The Wing Man

When my mother died I inherited her bird. Rudy was a parrot, an African grey. My mother told me he was unusually reserved for his species, capable of speaking but preferring not to. During my annual visits, Rudy seemed to take most of his pleasure from imitating the mundane sounds of the kitchen: the thock-thock-thock of a knife on the cutting board, the maraca-like rattle of my mother preparing a Shake ‘n Bake. After the funeral, we only sat shiva for one day, but I was still amazed by Rudy’s quietude, not a peep from his cage as my mother’s friends stacked chocolate babkas on a plastic foldout table. So I was surprised, two months later, when Rudy began to speak to me in my own voice. 

There was no mistaking it. Following a bike accident when I was eight years old, I developed a stutter I still carry. The stutter is severe. My sentences are afflicted with long, breathless pauses, and I am prone to what my childhood speech pathologist called maze behaviors; I will begin a sentence only to restart it, revise it, leave it unfinished—anything to avoid a word I can’t say.

Rudy first spoke to me after I returned home from a lunch date, a second date with Paula, a woman I liked very much but who, when she realized how little I would be contributing to the conversation, began to take quick, enthusiastic sips of her wine. Back home, I tossed my keys on the table and checked on Rudy, who slept in the guest bedroom in an enormous rectangular cage. The veterinarian had warned me to expect some misbehavior from the bird as he adjusted to our lives together, that he might bite me or even even pluck his own feathers, but so far all he had chewed was my doorframes. I worked from home, so he was rarely alone, and my house—a sizable one-story in a suburb of Orlando—offered good sight lines for Rudy’s small, indoor flights.

I opened his cage, and when he came to the door, I scratched his nape with my fingers. He lowered his head and made several brief clicking noises, which was the most I usually got out of him.

“—Bad news,” I said to Rudy, struggling as usual to produce the words. “It was not —I mean, okay —it was not a —success.”

Rudy bobbed his head side-to-side, his black pupils growing wide, and then flew to the top of the bookcase. His plumage was silver-gray, pigeon-like but prettier than a pigeon’s, and his tail was a stunning shade of red. All parrots of his species have red tails, but even though it was a stupid notion, I could not help seeing that color as a choice he had made.

I was thirty-five years old, Rudy seventeen. The fact that he might live to ninety, that the two of us were to spend the rest of our lives together, was a bit like knowing that a light year is the equivalent of six trillion miles. Easy to know, impossible to comprehend.

As I turned my back on Rudy, he made a whistling noise, as if to recapture my attention, and then, with his long neck pulsing from some complex inner mechanism, he said, “It is —I mean —I mean —dinner time.”

It was so discomfiting, so unbelievably strange, to hear my disfluency sung back to me in a creaking parrot’s voice, that I believe I did not move or speak for several minutes. In all the years he’d lived with my mother, Rudy had always been tight-lipped in my presence. On those rare occasions when I visited, the parrot and I observed each other from across the living room, a pair of sour stepbrothers from a poorly blended family.

Now, he gazed down at me from the bookshelf. When I finally recovered from my surprise, all I could muster was the truth. “—You’re right,” I told him. “It’s —dinner time.”

Thanks to my mother’s careful instructions, there was no mystery to Rudy’s diet. He ate pellets. For breakfast, I also served him seedless grapes, and for dinner, carrots he would only eat if julienned. Rudy watched me with one eye while I sliced the carrots, his claws grasped around the back of a hightop chair. I wondered if he could understand that in treating him this way, I was remembering my mother, I was recalling her. She was not a kind person, had been more than stingy with her love, but she raised me the same way she later raised Rudy: with careful, practiced attention. She tried hard to find a fix for my stutter, and I know she was wounded to have failed. The irony was that she had named me Franklin, as in FDR, America’s great orator.

As though he knew what I was thinking, Rudy said, “Well, —I mean, well, one drink won’t kill me.”

And this was especially odd, because he was saying something my mother would say—which was not about alcohol but instead her precious ginger ale—but he was saying it in my halting voice. In the wake of Rudy’s joke, I surprised myself by being delighted. I laughed. I went to the refrigerator, where I had a can or two of Canada Dry, and popped the lid, hoping Rudy would take some pleasure from hearing that gentle hiss, smelling that sugared smell.

I must have been right, because he did something he had never previously done, which was to fly to me and perch on my shoulder. We stared together into the black mouth of the can. Gently, Rudy leaned his head against my own.

