The Birdhouses Dad Sold by Noon

The call

I sat in my truck in the dump lot with forty birdhouses behind me and my phone in my hand, and I tried to think what a sensible man would do.

Dunmore Elementary holds one every October, the Saturday after the harvest wraps up. The parent-teacher group sets up tables in the front parking lot and sells coffee and cider donuts out of the cafeteria. I knew about it because Sylvia’s sister always sold her soap there.

I called the school. Denise Reyes picked up on the second ring, out of breath, and I could hear a roomful of kindergarteners behind her.

“Jasper Gosch? Oh, honey, we are full. We’ve been full since the first of the month.”

“I understand,” I said. “I only wanted to ask.”

“What are you selling?”

“Birdhouses. Forty of them. My dad built them.” There was a pause long enough that I thought we had been cut off.

“Emmett’s birdhouses?” she said. “The ones with the little names on the bottom?” I did not trust myself to say anything but “Yes, ma’am.”

“My mother has one. It’s been on her porch rail since 2012.” Another pause. I heard her flip a page. “The candle lady called this morning. She has the flu. Her table is yours, and it’s twenty-five dollars, and you can set up at eight.”

“Thank you, Denise.”

“Don’t thank me,” she said. “Bring that man. The kids will want to meet him.”

I told her he was in the hospital and might not be able to come.

“Then bring the birdhouses,” she said. “And if he can come, bring him.”

Friday

The hospital let Dad go on Friday afternoon. The doctor said his lungs were clear enough and the antibiotics would finish at home, and that if he was going to get better anywhere it would be in his own kitchen.

They sent him with a loaner wheelchair, a bag of pills, and a paper that said no stairs, no lifting, and no standing out in the cold.

Colleen was not at the hospital to take him home. She had the month-end close at the lumberyard, a job she could not move, and I did not hold it against her.

I drove him myself. He sat in the passenger seat with the wheelchair folded in the bed beside the birdhouses, which I had covered with a tarp, though he would have noticed by smell.

Dad is eighty-six. He is a long, narrow man who used to carry a rail jack on one shoulder like it was a lunch pail. That week he looked folded up. His wrists were like cedar kindling.

“You haven’t said how the garage looks,” he said, as we turned off the state highway.

That was how I knew he’d been waiting all week to ask.

I pulled onto the shoulder of County Road 1200 North and put the truck in park. I told him the whole thing, from the porch step to the dump, in the plainest words I had.

He did not say a word for what felt like a long time. A pickup went by, and then a grain truck, rattling the windows.

Then he said, “Colleen’s been carrying that whole house by herself, hasn’t she.” It was not a question, and it was not what I expected.

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Month, maybe more.”

“About that.”

“And nobody went out to help her.” He turned his head and looked at me, with those pale railroad eyes. “Not even the one who lives two minutes closer than she does.”