Fledgling
The morning of their annual 4th of July party the baby mourning dove fledged from the nest in the grape arbor that shaded their deck, the one overlooking Plum Island sound. Karen opened the slider to find it perched on the barbecue grill. She screamed for Bruce.
“What the hell is the matter now,” he said as he stepped through the door.
She made a big gesture out of pointing towards the grill.
“The damn thing just took a crap.”
A thin line of whitish liquid ran slowly down the front of the stainless steel cover.
“Hey little man,” Bruce said.
The mud colored bird stared at them, looking slightly stunned.
In a couple of hours there would be thirty people lined up for cheeseburgers, Italian sausages and hotdogs. Karen went back into the house and got the broom.
“No way,” Bruce said. “Leave it. It’ll fly off.”
Karen put the broom down and looked past the bird. The boat and Jet Ski traffic had started early. Everyone was vying for prime viewing spots of Crane’s Beach. Across the sound on Plum Island Point, campers were arriving by boat and setting up their tents. Streams of paddlers in blue and yellow kayaks hugged the shores on both sides, trying to stay out of the powerboat wakes as they cut their way in and out of the mouth of the river to and from the open ocean.
“I called and asked John,” Bruce said.
“Did he say he’d come?”
“Maybe. He said it depends on how he feels.”
Karen turned back to the bird. It hadn’t budged. Bruce motioned to her.
“Let’s give it some space,”
They went back into the house. Karen found the matching paper plates, cups and napkins she bought on sale after the 4th the previous year. She dumped plastic knives, forks and spoons into blue and white striped mugs. While Bruce duct taped flags to the deck posts at the front of the house Karen arranged platters of sliced tomatoes, onions, and pickles, made ground beef patties and mounded them next to a pile of hotdogs and a tower of sliced American cheese. The condiments were already set up in baskets. All that was left to do was slice the strawberries and sweeten them with a little sugar and a splash of balsamic vinegar. She’d made the shortbreads the night before and Bruce had bought a couple of cans of whipped cream.
Every year after the party they said it was the last year until the next year when the holiday rolled around again and friends started calling, and neighbors, whose views of the fireworks weren’t as good, started asking. And they said, “Yes of course we’re going to have the party again,” even though they never actually said it to each other. In fact in the months since Arlene died they hadn’t said much of anything of consequence to each other.
John and Arlene had been their best friends, but since Arlene’s death John had withdrawn. She watched Bruce try to understand, but Karen could see how hurt he was and she was awkward around him. For years they lived with each other, the last few months they’d lived around each other. Karen had spent a lot of time at John and Arlene’s. She’d spent nights there to spell John so that he could get enough sleep to face the days. Bruce had come and gone for short stretches. He said that was all he could take.
Over the years their circle of friends had narrowed down. The couples with children were preoccupied with carpools, soccer practices, ballet lessons, and PTA. She and Bruce, and Arlene and John were the lone “no kids” holdouts and Karen wondered if that was what had drawn them so close. Not that Karen and Bruce hadn’t tried, desperately for a while, half hearted towards the end, until they decided it was too late. She’d actually envied Arlene and John. For them not having children was a choice. Or so they said. And now, in her early forties, as she watched friends fight it out with surly teens who required small fortunes to send them into rehab and special clinics for eating disorders, or bail them out of fender benders and drug busts, there were times when she could almost convince herself that she was glad they hadn’t had kids.
As the guests arrived, they warned them away from the back door where the dove had moved from the grill to the deck rail. With every new arrival, Bruce looked to see if it was John, and when he did come through the door, Karen saw the relief in Bruce’s face, and was slightly embarrassed by his overdone solicitude. After polite hellos she and John kept their distance. She hadn’t seen him since the week after Arlene’s funeral, when he’d had all of her women friends over to give each of them one of Arlene’s scarves as a keepsake. Karen hand washed the pink and orange square of silk and stored it away in the back of her lingerie drawer under the frilly slips she no longer wore.
Bruce fired up the grill. Their next-door neighbor Larry, who traveled from backyard barbeque to backyard barbeque with his own apron and grilling tools, arrived with rolls and sausages from the North End. John stood alone at the end of the deck closest to the water. The other guests either kept their distance or were so smarmy that Karen motioned to Bruce to go rescue him. Karen watched Bruce walk over to John and touch his shoulder. Bruce said something she couldn’t hear. John said something back and followed him over to where she was standing. Bruce returned to the grill just as the baby bird flitted from the deck rail to the picket fence that bordered the small yard. The air smelled of sizzling sausages and citronella to keep the mosquitoes at bay. Karen stood and watched the bird.
“You know what it is. Don’t you?” John said. “It’s a mourning dove.”
He was standing close enough to her that she could feel his heat. In the last months of Arlene’s dying they had smoked some of the pot he bought to ease Arlene’s pain and had silent sex on the pullout sofa in the room next door to the bedroom where Arlene lay writhing in a hospital bed. Karen never thought about what she might expect of him after. She never thought about how she might feel. She never thought. Standing next to him, listening to Bruce and Larry banter about the pros and cons of basting the burgers with hot sauce, she wanted nothing more than to disappear. She forced herself to focus on the bird perched on the fence. It shifted its weight from one spindly foot to the other, and then without so much as a flutter, it lifted its wings and flew away. No timidity. No trial run. It just upped and flew like it had been flying every day of its short life.
John said to no one in particular, “I’m just not ready to do this right now.”
Bruce stepped closer to him.
“You’re not going to stick around for the fireworks?”
Karen said, “Let him go.”