I felt a tug on my heart, and I said, “Good —bird. Good Rudy.”

And he clicked his little beak and said, “—Well, —I mean.”

After dinner, Rudy stayed by my side as I thumbed through the dating app. The app was called From Oy to Joy, and it was for ancient Jews like myself, true dinosaurs, who had not yet found love by thirty. I was a healthy, decent-looking guy, well employed in cyber security, so I rarely had trouble finding matches. My problems arrived once we met in person. I always warned my matches about my stutter, but it was one thing to see it described and another to actually hear me, struggling through every sentence.

My first date with Paula, we’d gone kayaking at Wekiwa Springs, where my disfluency was dampened by the distance between our boats. We did more pointing than talking, laughing together at the clumsy way an alligator entered the water. Our conversations through text had been easy, lengthy, and surprisingly deep, so I’d told myself it was safe to just dip my toe into the ocean of a real, in-person connection. But eventually, if you want to fall in love, you have to throw yourself in the same way as the alligator: head-first, full-bodied, hungry as hell.

I scanned the app for new possibilities, but I found no one who was as interesting to me as Paula. She was my age, married once, and worked for the local university as a professor of art history. I was an art lover myself, had enjoyed hearing her talk about the subject with an expertise I lacked. Plus, she was funny. In every single one of the seven photos on her profile, she was drinking from a public water fountain, a different one in each photo. She had a nice smile, and she wore round glasses with little metal frames.

“Rudy,” I said now to my bird, “I mean, —what’s the point?”

Rudy bobbed his head. “Oy vey. One drink.”

Even though we had long ago exchanged phone numbers, I still had Paula’s profile saved on the app, and on some strange impulse, I showed it to the parrot. Rudy gave her a careful look, and then he rattled his wings and made a sort of wolf whistle, like a cartoon bird who has seen a foxy lady bird. It was persuasive, and I remembered how good it felt to laugh with him earlier in the kitchen, a sort of laughing I had not done much of lately except for with Paula. So I risked embarrassment and sent a message asking for one more chance.

I showed what I had done to Rudy, he was part of this now, and he clicked at me once, twice, and then flew to the floor and waddled to his bedroom. I followed him there and tucked him in the way my mother instructed, by tapping his sleeping perch until he climbed onto it. I remembered our first day alone together, when I carried his sixty-pound, wrought-iron cage into the bedroom and thought, in a certain way, my life was over. That night, I don’t believe either of us slept.  

Now, I watched him settle onto the perch. “Well, okay —chalomot paz,” I said.

He closed one eye but left the other open. “—I think, the truth is, —I mean, it’s goodnight.”

Paula ordered an old fashioned, a burger, a side salad. I ordered a beer, the same food. The drinks came first, and when she tasted hers, Paula narrowed her eyes and said, “I think I just paid twelve dollars for an ice cube.”

The restaurant was attached to a semi-artsy movie theater, the kind that played Wes Anderson movies roughly three hundred days of the year. We were outside. The sun was low and yellow, and the air smelled of the anemones planted along the perimeter of the porch. When my mother wanted me to practice speaking, there was a phrase she always made me repeat: Today is a warm day in August. Well, it wasn’t August, but I still thought of that sentence.

I took a sip of my beer, chosen because it was the only IPA on the menu whose name I’d be able to say without stuttering. Long Lake Beer. L’s are easy. You just put your tongue behind your teeth, push hard, try to forget every bad thing that’s ever happened to you.  

I understood that it was my turn to speak. “So tell me what, I mean, —well, how was your day?”

Paula shrugged. She was wearing a fitted blazer over a blue t-shirt that said, in white lettering, Support Local Artists. “I took the class on a field trip to the Folk Art Museum. There’s a new exhibit on barn art, which is exactly what it sounds like. The docent who gave us a tour said my students seemed, and I quote, ‘particularly sullen’.”

I asked about her family (her parents were still together, her sister was a “backpacker”), her holiday plans (Michigan for a Christmas-Chanukah combo), her thoughts on cinema (she only went to the theater for really scary movies; otherwise, she waited for streaming). Eventually, she gave me the same look she had once given the ice cube. “I can’t believe I’m complaining about this,” she said, “but we agreed you can’t only ask questions.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Tell me about your day.”

