The Sunday Mama Came Home

The feeder

Nobody said anything for a minute after that. Tonya was wiping her eyes with a paper napkin from the holder. Darren still had his face in his hands. I had my back to the stove so nobody would see my own face.

Then Mama said, “One more thing. Who’s been filling my hummingbird feeder?”

Darren lifted his head and looked confused. “Mama, I told you, the birds are gone. I don’t…”

“I have,” said a small voice.

It was Luke. Thirteen years old, sitting on the step stool in his church shirt buttoned to the top.

Everybody turned to look at him. His ears went red.

“You used to tell me you keep it up two weeks after the last one,” he said. “For the stragglers. So I’ve been making the sugar water. One part sugar to four parts water, and you boil it, and you don’t put red dye in it, because the feeder’s already red.”

Mama stared at him.

“I wash it out every three days with hot water and a bottle brush,” Luke said. “Like you showed me when I was little. I saw one on Thursday. A little green one with a white throat. I think it was a girl.”

“A female,” Mama said. Her voice had gone very small. “The females don’t have the red throat.”

“I know. I looked it up.” Luke picked at a thread on his khakis. “I wanted to tell you she was still here. But Dad said you’d want to come home if you knew. And we weren’t supposed to talk about home.”

Mama held out her arms.

Luke got up off the step stool and went around the table, and bent down, all knees and elbows, and let his grandmother pull him against her lavender robe. She held on to him with her eyes shut.

“You kept my bird,” she said into his hair. “You kept my bird for me.”

I had to go out on the porch. I stood next to the red feeder in the cool afternoon and cried harder than I had cried since Daddy’s funeral.

That night

Jeff came by after his shift, around eleven, still in his reflective vest. He found me on the porch swing with a blanket around me.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

I told him all of it. The front room and the boxes. Tonya’s mums. Darren at the table. The six hundred dollars. Luke and the feeder.

Jeff listened the whole way through without interrupting. When I was done, he sat down beside me on the swing and was quiet for a while.

“Two hundred and forty people,” he said finally. “I knew it was bad out there. I didn’t know it was that bad. I’m going to call down at the county. They’re hiring two drivers for the salt trucks this winter. It’s not tire plant money, but it’s state insurance.”

“You’d do that?”

“He’s your brother,” Jeff said. “And he carried a whole sectional couch through that door. A man who’ll do that for his boys is a man who’ll show up for work.”