Page 27 of Wrong Mail

They hop and flutter above us in the filtered green light, yellow and blue and white shifting through the branches while the new canary grips her perch inside the travel cage.

Henry is good with birds. That's the thing I don't know what to do with. Everything about him being here should feel wrong, and somehow he keeps getting it right.

He keeps back from the cage. He doesn't talk over the fluttering and chattering. When I open the outer gate, he waits outside until I tell him to come in. He watches where my hands are. He puts the travel cage down where I point.

"She'll sulk for a day," I say. "They all do."

"And then?"

"And then she'll be one of them and I won't be able to tell you which one she was."

Henry looks at the mesh, at the branches, at the birds shifting and resettling above us.

"That's a nice thought," he says.

My phone buzzes in my back pocket.

It’s Julia.

"Take it," Henry says. He's already stepping back through the aviary gate.

I take my phone out.

"Hey, Mallory, have you heard from Peggy?"

“No, why?"

"Not one of us has heard a word from her all day." Julia's voice has an edge in it I don't recognize. "She's not answering her phone. She was supposed to meet us at the flower shop to finalize the flowers for your birthday. She didn't come. She didn't call. Lil has been in the parking lot for over an hour imagining the worst."

"Maybe she’s ill or late.”

"Mallory. Peggy Erickson has never been ill in her life. As for late? Peggy Erickson would attend her own funeral early to check the seating."

I laugh.

"Then, perhaps she's gone into Seattle and forgotten," I say. "Or she's punishing somebody. Don't fret, she'll probably turn up and it'll be somebody's fault."

Julia doesn't laugh. “Yeah. Probably."

She hangs up.

Henry is up by the side gate with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the water, giving me the length of the lawn to be private in. He turns when he hears me.

"Everything all right?"

"Neighborhood politics."

"The best kind." He straightens. "Right I'm going to go, before I outstay a welcome I didn't strictly have."

"And there was me about to offer you coffee."

"Don't." He smiles. "Truly. Your husband looked at me on Friday like weather coming in off the water. He was right to. I’m not going to be the neighbor who's in the kitchen when he gets home."

It's so exactly the correct thing to say that I don't know what to do with it. He's giving me an apology for something he hasn't done, handing it to me so lightly that refusing it would be rude.

He gets to the gate and stops, with one hand on it, and he doesn't turn around all the way.

"Can I ask you something?" he says. "And you can say no."