“It’s, well—” The truth was that I’d spent my day rehearsing all those questions I’d just asked her. I worked for a bank, and my job was a bit like being a fireman, or how I imagined the job of a fireman: a lot of waiting around, maintaining the equipment, and then every now and again, an alarm sounds. “My day was —fine,” I said.

She nodded. “Fine. Good.”

When our food came, Paula skipped the salad and ate her burger so quickly I was genuinely worried she would die. But she must have been practiced at escaping bad dates, because when she was done, she took just one gulp of water, wiped her mouth with the napkin, and said, “Well.”

“I know you’re busy,” I said, trying to help her break free of me. Then, for some reason, I added, “I should get back, okay, to —Rudy.”

“Rudy,” she repeated. “Is that a child or a dog?”

“—Rudy is my mother’s parrot. I mean, just, my parrot.”

“How do I not know this? We’ve been texting for two months.”

I suppose I hadn’t mentioned him because I still hadn’t accepted that he was part of my life. Or maybe I wasn’t sure how women responded to bird people.

“A parrot,” Paula said. “Does he talk?”

“Sometimes.” When I’d left for the date, Rudy had stormed to his bedroom, muttering, “Leaving, I mean, leaving —Rudy?”

To Paula, I said, “Do you want to meet him?”

Paula sighed, as if disappointed in herself. “I really, really do.”

We’d driven separately to the restaurant, so Paula followed me home. Alone in the car, watching for her presence in my rearview, I chided myself for all the things I hadn’t said. I’d been to the Folk Art Museum. I had opinions on scary movies. I just knew how the words would sound when they tried to come out. That day of the accident, my body lost the voice to resist what hurt me, and so I never learned to take refuge inside my own opinions. I had seen others do it—had seen people, on the verge of one breakdown or another, gather themselves, say their piece, draw strength from the clarity of their proclamations. It was so obvious, at least to a stutterer, that a person is just a collection of small, small beliefs. Speech is how you gather them, present them as just one thing, as you. But I couldn’t gather them. I was a million pieces, and I would never be whole.

Paula parked behind me in the driveway, and when we met at the door, I saw in our faces the expressions of two startled cats rounding a corner. I thought, This is going to be bad.

We entered the house, and I was not so stupid as to make chitchat in the living room. I poured Paula a glass of wine, and then I went straight to Rudy, who had heard me coming and was peering through the bars in an eager, dog-like way that struck me as beneath him. I opened the cage and offered him my hand, palm-down, to climb onto. This was the first time I’d brought a visitor to the house, and I didn’t know how he’d react. I was not like my mother, who never missed synagogue, who had built a community of ancient, wise-cracking Jews.

Paula was waiting for us in the living room, where she was drawing all sorts of conclusions. “You have actual art on the walls,” she said, examining the largest piece in the living room, an abstract painting titled Red Blue. “And more than one book about art.” What she meant was: So why do you suck so much to talk to?

Rudy was surprised enough by her presence that he took a small step backward, his claws tight on my forearm. “Paula,” I said, “meet, well,” I took a breath, “meet —Rudy.” I sometimes wondered if it was deliberate, that my mother had given her parrot a name starting with R, which was always my toughest letter.

“Oh my God,” Paula said. “Hi, Rudy!”

Rudy would not look at her. He pretended to care a lot about the sleeve of my shirt, picking at it with his curved black beak.

“Are you a pretty bird?” she asked. And then, to me, “Is that what you say to a bird?”

Neither of us answered, and though Paula was temporarily distracted, as anyone would be, by the spectacle of Rudy’s plumage and his bright, nervous eyes, I thought it was only a matter of seconds before the reality of the situation descended upon her, that she was alone in a strange man’s house, that she had been lured there by a parrot who would not make eye contact.

Sure enough, she straightened and said, “Well, he’s lovely.”

Rudy cocked his head. “Well,” he said.

Paula gasped. “Well!”

“Well,” Rudy said, showing off his chest, “French fries?”

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but Paula’s eyes went wide with wonder.

“Do you think he smells the fries from dinner?”

“That, I mean, would be —interesting. Maybe he does.”

“It would be incredible.”

Rudy was snapping his head back and forth between us, as though our conversation about French fries was a riveting courtroom drama. He clicked three times and said, “I mean, okay, I mean, okay, it’s —so many carrots.”

Paula put her hand on her cheek. “He talks like you.”

