The Birds Grandpa Carved for Someday

Then the little girl got close, and he knew her.

“Well, look who it is,” he said, and his voice was so soft I barely heard it. “Look who came to see me.”

He gave her a chickadee. He gave her brother a cardinal, a big bright one he’d repainted the week before. He asked them both their names, like he did with every child, even though he knew them.

“So I’ll remember you gave me the right answer,” he told the boy.

They both said thank you. Lise had taught them right. Then they turned around and ran back across the green to their father, holding the birds up high.

“Daddy! Daddy, look! Grandpa made them! He’s giving them to everybody!”

Brady stood there by the bandstand with his little girl holding a chickadee up in his face, and his boy holding a cardinal, and half the town on the grass around him.

He took the chickadee from her, gently, the way you’d take anything from a five-year-old. He turned it over. I saw him look at the bottom, at the initials and the year burned into the wood.

He didn’t move for a long time.

Lise walked back to him. She didn’t raise her voice. She has never raised her voice in my hearing in thirty-seven years. She just stood next to her son and said something to him that nobody else could hear.

Brady nodded. He kept nodding. He did not look up.

Then Lise left him standing there and walked over to the table by herself. She went around it to where Grandpa was sitting in the lawn chair, and she bent down and kissed him on the forehead.

“I didn’t know, Pépère,” she said. “I swear to you I didn’t know.”

“I know you didn’t,” Grandpa said. “Sit down a minute. You’ve been driving all morning.”

I am not going to tell you that I felt good watching Brady stand there. I have thought about it a lot since, and that isn’t what I felt.

What I felt was sorry. Not for what he’d done, but for how long he’d been carrying it. He looked like a man who had been holding something heavy for months and had finally been made to set it down in public.

Nobody said anything to him. That was the thing. The people on the green didn’t know the story. They only saw a young man standing still in the middle of a fair with a chickadee in his hand and his face gone white.

The ones who did know, Lise and me and Grandpa, didn’t say anything either.

After a while Grandpa called across the grass. Not loud.

“Brady. Come give me a hand. My arm’s about to fall off.”

Brady looked up.

“There’s one box left,” Grandpa said. “I can’t do it alone. Come help your old grandfather.”

Brady walked across the green. It took him a long time, and he walked like a much older man. He came around the table and stood next to Grandpa’s chair, and I handed him the last box without a word.

He opened it. He unwrapped the first bird, a nuthatch, and held it out to the next child in line, a little boy in a ball cap.