BLACKBIRD
-An Excerpt-

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My son’s stroller was long for the treadmill, but we needed the exercise.  He was a big kid—ninety-fifth percentile.  We’d go five miles at a clip, until my heart leaped from its cage.  Feet pounding, I leaned into the stroller as my boy stared through the window at a blackbird building a nest in the bare oak.  “B—b—bird,” he kept saying.

Snow was coming.  The flies, and then the spiders, had moved indoors.

“Mommy’s on the phone,” my daughter said, entering the bedroom.  “She wants you to come to the phone.”  Brett wrinkled her nose at the mess I’d made of the boxes my mother kept stacked in the corners, the closet, and beneath the bed.  I’d unpacked my childhood, half-thinking to restore the clean, well-lit past, but all of the cowboys were scalped, the Indians diseased.  Earlier me’s were strewn about the room.

“Mommy’s always on the phone,” I said.

My wife claimed our relationship was sick.  The kids and I were at my mother’s while Kristen was with her family, reconsidering our marriage under the guise of a vacation.  She and her sisters, relatively young women, had taken up scrap-booking.  They arranged, then re-arranged their pasts in gingham-covered albums.  Kristen used purple ink spiked with glitter to draw dialogue balloons over our blurry heads.  In fairness, we sometimes said smart, funny things in the pictures: “Now I have to eat him!” above a brook trout I had caught and appeared to be kissing and “Martha Stewart!” hovering over the stove as Kristen stirred a pan of bland hash.

Brett put her hands on her hips.  Jagged blonde bangs hid her forehead like inverted Cascades.  She’d given herself a haircut when I’d momentarily turned my back on the paper pumpkins we’d been making.

“Mommy’s always on the phone,” she said, parroting me.

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