“It’s —new.”

We all looked at each other. When my mother died, I had not wanted this bird. That was the truth. It wasn’t hard to find the horror stories online—stories of orphaned, grief-stricken parrots tearing out their feathers, screaming through the night, an infant who will never grow up. I suppose it hadn’t occurred to me that I was an orphan, too, though my father, wherever he was, may have been alive. It’s a simple fact that true loneliness, by which I mean the kind that has no obvious end, is one of life’s most painful feelings. What did I want from Rudy? What did he want from me?

“What’s this about carrots?” Paula asked.

Rudy was eyeing the kitchen.

 “Okay,” I said. I carried him to a chair, where he rewarded us by raising his wings and doing his impression of the knife against the cutting board.

“I can’t get over him,” Paula said. “Rudy, you like carrots?”

I thought Rudy would be too focused on the carrots to talk about carrots, but he said, “It’s, okay, just —dinner.”

“How old are you, pretty bird? So pretty.”

Rudy swayed. “—One, —one drink. Just, okay, one —dinner drink.”

She asked him more questions: if he was hungry (“it’s —carrots”), if he knew how pretty he was (click), if he was excited for the carrots (“too, okay, I mean, too —early for bedtime”). As they talked, I realized I had stopped chopping and was simply watching them. I had lived inside this moment nearly all my life—a conversation, the sound of my own halting voice—but I had never seen it from the outside. Rudy made it look much easier than it felt to me, his rhythmic way of speaking, the way his gray head bobbed with each syllable. Was that all stuttering was? A few extra syllables? I had always described it as painful, physically painful; I had claimed that choking on a word is not so different, really, from choking on a jagged stone. When Rudy stuttered, it did not look painful.

“—He’s seventeen,” I said to Paula, answering her earlier question.

“A teenager, wow. And he was your mother’s.”

I sliced the carrots into strips. “She bought him, just, well. She bought him when I went to college. She paid $1,500, which I know because —I found the —receipt when I was cleaning out her house. She framed it. I guess, well, okay, it’s normal for parents to —replace their children with pets, and she was a single mom with one kid. But I took it personally that she adopted an animal specifically so that she could teach him to speak. I mean, just, it’s obvious that that’s why. She wanted. It’s, it’s —like she wanted to prove to herself that she could do it. Maybe prove it to me.”

When I looked up from the carrots, Paula was staring at me. “That’s the most I’ve ever heard you talk.”

“To complain about my —mother. Not very original.”  

She finished her wine. “I’ll take any sentences from you that have commas in them.”

Normally, I would place Rudy’s carrots in his little wooden bowl, which was sitting behind me in the drying rack. But I thought I would see what would happen if I just held them out to him in my hand. The answer was that he would eat them, pulling the strips gently from my palm, the limp ends of the carrots wriggling like worms before he managed to get the whole thing in his mouth. I asked Paula if she wanted to try, which she did, and Rudy seemed completely disinterested in who or what was holding the carrots as long as the carrots were there. When she was done feeding him, Paula squeezed my hand. I held her hand for a moment, my heart beating, and then I chopped some more carrots.

“Watch this,” I said to Paula. I held up one of the carrots to Rudy. “What color?”

Rudy lifted his neck. “That’s orange.”

Paula clapped. I held up a white bowl. “What color?”

“Okay, I mean, —white.”

It was the only trick my mother had taught him, though it was hard to know with a parrot what counted as a trick. We wouldn’t call a child learning colors a trick.

“That reminds me,” Paula said, pointing to the large, framed print that hung over my sofa. “I really like that one.”

It was the Thayer Wiley piece, Red Blue, which I’d bought for almost the same amount that my mother paid for Rudy, though I bought it online, and I hadn’t framed the receipt.

“I teach his work in my American art survey,” Paula said. “Sometimes I just want students to say: Look at these colors! That’s why I fell in love with art. I was like Dorothy leaving Kansas, except I was from Michigan.”

Rudy finished the second offering of carrots and spun a happy circle, showing off his bright red tail. I said, “Honestly, I spend —all day sitting on the couch with my laptop, and my job is, okay, just hard enough that I can’t have the TV on. I’d go crazy without something to look at. And now with, I mean, —Rudy, I try to move around even less, just to keep things peaceful for him. I was so, it was, I was so nervous to see you tonight, and I know he could sense it. I’m still figuring out how to be here with him.”

