“This is your guarantee that,” the girl said, showing my mother a piece of paper, “the bird is a male. If it doesn’t sing within fourteen days, you can bring it back for an exchange. But,” she said, “if you think you’ll want to do that, we have to mark the bird, so we know it’s the same bird you bought.”
My mother considered it for a moment—the guarantee, the marking.
“No,” she said, looking at her new bird’s pure white wing. It had its head tucked under there. She didn’t know how they marked birds, and didn’t ask. “I won’t be bringing it back.”
The girl threw the guarantee with its gold seal away, and said, “Enjoy your canary, ma’am.”
My mother carried the canary out of the mall like a lantern held in front of her. A hurricane lamp. Perhaps she looked like a Victorian ghost come back to haunt the mall in her wool coat, a thin and mysterious smile on her lips, headed somewhere with her bright urge in a cage. Children stumbled at the ends of their parents’ arms, pointing at the bird, wanting her to stop, but she kept walking.
It was only early November, but Muzak Christmas carols were piping down from the ceiling—high up, near the fluorescent lights—saccharine, slippery, frivolous, sounding lubricated and faraway, as if a choir of angels had been shipped to Ohio from heaven in aluminum cans: exhausted containers of angels, like poultry, chicken feathered, passionless, disoriented. They’d been brought here against their wills, forced to spend their days warbling about God from some crawl space above the mall—
With feeling, my mother imagined the maestro of Corporate Christmas Carols screaming, stomping his foot, waving his baton madly over them in the air.
But that languid music, that spiritless serenade, oozed from the ceiling.
And when she left the mall for the parking lot, my mother passed Santa near the entrance. He was smoking a cigarette. His eyes were big, as if he were medicated, or insane. “Good-looking bird,” he said, and wiped his nose on the back of his black glove.
She’d bought a miniskirt, too, before the bird—suede, taupe. It was in a bag with the bird book and bird food, slung over her other arm. She hadn’t even tried it on. She’d just seen it waiting there, and bought it. She pictured herself wearing it, sitting in that fat man’s lap.
She was happy.
She hadn’t had a pet since I’d grown up.
After Phil brought it in, my mother set the bird up handsomely, royally, next to my father’s La-Z-Boy in the den—its little water dish, its lettuce bowl, its perching stick. All day that canary kept its head tucked under its wing. It didn’t sing, but my mother was perfectly willing to wait those fourteen days. She was in no hurry to hear it sing. She had waited longer for more important things.
“YOU LIKE?” SHE ASKED, PRESENTING HER MINISKIRT TO THE den. It was a Sunday. My father and Phil were watching football. I was doodling into a math book with a pencil, legs tucked up under me on the couch. I’d thrown a piece of pale lettuce fringe to the canary, who pecked apathetically at it. That canary had no appetite at all.
She was wearing sheer black panty hose. Black heels. A black turtleneck. And that miniskirt.
“Well?” she said.
My father looked up from the football game like a man who’d been slapped on the ass with a towel. Phil looked sheepishly at my mother’s shoes. I was stunned, looking from her good legs up to her bright face. She was flushed. Her hair was all done up, and she had a dark smear of lipstick on her lips. On the television there was a close-up of a girl with a shredded burst of pom-pom in her fist. Cheering. She must have been shaking it into the cameraman’s face.
“Pretty sexy for forty-six, don’t you think?” my mother asked.
I crossed my arms and looked away.
My father’s mouth was open.
Phil was nodding yes.
“HAVE A SEAT,” DETECTIVE SCIEZIESCIEZ SAYS, HANGING MY coat on a hook near his door, which he’s already shut. He’s wearing a starched white shirt, maroon tie, loosened, and his sleeves are rolled up. His forearms are thick. He has a tattoo on the left one, “USMC.”
The detective’s office is warm, and smells like leather, musky. The office of a man. His desk is cluttered with papers, piles of envelopes torn open, pens, street maps, and a metal box of Band-Aids. He’s wearing a Band-Aid across the knuckles of his right hand. His oak desk chair rocks as he leans backward, and I sit across from him in a plastic chair.
It’s six o’clock in the evening, and I can see the sky behind him through a window, which is open just a crack. That sky is spatulate and turning blue-black but sparked with small, hard, flakes of snow. We are on the seventeenth floor of his office building in downtown Toledo, and I think I can actually hear the place where the wind starts. We are that close.
Detective Scieziesciez takes out a notepad and a pen, leans forward on his desk, and writes something at the top of a page. The Band-Aid on his knuckles ripples as he writes. “I’m so glad you got in touch and could come down here,” he says. “You don’t mind if I take notes while we talk?”
“No,” I say, and look down at the buttons on my blouse. They are flat and gold, and I can see my face reflected in them. Seven buttons, seven faces. I am wearing the taupe miniskirt my mother bought when she bought her canary.
“Okay,” he says happily, leaning forward, looking at me. “Where should we start?”
“Well,” I say, trying to sound serious, and intelligent, and worried, but my voice sounds weightless to me. I feel so far up in the sky. As I rode the elevator here, I felt lightheaded, and tired, as if I were flying for the first time. Now, my voice sounds like tissue caught in my mouth. “I called because I thought maybe I had some information. About my mother.”
“Of course.” He nods professionally. His jaw is dark with the stubble of the beard he must have shaved this morning, growing back already, just like the first time I saw him. A strong jaw. His eyes are also dark, and his eyebrows are raised. I can smell him. Salt and sweat and deodorant soap. And it makes my heart pump as hard as a shark swimming fast in my blood.
I watch the detective’s pen move over his pad of paper as I speak. I say, “I’ve been thinking. I’ve been thinking my mother might have been having an affair when she left. I’ve remembered some things.”
The detective writes this down. I look at his arms. From the elbows down, they are bare, resting on his desk. He looks up at me, pleased, and says, “Tell me more, sweetheart.”
“I DON’T LIKE THAT CANARY,” MY FATHER SAID. IT WAS perched on my mother’s little finger, feet curled up tightly, and it made nervous pecking motions in my father’s direction, as if it were sewing something invisible between them in the air.
“You don’t like that canary,” my mother sang to the tune of “Jimmy Crack Corn,” “and I don’t care.”
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked, seeming sincerely perplexed.
The canary shivered in her hand, as if a smaller, colder bird had darted across its grave. It looked frail, and my mother laughed out loud at my father in a sudden, cackling snicker.
“And what were you doing wearing that miniskirt?” he asked.
“You didn’t like it?” The canary crept up her blouse, making its way to her dark hair, tiny eye traveling over her enormous blue eye, taking it in, trying to imagine exactly what my mother was: