Osprey Island

Suzy chose her words carefully. “I was with someone then. I mean, I was with someone. And I was also . . .”—she spoke slowly, as if testing his reaction to each word, waiting to see how it landed before she spoke the next—“having an . . . well, sleeping with . . . someone . . . else . . . also . . .” Roddy was staring at her intently, waiting for each word as apprehensively as she issued them. “It wound up being kind of messy and yucky.”

Roddy was shaking his head. “And you didn’t wind up staying with either of them?”

“I wasn’t exactly anyone’s favorite person at that point.”

“And so did you ever . . . I mean, do you . . . ?”

“Know who her father is?” Suzy finished for him. “Yes,” she said definitively, “I do.”

Roddy just kept looking at her, unsure what she meant.

“They both left thinking it was the other, and it seemed like that was best for all of us. And I was going to abort anyway, but then I decided I didn’t want to. I have a good job; I could afford it. I knew she’d have good genes. It just seemed like: OK, I could do this.”

“Wow,” Roddy said.

“I guess.”

The door to Shakes swung open and Squee and Mia pushed through, cones in hand, Squee’s already beginning to melt down his arm.

“Make you not want to sleep with me anymore?” Suzy asked, her face scrunched up in exaggerated worry.

Roddy snorted. He reached down to conceal his erection before the kids climbed back into the truck.

He dropped Suzy and Mia at the Lodge, then drove with Squee beside him back up to Eden’s. She wasn’t in the house when they arrived, so Roddy deposited Squee in front of the television and went out to the chicken coop to find her.

There’d been no henhouse out back while Roddy was growing up. All that had happened in his absence. Eden had a custom-built cement-floor coop with divided nest areas for each of her birds and a separate “coop for one,” as she called it—a darkened, screened-off place for a broody hen to sit on her eggs and ready them for hatching. That spring Eden had mated one of her hens—Lorraine—with a cock from George Quincy’s farm. Now Lorraine got off her eggs only once a day—not more than twenty minutes—to step outside, eat, drink, and do her business. It was Eden’s only chance to get in there and check on things, tidy up. As Roddy approached he could see Lorraine at the food. The gate was made of chicken-wire fencing stapled to a scrap-wood frame. He opened the latch, slipped inside, and secured it closed behind him. It stank of chicken shit.

“Hey, Ma,” Roddy called.

Eden’s head poked out the splintering door frame. Lorraine stalked back to her nest, feathers puffed, defensive and proud, and Eden stepped out of her way and into the light. As Lorraine settled on the eggs inside they could hear her buk buk buk, low and constant and somehow contented-sounding.

Eden was smiling broadly. “I tell you they’re due to hatch ’round the Fourth of July?”

Roddy let out a sad snort of a laugh. “Yeah, Ma, you told me.”

Eden beamed like a grandmother would over brand-new Sears photo studio portraits.

Roddy’s tone when he spoke was anything but light. “What’d Sheriff Harty want with you, Ma?” Roddy and the Sheriff had passed each other in the driveway that morning.

Eden wasn’t prepared for such a change of gears, and she stalled a moment.

“Ma?”

“Oh, that . . .” She waved a hand away from her body to demonstrate the utter inconsequence of the sheriff’s visit, as though she’d all but forgotten he’d come by.

“Yeah,” Roddy said, determined, “that.”

A wash of panic swept Eden’s face suddenly. “Where’s Squee?” She looked toward the house. “You had him . . . ?”

“He’s watching TV. He’s fine. Don’t change the subject.”

“Oh ho,” Eden laughed bitterly, shaking her head, a finger pointed at Roddy in reprimand. “Oh, that is the subject, son. That is the subject.”

“Don’t,” Roddy said. He was growing impatient and frustrated. “Don’t get cryptical—”

“Well isn’t that the pot calling the kettle—”

“Ma—”

“Look, son. I know you’re not going to argue against there being some things best left untold, and I am not going to tell you what I talked about to Sheriff Harty this morning any more than you’re about to sit down and tell me where you’ve been since nineteen sixty-eight. So don’t tell me you don’t know that some things are best kept. There’s no reason to say them, and there’s too many other folks who’d get hurt if you did. OK? So, I am done talking about this, son. Done.”

Ten

HOW THE OSPREY TENDS ITS NESTLINGS