The Milk of Birds (2 page)

I nod.

Adeeba tells the
saidas
, “My friend is an excellent herdswoman.”

I look down. The one who praises himself is a devil.

From a metal box, Saida Julie pulls out an envelope with English writing on the outside. She holds it out so I must take it, heavy in my palm. She looks at me as she speaks English, and Saida Noor translates. “Buy something of what you need,” she says, “but when it is gone, hold tight to the goodwill that came with it.”

Saida Noor gives Adeeba a sheet of paper on a board. Chained to it is another fine pen. She shows Adeeba the name of my sister in America, K. C. Cannelli.

We return beside my mother. Around us talk bubbles quietly, like cookpots on low fires. I sit in the path of my mother's stare and show her the envelope fat with coins.
Money makes ugly things look beautiful,
my grandmother used to say. But my mother turns away.

“Count how much,” Adeeba says.

The coins clink as they fall against one another in my lap. K. C. Cannelli must be a rich widow with many sheep.

“What will you buy?” Adeeba asks.

We look at each other and answer in one voice. “Firewood!”

 

In the name of God, the Merciful and Compassionate

27 December 2007

Dear Madame K. C. Cannelli,

Peace be upon you. How are you? Are you strong? And your people?

When a tree leans, it will rest on its sister, we say. I do not have the words to tell you what your gift means. It is a great thing.

Your sister, Nawra

J
ANUARY
2008

If Emily doesn't get her butt out here, the late bus is going to leave without her. Of course I won't let it. I could faint. Or pick a fight with . . . Chaz.
Nice tattoo on your arm—oh, are those math formulas?
Not that the driver would care if we started going at each other. Kids are the inconvenience of his job. I had him in third grade too, and some parents got on his case for whipping by stops ahead of schedule, so now he never leaves one second early. He doesn't leave one second late, either.

His hand grips the silver handle that swings the doors. They're shut already, but he's just itching to give the final shove that seals the little rubber strip between them.

He's looking straight ahead instead of checking for stragglers inside the building. Because it's so dark outside, you can see everything in the school lobby—the limp flag, the half-empty rack for inspirational literature, the chairs outside the office, all two of them so nobody gets the idea that they're invited to hang around.

Emily is trotting up the hall at last, coat under one arm, backpack bouncing off the other shoulder. She's the only one in the genius club who rides the late bus; everyone else gets picked up.

Just then the driver
oomphs
the doors shut, and the big bus engine starts to grind.

“Wait!” I shout. Standing, I pinch the latches and drop the window. “Emily!” I scream, leaning out and waving her on like some crazed coach at the finish line. She sees me and picks up the pace.

“Sit down and shut the window,” the driver yells.

“You've got one more rider,” I yell back. “Her mom will call transportation if the bus ditches her.”

Which is a big fat lie, of course, because Stacy is probably in one of her yoga classes doing the Royal Pigeon or the Peeing Dog or some other pretzel pose.

I can feel his eyes boring into my back although I'm too busy relatching the window to glare back at him. So he hates me; join the club.

Emily tears out of school, but then she has to stop because the driver takes his time opening the door.

As the bus starts moving, she ricochets down the aisle.

“You owe me,” I say as she plops down beside me.

“We got caught up in a really cool puzzle,” she says.

The matted fuzz around her hood brushes my arm. “Get that thing away from me.”

“How was homework club?” she asks.

“Horrible. Somebody ate the beans for lunch, and then Rosa's phone was going off—”

“J.?”

“G. Rosa J.'s not dumb enough for homework club.”

“Stop saying that,” Emily says.

“You sound like my mother.”

“She's right! You finish your math?”

“Sort of. Want to look it over?”

I pull out the sheet and give it to Emily. Of course she finds a gazillion mistakes. “All right triangles can be half rectangles,” she says. “Think about it.”

When she explains things, they make sense, for a while. Who cares about the area of a trapezoid, though? That question stumped my teacher for a minute, and then he launched into this spiel about geometry in everyday life, and if I were someone with a trapezoidal yard, I might need to figure out how much fertilizer to spread. As if. Hook up your hose to a bottle of Miracle-Gro, point, and shoot.

Emily finishes my problem set just as we turn onto her seedy street. That's the other hard-ass thing about this driver: We pass right by Emily's house, but because transportation put the stop on the corner, he won't drop her anywhere but there.

“Key,” I remind her as she passes back my math.

Last year Mom made me take self-defense, where they taught us to scream really loud (“Like you need a lesson in that,” Emily said) and to hold our keys between our fingers so we can gouge out the eyes of any carjacker waiting to ambush us in the parking lot. Emily and I don't carry those long pointy car keys that can really do a job on a thug's face, but a house key works passably, jutting out of your fist like a nasty spike.

“You got other homework?” she asks as she pulls on her backpack.

“Book report.”

“On?”

“Hoot.”

“Again?”

“Shut up.”

“You like barefoot boy.”

“Mullet Fingers,” I say. “Living my dream.”

“Homeless.”

“No school,” I say as she starts moving down the aisle.

“No future,” she says.

“Maybe you
are
my mother,” I call after her.

She stops on the bus steps for a second. The driver drums his finger on the door handle.

Call me later,
Emily mouths.

As the bus roars down the street, Emily jogs in a cloud of exhaust toward her house. Half a house. The landlord lives in the other duplex, but he's almost never there. Although Emily doesn't complain, Stacy always forgets to leave a light on. Her yoga instructor should teach her the Attentive Mother.

