Island Girl (47 page)

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Authors: Lynda Simmons

BOOK: Island Girl
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“When is Lori coming to take everything away?” That was all I wanted to know.
She sighed. “Around ten today. We could use your help getting things packed up.”
“I won’t help,” I said, and she didn’t argue. Just watched me take my binoculars from the hook by the door, and my bird book from the shelf above that.
“Grace, you can’t keep this up,” she said when I got on my bike.
But she was wrong. I kept it up all the way down the walk and through the gate. As much as I wanted to, I didn’t look back once as I rode down the street and around the corner. I wasn’t going to wait for Jocelyn this morning, and I only hoped Mark had some groceries at his house for a change because I was not going home for breakfast either.
I thought I might run into Mark and Jocelyn along the way. But I was on their walk and almost to their front door before they stepped out onto the porch with Kylie, Brianne, and Courtney—all of them yawning and blinking in the sunlight.
“My dad let me have a sleepover,” Jocelyn said.
“Weak moment,” Mark mumbled on the way to his bike. “Is your mom up?”
“She was in the kitchen when I left. Are you helping her pack up everything?”
He looked down as he kicked back the stand. “I don’t like it any more than you do, Grace, but I can’t let her do it alone.”
I nodded because it was true. She would be his wife after all. And I would be what? There, I guess. I would just be there.
“Tell Lori to watch out when she’s moving my workstation around,” I said. “If you bump it over a cord or anything, one of the wheels will fall off.”
I should have warned him about my chair too. Told him that if you turned it round and round too many times to the right, the seat would pop off. But I didn’t. Lori could find that out for herself one day.
“If my mom goes looking for my kit,” I added, “tell her I took it out of the workstation last night and I’m not telling her where it is. Those are
my
scissors and
my
combs, and no one else is getting their hands on them.”
Even if I only threw the kit in the Eastern Gap one day, it was my kit to do it with, not hers. And never, ever Lori’s.
“I’ll let her know.” He gave Jocelyn and the girls a wave and left, pedaling slowly toward the bridge.
“I still think her mom’s a bitch,” Jocelyn whispered to the girls then came down the stairs. “I told everybody they could come biking with us this morning. And that we’d look for the cuckoo too. Is that okay?”
We wouldn’t get to watch the planes, because that was still a secret—one Jocelyn was really good at keeping—but I didn’t care. We could see them tomorrow. Or not.
I looked from one girl to the other. “Do any of you have binoculars?”
Lucky for us, Kylie and Brianne’s mom and dad had two pairs of binoculars, so there would be enough to share. Mark still didn’t have a lot of groceries, but there was toast and peanut butter and orange juice, which was okay. Funny, but I didn’t miss the eggs as much as I thought I would.
After breakfast, we rode across the Island to the woods near Gibraltar Point and pulled our bikes off the road where Jocelyn and I had last heard the cuckoo. I showed the girls the picture in the field guide and told them how to use the binoculars, explaining that you had to move them nice and slow over the branches or you wouldn’t find anything.
They nodded and said, “Yeah, yeah,” pressed the binoculars to their faces and took off into the scrubby brush before I could tell them anything else. They were back in about two minutes, all of them frowning and shaking their heads.
“I think the only cuckoos around here are us,” Courtney said.
“He’s in there,” Jocelyn assured them. “I heard him.”
Brianne looked around. “I hear all kinds of birds. How do you find the one you’re looking for?”
“You have to listen carefully.” I put a finger to my lips to keep them quiet, closed my eyes, and listened. “Hear that? Four notes, really low, all the same. Cu-cu-cu-cu. Cu-cu-cu-cu. Then ten notes, higher but still all the same. Now back to four.” When I opened my eyes the three of them were still looking at me like I was making it up. “Close your eyes. It helps.”
They closed their eyes and scrunched up their noses and listened.
Kylie shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re ...” Then all of a sudden she stopped talking and opened her eyes wide, like she was real surprised. “I heard it. He’s not as interesting as the mockingbird, but I heard him.”
Brianne scrunched her eyes up tighter. “I still don’t hear it.”
Her sister punched her on the arm. “He’s over there. Listen that way.”
Within a few more minutes, all the girls had heard him, and could make out the low cu-cu-cu-cu, without closing their eyes.
“Now all we have to do is find him,” Jocelyn muttered.
The girls headed off again, searching the branches, still finding nothing. “They like to hide,” I reminded them. “And the leaf cover is thick this time of year so you have to take your time. You have to be patient.”
“Come on, you stupid cuckoo,” Jocelyn said. “Where are you?”
“You’re not looking in the right place, any of you,” I said. “He’s over to the right.”
Courtney glanced back at me. “How can you tell?”
“Because I can hear him, clear as a bell, right through there.”
Jocelyn stuck her tongue out at me, then shifted the glasses to the right. The other girls did the same and started checking again, passing the bins back and forth, checking the branches from left to right a little more slowly this time.
After a few more minutes Brianne froze, binoculars pinned on something. Then she flapped a hand frantically. “Everybody, stop,” she whispered. “I see it. I see it!”
Kylie adjusted her position. “What’s it look like?”
“Brown on top. White chest. Just like the picture.” She grinned and held out the binoculars to Courtney. “You want to see?”
Courtney put the binoculars to her eyes. Brianne helped point her in the right direction and after a few seconds, Courtney’s mouth fell open. “I see it, I really do.” She lowered the binoculars and grinned at me. “Oh my God. I see it!”
“I still don’t see anything,” Jocelyn grumbled, then stopped moving the binoculars, held perfectly still, and grinned too. “It
is
there.” She held out the bins to me. “You want to see?”
I stared at the binoculars. Shook my head. “Cuckoos are pretty cautious. He’s probably gone by now.”
Jocelyn kept holding the binoculars out to me. “You don’t know that for sure.”
I took the bins and snapped the covers on the lenses. “Don’t worry. I’ll see it another day.”
“That was kind of cool,” Courtney said to her. “How come you never told me you were doing this?”
She turned to her friend. “Are
you
going to tell anyone you did this today?”
The girls all shook their heads. Probably not, they agreed.
“But it
was
fun,” Kylie said, obviously as surprised as Courtney.
“You’re really good at teaching people how to do it,” Brianne added.
“You should take people out birding and charge for it,” Courtney said. “Make it like a business, now that you’re not working and all.”
Jocelyn whacked her on the head. “Shit, Courtney, what is wrong with you?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Plus it’s true. I’m not working and all.” I bent down to pick up my bike. “But I’m not a good enough birder to charge anybody anything. Maybe in another ten years, I can think about it.”
Kylie looked down at my bike. “Are we finished here already?”
“I think so.” I took a slow look around, hearing waxwings and warblers, finches and phoebes. Even a Lincoln sparrow, and all I could think was, so what? He’d be there tomorrow too. Or not. What difference did it make? There would always be another bird somewhere. If anyone wanted to find it.
I rolled my bike forward. “The birds are getting quiet now. Makes them harder to find.”
Jocelyn narrowed her eyes. She could hear that Lincoln as well as I could.
“Where to now?” Brianne asked.
“Feels like a swan day to me,” Jocelyn said, and wiggled her eyebrows when I glanced over at her. “What do you say?”
I smiled. “You hate the swans.”
“But we love them,” Brianne said, then shrugged, embarrassed. “We just don’t tell anyone that either.”
Jocelyn started to roll her bike forward. “Let’s go do some swan. Last one there sucks.”
The three other girls hopped on their bikes and shot out ahead. “How do we swan?” I heard Courtney asking just before they were out of range.
“You should hurry,” I said to Jocelyn. “Or you’re going to suck.”
She looked over at me. “You’re not coming, are you?”
I threw my leg over the bike. “Not this time.”
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked in her wonderful, blunt way.
“I’m just tired. I didn’t sleep much last night. And I promised Mary Anne I’d help her with wedding stuff today, so I should get back.”
She seemed to accept that and we started riding, neither of us hurrying to catch up. “I wanted to thank you for yesterday,” I said as we rolled along. “For telling your dad you don’t mind living on the Island. I know it’s not what you want and I wish things could be different—”
“One day it will be.” She smiled at me. “I really believe that.”
It was funny. In seven weeks, Jocelyn would start junior high school. In ten, she would be a teenager. But right now she looked like a little girl. Nose freckled, eyes shining—trusting that everything was going to work out fine. And I felt nothing but old.
RUBY
 