They stood, the three of them, each of them settling into early middle age, silently watching the other guests eat and chat for a few minutes before John left, and Karen noticed how she and Bruce had each added a bit of flesh to their once taut bodies while John was leaner than she’d ever seen him before. Grief? Guilt?
‘Both have their consequences,’ she supposed.
Later that night, after the roman candles, whizzers and sky rockets lit the sky, after the guests were gone and Bruce was inside shoving ketchup smeared paper plates into green plastic trash bags, Karen paused from the cleanup to look out over the water. A line of light glowed through the trees, where rows of cars, carrying families who’d paid to picnic on the lawn above Crane’s beach, made their way back to the main road. They’d gone over there for the 4th, once, years ago. It was so depressing. All those young couples with their little kids. They never went again. Told each other it was too chaotic. Why go over there and pay when they had such a great view from their own house? Watching the headlights through the trees Karen wondered for an instant; maybe it wasn’t too late. John told her it was Arlene who hadn’t wanted kids. Karen was sure she was still fertile. Their problem was Bruce’s slow swimmers. Plenty of women past forty had children. Change of life babies they were called and she fantasized about what a change of life with John might be like. He was so much more of a risk taker than Bruce.
She dumped the last swallows of stale beer into one cup and stacked it into the rest. Someone had started to smoke a cigarette and left it on the deck rail where it had burned down to ash and left a mark on the weathered wood. She flicked the butt into the beer filled cup and went inside. Bruce was tying the tops of the trash bags closed.
“We’re lucky the house didn’t burn down,” Karen said. “Some idiot left a lit cigarette on the railing.”
“Probably in a rush to get one of my killer burgers,” Bruce said.
“Pretty weird,” she said, “the whole bird thing, dropping out of the nest on the 4th of July. Arlene was here this time last year. She brought that pasta salad you like so much, the one with the lemon juice and fresh chopped dill. “
“I don’t remember saying I liked it that much. If I did I was probably just trying to be polite. Frankly I prefer mine with gobs of mayo.”
“Did you notice? When John looked at the bird tonight, it flew away. You know it was a mourning dove. Do you believe in signs?”
Bruce stood at the kitchen door with a trash bag in each hand. Karen walked over and opened it for him. He carried the bags to the cans in the driveway, dumped them in, and came back into the house.
“What a fucking hypocrite,” Bruce said. His voice rose as anger flashed across his face. “No, I don’t believe in signs. I can’t do this right now? How dare he say that? What the hell can’t he do? I know perfectly well what he’s going to do as soon as what he thinks of as the appropriate mourning period is over.”
The knife in his voice cut Karen and pinned her to the tile floor.
“I…” she started to say, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. How long had he known? How could she possibly explain?
“Don’t you try to defend him,” Bruce said. “You don’t know what was going on. He’s been screwing that woman he works with for years. Margaret somebody.”
“Maggie?”
“That’s the one, the marketing communications manager.”
Maggie, a trim blond who wore her hair in a fifties flip, had been in and out of John and Arlene’s those last days, bringing tasteless frozen dinners in aluminum containers with the names neatly lettered on the white cardboard lids: TUNA CASSEROLE, CHICKEN DIVAN.
“He was going to leave Arlene for her. I talked him out of it. Actually I shamed him out of it. I don’t know how anyone can live with a woman for that many years, cheat on her over and over, and then, when she gets sick, bail on her. I told him if he left I’d never speak to him again. At least he took pretty good care of her, but I couldn’t stomach all his my sweetie this and my darling that.”
Karen willed herself to move, but the step she tried to take was more of a lurch. John moved towards her.
“You okay.” His tone had softened.
“I don’t feel well,” Karen said.
She walked over to the sink and threw up all over the dirty dishes.
Later that night they lay together, Karen on her back, Bruce on his side, turned away from her. The thin fabric of her nightgown clung to the convex bowl of her empty belly. When thoughts of John crept up on her she fought the acid feeling in her throat. Jealousy? Humiliation? Guilt tinged relief? She had to choke it down. She lay awake until dawn when the birds started talking to each other across the yard. The birds, she was sure, had their own language. She was as sure of that, as she was sure that the man who lay asleep next to her was a good man, a very good man. And the sense of loss she felt when she allowed herself to speculate what their lives might have been like if they’d had children rose in her again. What might it have felt like to hold a baby in her arms, to have been a member of that unattainable club of mothers? But how could that matter anymore? It was too late – much too late for that.
Karen was careful not to wake him. She got out of bed, went downstairs and out onto the deck. She looked, but there was no sign of the fledgling. Sparrows and house wrens flitted through the trees. She caught a swirl of yellow and black, as a gold finch dive-bombed the feeder filled with thistle seed. Others flew in until they were fighting each other to get to the food. The grapevines that covered the arbor had begun to fruit. The dinner plate size leaves were already aging from bright emerald to a darker duller shade and tight yellow green grape clusters were pushing their way through the dense cover of leaves. By the end of August they would be pendulous and deep purple, ready to be picked. Each year she juiced and jellied them. An unsatisfying effort, she and Bruce always said because the end result tasted just like it came straight out of the supermarket.
She pushed one of the wicker chairs over and used it as a stepstool to climb onto the deck rail. The dew-dampened wood chilled the bottoms of her bare feet. She scanned the tops of the trees and the picket fence that bordered the lawn. No mourning doves. She reached up into the grapevine and felt around for it. The nest was a prickly mass of twigs and God only knows what other detritus the scavengers had woven into it. It took her a minute to get a really good grip. Then with one quick satisfying tug she tore the fucking thing apart.
