The Milk of Birds (17 page)

“We'll stop when we get a puppy, meanie,” Dad said.

“Poodles don't shed,” she said.

“Poodles?” said Dad, as if she'd suggested a python. “Sheepdog.”

“Let's go see who's at the animal shelter,” Mom said.

Todd and I looked at Dad. We'd won! She was giving in.

“Meanie,” Dad said.

Telling the story to Parker, I remember how hard it is to call someone “meanie” when they call you “cupcake.”

Dad said it louder. “Meanie!”

I looked at Todd, who seemed sort of confused. Then we both said, “Meanie!”

Mom stood up, folded her napkin, and carried her dinner plate to the sink. “I don't have to put up with this,” she said. “You can practice your caregiving skills,” she said to Dad. To us, she
said, “I love you, and I'll be back.” She picked up her purse and her car keys and walked out the door.

“Good for her,” Parker says. I like him for saying that. “Were you scared?”

Stunned mostly. Dad pushed his plate to the center of the table and said, “Let's get a puppy.”

That night we drove to five pet stores, but none of them had sheepdogs. At one place we tried to talk Dad into a Lab, black as an Oreo and soft as if you'd dunked him in milk. But Dad wanted nothing but a sheepdog.

When we got back, Mom wasn't home, and I started to cry. Dad had bought us giant milkshakes, but my nose was so stuffed up I could hardly taste mine. Then he let us skip teeth brushing, but my teeth felt furry all night. Nothing felt right—no stories, no rubbing noses, and he got our pajama tops and bottoms mixed up and even forgot Todd's sleep pants, which are like a diaper, so Todd wet his bed.

I did too, but I don't confide that to Parker. I tell him that Todd had to wear sleep pants until he was eleven, but I swear him to secrecy so Todd doesn't kill me.

Mom noticed as soon as she walked in the door, Sunday afternoon.

“You bought a sheepdog,” she said, sniffing.

“Couldn't find one,” Dad said. Then he told her the whole story, and we all started laughing, especially when she tickled Todd and me and said, “Puppies! Who needs puppies? We've already got two.” She changed the sheets, and everything smelled right again. Not for long, though. That was the summer before third grade.

“My parents are so boring,” Parker says. “Though once my mom got so mad at my dad that she smashed her coffee mug on the floor.”

“I thought you were going to say she threw her coffee in his face.”

“He wasn't even in the house,” Parker says.

When my parents were divorcing, what Mom wanted most was us, but Dad threatened to bring up the weekend she abandoned us to show she was an unfit parent, so she gave him the good car and the joint savings and some other stuff. I wasn't supposed to hear, but I did—well, overhear.

“So he's the meanie,” Parker says.

As soon as Dad got his own place, I thought he'd buy a puppy, but instead Sharon moved in, and she doesn't want anything messier than tropical fish in her living room. Maybe she jumps up and down when Dad walks in the door.

All of a sudden my eyes start to sting, and all I want to do is talk about those wishy-washy Byzantines.

Dear Nawra,

I would love to fly beside you! Really, if I were a kite, I'd sail over the ocean and swoop down in Sudan and bring you back here. And your mother and Adeeba. And Hassan and Zeinab. Anybody else? Of course, if I were a kite, Mom would be holding the string like a leash, which means I wouldn't be allowed beyond the end of the block. I know, I know, if you've got a mother around, you don't have to worry. Because she does enough worrying for the whole universe.

True story. Todd was being nice for once, and as we were heading to the table, he told me that his friend Alfredo asked him, “How's your dishy sister?” Mom had her antennae out, as usual, but she was emptying the dishwasher, so she overheard wrong. She didn't say anything at first, but right in the middle of dinner, she burst out, “Tell Alfredo your sister isn't ditzy!”

It was sweet, right? She was holding a taco, and she was so upset that the taco shell shattered and all this meat and cheese and lettuce and tomato and corn-chippy stuff rained down in her lap.

“Shit,” she said. Then, “You didn't hear that.”

Todd and I cracked up.

“
Dishy
, Mom,” Todd said. “As in
hot
. Alfredo's dad is from
England. Which explains Alfredo's strange taste in sausages and girls.”

I kicked Todd under the table. I'm not sure that “dishy” made Mom feel any better because she's always telling me to keep my belly button covered and not wear makeup to school, though I finally found some lipstick with sunscreen, SPF 15, so it's medicine. But Mom's worries don't come out of nowhere. Sometimes I feel ditzy. Or maybe I act that way because ditzy is better than just plain dumb. I looked up “ditzy” in the dictionary for you and Adeeba, so you don't have to ask one of those superserious
khawaja
; it means “silly or scatterbrained.”

Last month Chloe invited me to go with her to a party at the country club her father joined so he can let his boss beat him at golf. I didn't know most of the kids there. They sort of sniffed when I said I was going to summer school and not tennis camp or lacrosse camp or Europe.

One guy actually said, “That's what I miss about public school, having stupid people in your class. It helps the curve.”

Usually when somebody says something mean, I can't think of a comeback, except “asshole,” which I don't say out loud because I might get beat up. But this time, I said, “Remember when you're pointing at me, you've got four fingers pointing back in your own direction.” Thank you, Nawra.

“Touché,” one of the kids said.

Another said, “Right on, K. C.”

