The Birdhouses Dad Sold by Noon

Eleven forty

By eleven-thirty I had hauled the last of the birdhouses out of the truck bed and set them on the table, and by eleven-forty they were going faster than I could place them.

Then, at 11:42, I looked down, and there was one left. It sat at the end of the table, all by itself, on a folded paper towel.

It was the crooked one.

I had not meant to bring it. I had counted forty in the dump, and I had not realized, in the rush, that it was the first one, the one that had hung on the fence post by the kitchen window for nine years before Dad took it down and put it on the garage shelf to keep it from the weather.

It was painted a faded yellow. The left side of the roof hung a quarter inch lower than the right, exactly the way I remembered it, and when I turned it over, the pencil on the bottom said Wren. 2006.

I had not put a price card in front of it. Dad had said nothing about it. All morning, I realized, he had not looked at it once.

“Dad?”

“Leave it,” he said.

“It doesn’t have a price.”

“Leave it, Jasper.” I stood there with it in my hands. He kept his eyes on the blacktop, and his hands, which had been busy all morning, lay still on his knees.

“It was your mother’s,” he said, finally. “I can’t put a price on it, and I can’t stand to see it go to a stranger. I don’t know what I was thinking, letting you put it out.”

“I can take it off the table.”

“No.” He closed his eyes. “No. Let it sit a minute.”

So I set it back on its paper towel, and we sat, the two of us, in that bright noon, in the loud, cheerful ordinary world of the craft fair, with the last of the cider donut smell drifting by and a kindergartener screaming happily somewhere behind us.

That was when I saw her. Colleen was crossing the lot.

She was wearing her good gray coat, the one she wears to funerals, and she had her purse clutched to her side with one hand and her car keys in the other. She walked fast, with her head down, like she did not want to be seen coming.

She stopped at the end of the table. She looked at the empty rows where the birdhouses had been, and at the cash tin, and at Dad.

Finally she looked at the one left. Dad looked at it, then at her. “Eighteen dollars,” he said.

Colleen opened her purse.