The Lovebird by Natalie Brown

Author:Natalie Brown [Brown, Natalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780385536769
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2013-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

I HAD NEVER KNOWN SUCH QUIET. All I could hear was the movement of grass, the calls of birds, and the occasional creaks of the house, as if it were a living thing that had grown up out of the prairie. Still, despite her silence, I knew Granma was there. In the short bits of time I had spent with her, I had memorized the feeling of her presence. She had a soothing effect on my left ovary. I had grown so accustomed to the sensation of its excitement, its pangs and flares, its melting aches. But Granma, I had noticed, softened it, made it uncoil and breathe a sort of sigh of relief, because there was nothing in her that inspired pity, no strain of sad helplessness, no heart-crushing vulnerability. She had a quality that seemed like it might mend those aspects in others. I didn’t exactly understand it, but already I knew how I felt when I was near her. Showered and with my hair still dripping, I wandered in my lucky red Chinese shoes, seeking her out. I worried for a moment that I had already become the cliché I so feared, the wayward white girl romanticizing a wise old Native American. But, apart from a few cantankerous schoolteachers, I had not been around many older women in my life, and I knew it was Granma’s pronounced femininity, not her ethnicity, that attracted me.

She was not in her room, the entirety of which I could see from the hallway—a bed draped in a quilt featuring a giant star made of scraps from old blue jeans, a nightstand covered with framed photographs of faces I could not quite make out. She wasn’t in Jim’s room, which was opposite hers. Giving it the briefest of looks, I saw a brown woolen blanket, a basketball, and a buffalo skull propped against the wall. And she wasn’t in the kitchen or the living room.

She was outside on a makeshift porch of sorts, a square of packed dirt under a place where the metal roof extended out a few extra feet to make an awning. She sat in a chair, knitting. The dog lounged at her feet in a posture of profound satisfaction, her chin resting on a ball of yarn. “Beautiful Belly,” I said, stroking her enormous, triangular ears.

“The chickens are around back,” Granma said after a long time. She had folded the subtlest of suggestions into her voice.

There were eight hens, round and pale in shades of white, cream, and fawn, with bright red combs, and when I stood among them they made worried, watery warbles. They scratched at the ground and examined it with their beaks. I looked into their coop, a structure evidently fashioned in a spirit of improvisation with assorted scraps of wood in varying sizes and shapes, and spotted one lone egg. When I picked it up, it was still warm. I had never seen or touched a freshly laid egg before. I held it out to Granma.

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