The Birdhouses Dad Sold by Noon

Colleen was sitting on Dad’s porch step when I pulled in Thursday at noon, a black trash bag across her knees and sawdust in her gray hair.

Behind her, the garage door stood open. I could see straight through to the back wall. The shelves were bare.

Twenty winters of shelves, and nothing on them but a few clean rings in the dust where the birdhouses had sat.

“Where are they?” I asked.

“The dump,” she said. “They were junk, Jasper. I took them out there this morning.”

She said it flat, the way you read a number off a bill. She did not look up.

I stood by my truck with Dad’s reading glasses in my jacket pocket. I had only come by to pick them off the kitchen table and carry them back to the hospital.

Dad was on his fourth day of pneumonia. The doctor had said Monday that he was too weak to go home alone, and Tuesday that he was too weak for stairs at all.

Forty birdhouses. I knew the number because Dad counted them every December, out loud, touching each one like a man checking cattle.

I opened my mouth to say what I thought of that. Then I looked at my sister, really looked, and the words went somewhere else.

Colleen is sixty-three. She keeps the books at the lumberyard in town and she has never once in her life been late to anything.

She looked like a woman who had been awake since the Tuesday before. Her eyes were red around the edges. Her good blouse had a grease smear down the front.

There was a pile of flattened boxes at the end of the driveway and another of lawn bags tied off with yellow twine.

It was Mom’s sewing room in those bags, I found out later. And the attic. And a basement full of canning jars that nobody had used since 1998.

I should tell you plainly what kind of son I was that month. A month earlier I had said “call me if you need anything,” and then I had gone back to fixing combines at the implement dealer.

That sentence cost me nothing, and I let it stand in for help.

I did not yell. I want that on the record, not because it makes me look good, but because I had a reason. Shouting at her would not carry one birdhouse back out of that dump.

And I had a second reason, the one I am less proud of. I knew somebody had to clear that house, and I knew I had not been the somebody.

“What time does Howard run the compactor?” I asked. She frowned. “Three, I think. Why?”

I did not answer. I went in, got the glasses off the kitchen table, and walked back out past her.

“Jasper,” she said. “Jasper, it’s just a bunch of wood.” I stopped on the walk. I did not turn around.

“It’s twenty years of Dad,” I said. “I’ll be back for you in a while.”

I do not know why I said that last part. I think I meant it as a kindness.