I knew there were eggs in the nest the moment the mockingbird launched a surprise attack on a group of tourists. It happened around ten this morning. I was outside deadheading roses when they stopped by the gate, but they barely had time to raise their cameras before the male went to work. Diving, reeling, diving again—moving those interlopers along as efficiently as any of Grandma Lucy’s belly dancing routines, and without a single visit from the authorities. They were birds after all, protecting their nest. Not a dotty old woman with cymbals on her fingers.
To be honest, after everything the female had been through, I was surprised there were eggs at all. With the nest only five feet off the ground, I assumed it would be easy to take a quick look, find out how many she’d been able to lay. But those two birds drove me back before I had the first leaves parted. Flying at my head, beating their wings in my face, making it clear that I was tolerated as a neighbor but would never be a member of the family.
I went inside and asked Grace to take a look, certain she could find a way to take a peek, find out how many babies we could expect. But she shook her head and said, “We’ll know when they hatch,” which made sense but wasn’t at all what I expected of a committed birder.
Then she gathered up the box of Styrofoam balls and dowels that Mary Anne had assigned to her and went outside to work on centerpieces for the wedding—just as she had done for the last three days, ever since Chez Ruby changed hands. She was out there now, sitting on a blanket with a few of the neighbors, all of whom Mary Anne had recruited to help with her endless projects. Centerpieces, table favors—there was no end of silly things that needed doing. While Grace had never been the type to take up crafts, I could see she was enjoying herself. Laughing with Mary Anne, fishing for sequins with Carol, helping Renata with a glue gun—finally discovering that life without a blow-dryer could be fun.
I’d been busy with my own wedding jobs, of course. Trying to shop for a gown and flowers while helping Mark find new homes for the washing machine, the winter boots, the Christmas decorations—all so Jocelyn could have her own room. With my closet bursting and Grace’s room jammed, I’d come to the conclusion that a third-floor addition would be a good idea after all. But the most important discovery I’d made was that without customers coming and going, and without equipment everywhere I turned, this house was starting to feel like a home again. And the wicker couch didn’t take up half the room that old barber’s chair had.
Being free of the business, I was learning how to really relax for the first time in my life. Sleeping in if I felt like it, going for a walk when the mood struck, these were small luxuries I hadn’t known in years. And having Mark around to enjoy them with me wasn’t hurting at all.
I still chafed at the term
caregiver
and refused to put the label on either him or Mary Anne, but if I was honest, I’d admit that knowing one or the other was always around—that they’d make sure I took those stupid meds—had made my life easier. And so far, Big Al hadn’t objected.
He woke up briefly on moving day, shuffled a few things around inside my head, and went back to bed, leaving me searching frantically for a file marked WEDDING VOWS, which I found in the microwave before anyone else was the wiser. But for the most part, he’d been pretty quiet. And sitting at the kitchen table now, with Grace outside and Mark washing down the last wall in the storage room, a tiny thought pushed at the corner of my mind.

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