“What kind of bird is that?”
I listened. Up in the oak tree, a mockingbird was going through every song it knew: a cardinal, a blue jay, a robin, the squeak of a gate, something that sounded almost like a car alarm. Over and over, running through its whole list, one song after another.
“It’s a mockingbird, Daddy.”
“A mockingbird,” he repeated softly.
He stood there in the parking lot of a medical building on South National Avenue, in his pressed white shirt and his good khakis, with his head tilted back and his eyes closed, listening like it was the first bird God ever made.
I had to look at the pavement for a minute.
Mom used to love mockingbirds. She kept a bird feeder outside the kitchen window of their house on Elm Street for thirty years, and she could name every bird that came to it. When she was dying, in the hospice room at Mercy Hospital, a mockingbird sat outside her window every morning for a week and sang. She said it was the prettiest sound she’d ever heard.
Dad hadn’t been able to hear it. That was before he got his first hearing aids.
He told me once, after she passed, that he’d sat by her bed every morning and watched her smile at that bird, and he couldn’t hear a single note.
Now he stood under the oak tree and listened to the mockingbird for a long, long time.
“Your mama would’ve known what all those songs were,” he said quietly. “Every one of ’em.”
“I know, Daddy.”
He opened his eyes and looked at me. He’d heard me. He’d heard me say it in a normal voice, standing three feet away.
He put his arms around me right there in the parking lot and held on.
On Saturday morning, Josh drove out to his mother’s place, and I rode along.
Cindy lives in a tan double-wide on two acres outside Rogersville, about three miles from Uncle Gene’s farm. The yard is full of ceramic geese, wind chimes, and a sign by the porch that says THIS IS MY HAPPY PLACE. Her white Buick Enclave, the one Josh co-signed for, was parked in the gravel drive.