I was the hero of the party. Someone even told the guy, “You are such an asshole, Will.” But Chloe and I left pretty soon after that.

Truth is, I almost flunked summer school. Even after Mom
made me get up every day before she left for work for a one-hour study hall at the dining room table and then another one at night after dinner.

Now I can't try out for cross-country in the fall—Mom's rules. I'm really a sprinter, but last spring I ran a 1,600 meters and came in second. I thought I'd try 5Ks this fall, at least build some wind, but Mom says she doesn't want my every afternoon and Saturday tied up in practice.

She'd rather handcuff me to my desk. “Let's get the academics on track first,” she says.

Gotta go now.

S
EPTEMBER
2008

I wake without chills, warmed by the sun through the plastic. My mother is sitting.

“Good morning,” I say. “Latrine?”

She shakes her head. She limps there on her own now. Still she does not speak. When people greet her, she bows slightly in their direction and draws her
tobe
more tightly around her head. In Umm Jamila such silence would have offended, but here we grow used to living among ghosts.

The bell clangs softly from afar. I shake Adeeba. She sits up awake, like a
khawaja
umbrella when it opens. Just the opposite of Meriem, who loved her sleep so much she curled around it in the morning, refusing to let it go.

“School,” Adeeba says. She grabs the cowbell Si-Ahmad has given her and leaves our shelter. She rattles her bell, as all the teachers do, so that none can escape the call to school. Some days she walks through our section shaking the bell hard by the shelters of parents who keep their children out of class. And by Halima, who complains of the noise.

She tosses the bell inside. “I must run to the schoolhouse,” she says. “No wood.”

She looks at my mother. “Do not let her go,” Adeeba says.

I get to my feet slowly. The fire has died, so we have no tea.
I should have gone yesterday.
Do not delay today's work for tomorrow,
my grandmother always said, God's mercy upon her.

I pull aside the cloth at the opening of our shelter and step over the puddle. It is a relief to have a break from rain.

Many are moving in the sideways light of morning.

My urge to make water is so strong I must hurry to the latrines. Zeinab and Hassan run by my side like little goats.

The stink greets us before we leave the line of shelters. “Go elsewhere,” people say. They talk through cloth pulled over their faces. The latrines have overflowed in the night.

I tell Hassan to bring Zeinab to our shelter. I cannot wait for elsewhere, so I wade behind the straw screen. There I squat, but not much, for I do not want to fall into the muck.

The stink follows me like a shadow. Near our shelter, Hassan tips the jerry can so I may rinse my hands, and I ask him to splash my feet as well. I wet a small piece of demuria cloth and clean Zeinab's eye.

“The flies will have to go someplace else for their breakfast,” I say. “Where is your uncle?”

“In the market,” Hassan says. “I must join him.”

He draws a small, sharp breath. He does not like the work his uncle has given him, sharpening the knife and holding the legs of the animals while his uncle slits their throats. The hand suffers at work, but the mouth still must eat.

“He told Zeinab that she must get us wood,” Hassan says. “I thought she could go with you.”

I look to the sky. The rains will come again, but if we leave now, we will return before late,
inshallah
.

“We will go together,” I say.

Hassan hugs his sister and runs toward the market.

Inside, I brush Zeinab's hair. My mother watches us. I feel something rising in her, but it does not reach the top. She turns away.

“Adeeba can get us water after her class,” I say as I wrap four dried figs in the end of my
tobe
.

Adeeba can scold me about wood tonight while we drink tea.

Dear Nawra,

Mom hired me a tutor, the younger brother of Todd's friend Gregory. I assumed Parker was going to be like Todd, so full of his own wonderfulness that it spills all over the floor just because he won a five-hundred-dollar prize for his essay about Civil War amputations. Not my type. To tell the truth, I didn't really know what type Parker was, since I'd just seen him here and there when Gregory was getting picked up or dropped off. I knew he didn't wear bow ties or read encyclopedias in the bathroom because Gregory used to complain that Parker was always borrowing his Star Wars stuff and beating him at Empire at War.

I hate video games. Whose bright idea was it to make killing people fun?

Parker turns out to be another smart person I like.

He's very quiet when you first meet him—the opposite of a nosey Parker. People who know his reputation probably think he's computing the square root of a gazillion in his head. But really he's shy and just wishing you would turn into a book. He even said, “A nice thing about a book is it shuts up when you close it.”

Teasing him is so much fun. When he was trying to give me
a dose of ancient Greece, I made up this story that we had lived in Athens for a year while Dad opened a SuperOffice franchise. Finally Parker figured out that was the year Todd and Gregory were drummed out of Boy Scouts for refusing to sell popcorn and spreading bad attitude. After that he looked at me kind of sideways, never sure when I might be telling him a whopper.

This isn't lying, Nawra; it's fiction, when you make the truth a little more interesting.

The downside of tutoring is that it's one more afternoon a week that I can't help Mrs. Clay. She said she doesn't mind taking Wally to the pool, though no way is she waddling around in a bathing suit. “It's bad enough I've got a medicine ball for a belly,” she said, “and these elephant legs . . .” She lifted the hem of her gypsy skirt to show me the popovers where her ankles used to be.

“It all shrinks back, mostly,” Mom told me, but it made me a little more skeptical about the wonders of the uterus.