The Birdhouses Dad Sold by Noon

Then Dad lifted the crooked birdhouse off its paper towel.

“Hang it where your mother could see it from the sink,” he said. “Wrens nested in that one nine springs running. They remember it is there.”

Colleen took it in both hands and held it against her good gray coat. She looked at him for a long second. She did not say thank you, and he did not want one.

She turned and walked back across the blacktop. She went the way she had come, but she held her head up this time, and the folks in the line stepped aside to let her through. Nobody said a word to her.

Nobody had to. They had all seen what I saw, an old man in a wheelchair and forty birdhouses, and a daughter carrying home the one he had not been able to price.

I did not go after her. Sylvia put a hand on my arm and shook her head, and she was right.

The count

We counted the cash tin in the cafeteria at a long table with plastic benches built for second graders, Dad and Sylvia and me.

Seven hundred and fourteen dollars and twenty-two cents, counting the pennies and the seed cap man’s tip. Dad counted it twice, out loud, touching each bill.

“Thirty-eight at eighteen apiece,” he said, “and your sister’s, and the wren at four twenty-two, and the tips.” He nodded at the pile. “Good day’s work for a man in a chair.”

He did not mention the money again. He ordered the dumpster for the driveway the next week, the kind a truck drops off for ten days, so that nobody would drive a carload of his wife’s things to the township dump ever again.

It was Sylvia who worked out the rest that night, at Dad’s kitchen table, over a pot of decaf.

Colleen had emptied the sewing room and the attic and the basement alone, one Saturday at a time, and she had left the garage for last because it was all him. Dad had known that the minute I told him on the shoulder of the county road. It was why he asked for his wood glue before he asked for anything else.

He never held it against her. He only made sure she never carried it by herself again.

I put the garage key on a hook by his door that night. In April the wrens came back to the crooked yellow house on the fence post by the kitchen window, and Dad stood at the sink and watched them.

But the picture I keep is the table at noon on that Saturday, empty except for a paper towel. Dad folded it in quarters, tucked it into the pocket of his red plaid flannel shirt beside the stub of his carpenter’s pencil, and said, “Well, Jasper. What do we build next?”