Paula laughed, but not meanly. “That’s a much better answer to ‘Tell me about your day,’ than ‘It was fine.’” She stood and moved closer to Red Blue. “Is it like a theme for everything on the walls? Stuttering?”

I didn’t know what she meant, but I flushed anyway. We had only ever talked about my stuttering through text. “Huh?” I asked.

“He was a stutterer. Thayer Wiley. He stuttered when he was a kid, and that’s why he started painting.”

“Jesus, —really?”

“I assumed you knew. You made it the centerpiece of your living room.”

“Hm.” Paula was happy to see me more talkative, but I needed to think about this. I never wanted to be governed by my voice, but it had governed my relationships with everyone in my life, and I’d bought this painting, and my parrot spent all of two months with me before he developed a speech impediment. It occurred to me that when there is a part of yourself that you hate, that you can feel glinting inside you like a swallowed knife, the size of the world shrinks to match that feeling. Soon, your whole conception of what is possible in life becomes no wider than the edge of that blade.

“Hey,” Paula said, “can you bring Rudy here?”

I offered Rudy my hand, and he clicked and climbed onto me, full of trust and carrots. I carried him to Paula.

“Rudy,” she said, pointing to the Thayer Wiley. “What color?”

Red Blue was mostly blue, with a large, thumb-shaped blob of blue dominating the center of the print, barely fitting within the canvas, as though the shape were a wild thing that could only just be controlled. But atop and below the thumb, there was a hint of bright, monotone red, just a little triangular sliver at the bottom of the canvas, an only slightly larger horizon at the top. I was not a professor of art history, had not known the biography of the man who painted the work, but to me, the piece showed the impossibility of defining anything that contained even the smallest variation. Something that was only blue, you could call Blue. But if you added even a fraction of red, you could only call it Red Blue.

Rudy looked at the painting. He waved his head side to side. He said, “I mean, okay, well, that’s —blue.”

“See?” Paula said. “Simple.”

I smiled at her. “I guess, it’s, I’m —really glad you came over.”

She scratched Rudy’s nape the way she had seen me do it. “He doesn’t sleep in your room, does he?”

“Oh, God no. He has his own.”

“Good,” Paula said. “Should we have another drink?”

I woke the next morning to Paula still asleep beside me, face-down. I rose quietly and put on my shirt and some flannel pajamas pants, which smelled faintly of the grapes I always fed Rudy in the morning. My phone said it was nearly eight-thirty, a late start for me.

Rudy must have been worn out from the company because he was still asleep, too, with his head tucked to the side and his beak pressed into his feathers. But he sensed me in the doorway and stirred.

“Grapes?” I asked.

“Oh, grapes,” he answered.

In the kitchen, I put on the coffee and served Rudy his pellets with a few purple grapes. Rudy’s morning routine was that he would eat his breakfast quietly, with only the occasional click or coo when a grape hit the spot. I would stand beside him, reading the morning news on my phone. But once he finished breakfast, Rudy entered a period of what my mother, in her instructions, called his “brief morning frenzies” before he returned to his more reserved state. I thought of this period, instead of as a frenzy, as his vocal warm-ups. In quick succession, he would practice all of his favorite sounds.

The thock-thock-thock of a knife on the cutting board. The rattle of the Shake ‘n Bake. Click, click, click.Breakfast, dinner, grapes, carrots. Oy vey, oy vey. Occasionally, other sounds: the start-up chime of a laptop, the chitter of a squirrel. That morning, he ran through the gauntlet of my maze behaviors: Okay, I mean, it is, just, well, —Rudy—Rudy, —hello.

It was pretty loud, and I thought he might wake Paula. The truth was, I wanted her to wake up: my nervous anticipation was only going to build, and I thought if she slept too late she might be embarrassed. Still, I did what comes naturally when one person is sleeping and another is making noise.

I said, “Shhh.”

I didn’t expect him to listen to me at all, and I certainly didn’t expect what actually happened: Rudy snapped to attention as if a gun had been fired. He stopped mimicking my stutter mid-sentence, looked me square in the eyes, and said, “Okay, Rudy shhh.”

I remembered being a child, those moments when my mother simply could not take it any longer, the sound of my voice. “Hush, Franky,” she would say. “Enough.” I wondered if I looked then how Rudy looked now: rigid as a board, and so, so sorry.

