LATER, AT THE BAR by Rebecca Barry

Author:Rebecca Barry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

HOW TO SAVE A WOUNDED BIRD

Two weeks after her husband, Bobby, left her for a man, Elizabeth Teeter’s cat got into a bird’s nest. At first she thought it was funny, Roger dangling from the neighbor’s trellis like a giant black apostrophe, but then she saw the nest woven into the ivy at the top, and something small, blue-gray, and downy hanging from Roger’s mouth.

“Goddammit, Roger!” she said and went across the lawn to get the bird from the cat’s mouth. It was a baby, probably two weeks old, most of its skin still leathery, with a bulbous head too heavy for its neck. Elizabeth stared at it for a moment, thinking that all mothers have to love such ugly little things. She could see the mother bird sitting on a telephone wire, crying sharply. Roger ran under the porch and looked at her, his eyes like slits.

The baby bird seemed stunned but mostly unharmed, and Elizabeth decided to try to put it back in the nest. She was halfway up the neighbor’s trellis when her neighbor, Allen, came home with his wretched dog, Otto.

Elizabeth waved.

“I have to put this bird back in its nest,” she said.

Allen stood on tiptoe and peered at the bird. Elizabeth noticed his tan, which he kept year-round. Odd for upstate New York, she thought, especially if you were an accountant.

“Look, Otto,” Allen said to his dog. “She has a bird.”

Elizabeth sighed. She used to make fun of people for talking to their pets. Like her father, and the way he would talk to his dog—“Look, Stanley, Elizabeth is here. Isn’t that great? Lizard is here for a visit!”—as if the dog were going to run upstairs and put clean sheets on the bed. But ever since her husband had gone, she’d been just as bad. “How did you sleep, Roger?” “Want some oatmeal for breakfast?”

“Can you reach the nest?” she said to her neighbor. “You’re taller.”

“The mother won’t touch it after you have,” Allen said. “They hate the smell of humans.”

“Birds have little or no sense of smell,” Elizabeth said, quoting a paper Trevor, one of her freshman students, had written about ducks.

Looking like he’d rather stick an ice pick in his eye, Allen took the bird and dumped it back in the nest. The mother bird still hadn’t stopped crying.

“My cat got it,” Elizabeth said, moving away from the nest so Allen would do the same and let the mother get back to her offspring.

“That’s a fat cat,” said Allen.

“Roger’s not fat. He’s big-boned,” Elizabeth said. Allen’s dog was sniffing around her lawn as if he was looking for a toilet.

“He looks like he could eat a house.” Allen still hadn’t moved away from the nest. “If you put a muzzle on that cat, he wouldn’t eat the birds.”

Elizabeth stared at his tight body, his muscled face, and wondered if he had ever kissed her husband. The thought made her tired. There was a time when she’d thought that being left for a

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