, and the winners got to pick out a prize. The way these ladies squealed when they unwrapped their mini staplers, you'd think they'd just collected a new Cadillac convertible. No wonder Dad keeps winning SuperSalesman awards. He was buzzing when we left, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, and he sneak-treated us to McDonald's, which would have been fun on any other day, but I threw up.

Dad had to spend a fortune at the car wash. I felt so bad. When Mom got back from Florida, she got tight-lipped mad at Dad for dragging me around sick. A few days later I overheard her talking about his barfy car, and she said, “You know, there is a God, and she's a woman.”

More later.

J
ULY
2008

I knock on Todd's door.

“Who is it?” he asks.

“Santy Claus,” I say.

He opens the door but blocks the way with his body, like one of those football guys who stand in front of the quarterback. What is he hiding? I sniff, hoping for pot. I would so love to rat him out. But all I smell is socks composting.

“What do you want?” he asks.

“Peace on Earth and goodwill to all,” I say, which is Mom's line.

“You can't borrow my cell phone,” he says.

“Do you think Dad had an affair with Sharon before the divorce?”

“Christ,” he says. He looks around as if Mom is going to jump out of the shadows.

“She's paying bills.”

Todd shudders. At least we agree on that—steer clear of Mom when she's banking online. She holes up in her bedroom and streams from the lonely oldies station.

Todd steps back. His room's not much neater than mine, although he's stacked all the books on his desk with the spines facing out. On the wall over his bed, among the blurry body parts, he's got a new picture, of a blurry house. But it makes
you stop because you see it through a web, which is all sharp and delicate, with just one hairy spider leg in the corner.

“Cool picture. They going to put it in the
Sunshine
?”

“The editor said they don't want anything creepy with a house in the background.”

The
Sunshine
prints real estate ads surrounded by neighborhood news. Todd's the photo intern: Every week he gets a list of houses for sale, and they pay him ten dollars per picture—in focus, so it's good practice. He's also working the counter at Camera World. Mom's making him save half his pay for college, but with the rest he's going to buy a Nikon D300 because it has a 12.3 megapixel CMOS sensor and a Live View LCD display, which everyone in this family knows because that's all he talks about to anyone who'll listen and even to those of us who won't. It also costs $2,229 at Camera World, so even with an employee discount, he's going to have to work there until he's forty to afford it.

“This is the first summer you've made more money than I have,” I say.

“About time.”

“Damn summer school.”