My mother has our porch light on a timer. And she makes the first kid home call her at work. She and Stacy come from different parent planets.

Getting off the bus, I put my key in gouge mode, just for practice. Our street's a step up from Emily's, plus, I know a lot of neighbors since we've lived here almost since I was born. Still, I'm always secretly glad to see the light in Todd's room.

I lean on the doorbell and listen to Todd's size elevens thump down the stairs. Pause, peep through the hole, turn the lock.

“Forget your key, Sievebrain?” he says.

“Just making sure you get some exercise,” I say, waving my eyeball skewer toward his face. I wonder, does blood or some other liquid come out? Maybe you just find the eyeball halfway up your key, like an olive on a toothpick. “Any word from Mom?”

“Start your homework.”

“Yes, sir,” I say to Todd's back. I make a small detour into the kitchen for cheese curls and fridge inspection. Defrosting burger means either chili or tacos.

Up in my room, I make a little bed nest out of pillows and fleece, the perfect place for listening to music and basking in the glow from Hollywood pinned up on my wall.
Hello, stars.
No matter how much I mess up, they're always smiling down at me. Of course, I'd be smiling too if somebody handed me a TV show or a billion-dollar record contract. I totally get why the Greeks loved their gods. Zeus, Hera, Apollo—they were celebrities, almost human, only luckier and better-looking, with personal assistants to do their bidding.

Do personal assistants do homework? Probably not. But I bet you can bid them to look it over.

•   •   •

Next thing I know, Mom is knocking and entering. “K. C., hi, cupcake, it's your turn—oh.”

I sit up fast.

“Sleeping? This is a terrible time to nap.”

“Thinking,” I say. Although thinking what I can't say because my head feels like a snow globe that's just been shaken.

“Our deal,” Mom says. She's looking around, but clearly I haven't unpacked my backpack, since it's still downstairs. So that means I haven't cleaned out my lunchbox and copied new assignments from my agenda to the four-month planner over my desk and started on something due the next day.

Which means Mom owns my Saturday, and I might not be able to babysit and pay Emily back for the onion rings.

I could wave my math around and pretend I did it at home, but since it's downstairs I decide it's better to go for mercy.

“I'm so tired,” I say. Mom takes a deep breath. I know what she's going to say.
If you didn't stay up until all hours of the night . . .

Before I can ask her to take my temperature, she changes her mind and holds out an envelope. “For you.”

“Visa again?”

“Get that out of your head,” Mom says. “Fourteen is too young for a credit card.”

It's nice to know that Visa doesn't think so.

“Save the Girls,” Mom says. She sounds excited, but the brain flakes are still falling in my head. Then I remember. The present. If you can believe signing someone up to write a million letters when they can't write is a present. “Want to read it to me?” Mom says.

Doesn't she have something better to do, like making chili? “After dinner,” I say. “I'm so hungry. Maybe that's why I have a headache.”

Mom punts a couple of pillows and sits down on the rug beside the bed. She leans over and lays her head next to mine on the fleece neck roll.

Crinkle.

Suddenly Mom sits up. Following her foot under the bed, she pulls out the empty cheese curls package. And a plate of crusty spaghetti. Oops.

How many times have I told you not to eat food in your room?
But Mom doesn't say anything. She just looks disappointed, which is worse.

“Read it to me?” Mom says. She's all upright again. “Or I'll read it to you.”

“You read it,” I say.

“You open it.”

The envelope's as thin as old-lady skin. A swell of missing Granny washes over me, gardenia perfume and fingers in potting soil and the way she calls me Little Miss Bright Eyes. Of course, the only one who's ever associated “bright” with me lives fourteen hours away by car.

“How come it has an American stamp?” I ask. “I thought it was coming from South Africa—”

“Sudan,” Mom says, “which is
northern
Africa. But that's a really good question, K. C.”

I wish I could think of another really good question and another and another, and then maybe I'd be the daughter Mom always wanted.

“Probably Save the Girls bundles all the letters together for the trip overseas and mails them out in the States,” Mom continues.

I unfold the square inside—two pages, one all dotted Morse code that Mom says is Arabic, and the other lacy cursive. I pass it to Mom, who reads it aloud.

“Why does she call me ‘sister'?” I ask.

“It's like ‘comrade.'
Sisterhood Is Powerful
. That was this book—”

“What's for dinner?” I ask.

Mom stops with a look so sorrowful, I wish I could turn into a stuffie. I'm already filled with fluff. No one lectures a teddy bear; you just hug it.

“Tacos,” Mom says, creaking to her feet. “I came up to remind you that it's your night to set the table. Bring your dirty dishes when you come down. Please.”

“Sorry.”

“Don't be sorry. Just do better next time.” That's Mom's refrain. “I'll do the table tonight so you can write Nawra. You have the stationery I gave you at Christmas?”

“Yeah.” Somewhere.

“Want me to help?”

“You don't think I can write a letter?”

“I didn't say that.”

“Do we have real taco shells or just scoopy chips?”

“Shells,” Mom says. She looks as if she wants to say something else, but she doesn't.

“Lots of lettuce,” I call as I hear her step on the stairs, but she doesn't answer.

Thank God the letter's short. Thirty bucks—is that the great gift Nawra's raving about? Not that I'd mind. I'd put it toward a replacement cell phone. It's so Mom to send money off to Sudan and then make us eat Cutie Oats instead of Cheerios, everything generic, except for brands she claims really taste better, which is always her stuff, coffee and smoked turkey.