The Birdhouses Dad Sold by Noon

The girl with the coin purse

Around eleven, a girl of about eight came up to the table with a coin purse in both hands.

She wore a red coat that was too big for her and had a front tooth missing. She had walked over alone from the cider donut line, and she stood very straight, the way children do when they have been given a mission.

“Sir,” she said to Dad. “Do you have one for a wren?” Dad leaned forward, as if she had asked the one question he had been waiting all morning to be asked.

“I have three for a wren,” he said. “What do you want it for?”

“It’s for my great-grandma. She’s at Parkview. She has a feeder on the window and she says the wrens fuss at her.” The girl swallowed. “She doesn’t have a yard anymore, but she has a balcony.”

“A balcony,” Dad said. “A balcony will do.” He picked a small blue house off the middle row. The roof was white, and a little round pencil mark showed where he had once drawn a bird on the front.

“Wren houses go in a spot out of the wind,” he said. “Under an eave is good. Not too close to the feeder, because wrens are fussy about neighbors. Hole’s an inch and an eighth. It keeps the big birds out.”

“How much is it?” the girl asked.

“Eighteen,” I said, because that was the number on the card. She opened her coin purse. She turned it upside down in her palm and counted. Three quarters. A dime. Two nickels. A whole mess of pennies.

She put her finger on each one and moved it to the table. When she was done, she looked at what she had counted and her chin started to shake.

“I’ve got four dollars and twenty-two cents,” she said. “I thought… I thought they’d be like a dollar.”

I started to say something. I do not know what. Dad lifted one hand an inch off the table.

“Young lady,” he said. “That is exactly right.” She stared at him.

“For a wren house,” he said, “four twenty-two is the price. The card is wrong. My son wrote the card.”

I looked at him. He did not look at me.

He took the coins, all of them, the pennies too, and he slid them into the cash tin as carefully as if they were folded bills. Then he took a carpenter’s pencil from his shirt pocket, the stub of it, and turned the little blue house over in his hands.

Under the word “wren” and the year, he wrote in his careful railroad hand: for Ellie’s great-grandma.

“Now it’s hers and the wren’s,” Dad said, and he put it into the girl’s two hands. “You tell your grandma to wait until April before she gets her hopes up. They take their time.”

The girl held it against her coat like a loaf of bread. She said, “Thank you, sir,” in a very small voice, and she walked back across the lot without looking at anybody.

I had to look at the school roof for a good minute.