As quickly as my voice would let me, I said, “Oh, it’s, I mean, don’t worry, —Rudy. No shhh. You can talk.”

Rudy maintained his stiff posture. “Shh. No stutter. Franklin on phone.”

“What? —What about me?”

“Shh. Shouldn’t make fun. Not nice. Mean Mama. Mean Rudy.”

“Mean Mama?”

“F-F-F-Franklin. Ha ha. Not nice.”

He went on this way for another fifteen seconds, but I didn’t need to hear any more to understand him. I understood perfectly, as if a rope had been tugged, a curtain pulled away. I had thought Rudy’s impression of me was newly formed, a response to our lives together. But I was wrong. He had been mimicking me for years, and what was worse was that F-F-F-Franklin wasn’t even something I would say. I never stuttered my own name.

No, F-F-F-Franklin was my mother talking. Which meant Rudy wasn’t doing an impression of me at all. He was mimicking my mother’s impression of me, her cruel parody. And when I called or visited, she told him to shush.

How strange it must have been for Rudy to suddenly be living with me, to hear every day the stutter he had been told was a joke, but a dirty one, not to be repeated in mixed company.  

The future stretched out before me: a lifetime of this, a light year, six trillion miles, living with a bird who would sing to me every morning my mother’s hatred. What sort of sad, strange inheritance had she left me? A bird, a birdcage, a binder of instructions. When I settled her estate, doled out her possessions to the friends and cousins and charities she had chosen, there was a word I’d learned: to disclaim. You could disclaim an inheritance. You could reject a gift.   

I hadn’t disclaimed Rudy then. I made my mother a promise, and I thought I could convince myself, over time, that this bird was more than a birthright—he was an act of love. One son entrusted with the care of another. But he was only a curse, an albatross, as heavy as his cage. What stopped me, now, from disclaiming him?

I invited Rudy onto my hand, and I carried him to the window.

I opened the window.

Rudy gazed outdoors. He had never shown much interest in the world beyond the house. Even when he was flying free, he preferred the top of a bookcase to anywhere with a view of the outside. I didn’t know what would happen if I held my hand, and him, out the window. Would he fly away? Would he know what it meant, or the danger he was in? I brought him closer to the windowsill, the breeze touching my hand and the soft feathers of his chest.

He was looking at me. Click. I scratched his nape, and I willed myself to say goodbye to him. Rudy was my pet and my brother and my burden and my mother, and he was my voice, and he was me.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” Paula said from behind us.

I turned from the window. Paula had put on her glasses and fixed her hair, but she was wearing her Support Local Artists shirt inside out, and there was something so intimate about that, as intimate as anything we had done together.

“Are you okay?” she said. “You look sick.”

I surprised myself by putting a protective hand on Rudy, as though Paula was the one who had threatened to release him. Suddenly I could not imagine letting Rudy go. We belonged together. But I couldn’t imagine this, either: me and Paula, me and anyone. I couldn’t imagine happiness, even though just last night I had felt it.

“Listen,” I said. Paula’s eyes narrowed, maybe recognizing the sound of rejection, but as always, I could not speak. “Listen, it’s —just, okay.”

“Breakfast,” Rudy interjected. “It’s, well, —breakfast grapes.”

“Is that right?” Paula said, looking at me, not at Rudy. “Is it breakfast?”

So that was the question. Breakfast or breakup. Oy or joy. Red or blue. Loneliness or its opposite. At that moment, the answer was breakup, oy, blue, loneliness—it was the largest part of me, the thumb print, the truth you could see from a distance.

“Breakfast, more breakfast,” Rudy said impatiently. “Hellooooo?”

Paula laughed. “Come on,” she said. “I’m hungry, too.”

I opened my mouth to speak, and for the first time in my life, I prayed for my stutter to come, to protect me from my own mistakes. Since the day I woke up from the accident, eight years old, my mind and body changed, there was a kind of life I’d always wished for—an easy life, a life without stuttering. But when you stutter, you speak more carefully, and how could that be bad? If my voice could keep me from saying what I was about to say, maybe I’d find time enough to see myself how Paula saw me: a quiet man near a window, a man whose happy bird was evidence, she hoped, of kindness. Maybe I could see myself how Rudy saw me, too: as the man who could give everyone exactly what they wanted, more breakfast, more grapes, a warm day in August, a scratch on the nape and right where it itches—right then, right on time.