“But you’re wearing coral!”
“Only around here. I wouldn’t if I was out birding. I, for one, am not birding. I am human-ing. I love watching the birders, and I’ll tell you, there’s quite a range. First, there are the life-listers that keep a meticulous list of every bird they’ve ever seen, and many of them overlook what the bird is doing; they just want the checkmark. It’s very competitive. The ‘List ’em and Leave ’em’ types. They are incredibly detail-oriented people, the OCD types of the world. I do not like them.”
Ammalie snorted with a genuine laugh. Oh, the joy of honest people!
“Then there are the birders who are life-listers and not obnoxious. They have no problem being kind. David Sibley—you know Sibley’s books, yes?—he’s in this category. A good guy. I met him once, in a field. He said to me, ‘Why, there’s an olive-sided flycatcher on a nest,’ and, like a magician, just set up a scope and invited us all to see. A good man, a generous man.”
“I love that,” Ammalie said, picking up a scoop to help fill the other feeders.
“Me, I like the casual birders. They want to figure it out, see what the bird is doing, and simply share that with another person. Half the time, they have the bird’s name wrong, or partially wrong, but they revel in birds, they feel joy. Dan is that sort. Lulu will be a better birder than Dan any day now. Then, of course, there’s the vast majority, who know very little about birds, nor do they care.”
Ammalie reached into the can and ran the birdseed through her fingers, the soft globes pouring through. “I might be in the very-beginner category, trying to move up. And the birds themselves, do you have a favorite?”
“Well, obviously, vermilion flycatchers and phainopepla are the best. I mean, just listen to those names.”
“Lulu likes house wrens. I like snow geese and ravens.”
Rita raised her eyebrows. “Interesting combo.”
“Also sandhill cranes.”
“Yes, cranes. And great blue herons. Four hundred,” Rita said, out of the blue, and without further explanation.
“Four hundred?” Ammalie prompted.
“There are four hundred species of birds here, residents and migrants—do you know how many that is? It’s a lot. Birders come from across the world. Bullock’s orioles are maybe the best, I forgot about them, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Those dangling sock nests!”
They walked inside and Rita showed her where linens were kept and where some emergency supplies were. “You’ll do just fine. Call me if there’s any problems, although I rarely pick up the phone if I don’t feel like it. I’m really not cut out for this job.”
Ammalie nodded her understanding, still delighted.
On her way out, Rita turned and added, “Just to warn you again, there will be some rude ones, and it has been my experience that these rude humans are especially rude to middle-age or older women. You want my two cents? I’ll give them to you anyway. Hold their gaze and stare. Make them speak to you the way they’d speak to a strapping, handsome man, or a gorgeous young woman. Don’t let them do that belittling thing. Don’t you let them get away with it. I try to be apolitical, being a host and all, but you’ll get it from all sides and from otherwise-seeming nice folk. Do. not. let. them. speak. down. to. you. Or worse yet, not see you.”
Ammalie startled. “Exactly! Rita, exactly! I’m so noticing this tendency. I’m newish to middle age…I’m just now seeing it. Back at the restaurant, people were mostly nice to me. And I wonder if it’s because, well…I was young and kinda…”
“Attractive.”
She shrugged.
“Honey, you’re going to notice it more and more. Don’t stand for it. Do what you can to reeducate people. Step directly in front of them and force them to hold your gaze, if you must.”
Rita ended the tour of work by showing Ammalie a little golf cart that could be driven down the dirt pathways from cabin to cabin with the clean bedding and supplies. She told Ammalie to start the day by cleaning the cabin called North Star. Then she was gone, a whirlwind calmed, and Ammalie stood there, touching her head, taking in the cluster of cabins and blue-sky day.
She drove the golf cart down the dirt path that wound itself through the property, learning the gist of the cart and the property. She felt oddly gleeful. She was a grown woman and still somehow delighted by the thrill of a small motorized vehicle. And also because the cabins had wonderful names, which she listed over and over in her head.
Moonsquin
While-Away
Evensong
Epiphany
She singsonged their names; they all sounded like not only good places to be but also good internal places too, as if each one offered advice on how to spend the day.
—
Her head hurt but her body enjoyed actual physical labor—not planks, not lunges, not walking, but necessary and useful labor. Scrubbing and vacuuming and changing sheets. Maybe that’s why she had liked carrying plates and trays—she liked moving with purpose. All of it left her panting and occasionally grunting, but she felt strong, felt her arm muscles working as they had when she’d been waitressing. She felt the strength in her core when she lifted and flipped the clean white sheets over the bed.
For the first time since she’d been on the road, she played music on her phone while she worked. She’d been living in such silence, she realized—but that’s because she had wanted to hear a car pulling up, her ears always attuned to danger. Now she put on her favorites, old folk songs and new folk songs. Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt and Townes Van Zandt and Eva Cassidy and Nanci Griffith.
Her sister had been the one to help her fall in love with music, plinking the piano and teaching her Carpenters tunes. Sing, sing a song, sing out loud, sing out strong…
She wondered how Apricot was doing, felt the pang of the rift between them—the endless dealings with the mess their mother had left. There hadn’t even been any money—so it wasn’t that—it was instead just the separation of tasks, the “Did you call the bank and ask if she had a safe-deposit box?” and “Who canceled her Netflix subscription?” and “Did you take the millionth load of junk to Goodwill?”
It had taken more than a year and there was so much stuff—stuff was such a burden!—and nothing good resulted except that Vincent had witnessed it and heeded the inherent lesson, which was, as he put it, “to get one’s shit in order,” and he had done just that. He put all their accounts on a spreadsheet, set up life insurance policies, discussed and wrote down their burial-spot wishes (a green burial if possible, and if not, cremated, ashes scattered illegally along the river, their favorite place to walk), wrote a will. They’d sat down together to discuss everything. Then they’d cleaned out the garage, pared down the detritus of life, and organized cabinets and drawers. It had been calm and comforting to do, actually. It took months, but it was a good set of months, and they’d frequently had sex afterward and a nice glass of wine—something about the mutual work increased the mutual attraction. Come to think of it, their Death Prep months had probably been the best months of their entire marriage.
So, in a way, her fight with Apricot had helped her marriage—had created a period of peace and ease. And, of course, all that work had helped her enormously upon his death.
Apricot was not Apricot’s real name. Her real name had been Heidi—Ammalie and Heidi, from old Dutch relatives—but Heidi had gone to the trouble of changing her name in her twenties, which was when she wanted to make it big as an actress and figured she needed a memorable name. The acting thing had lasted about two years, with a local theater community performance or two, and then Apricot had become a real estate agent. But the most interesting thing about her life was her obsession with garage sales and amassing all sorts of high-quality random items. Such as, when she heard that Ammalie was going to go on a road trip of sorts—Ammalie had kept the details vague, just saying she needed some space to grieve and pay tribute to some of her memories with Vincent—she sent her some of the items Ammalie was using now. The travel pillow that collapsed into nearly nothing, the efficient camp stove, the tiny kit of high-quality silverware and cutting board and kitchen items that tetrussed amazingly well into the smallest possible space.
She loved her sister, she did, and she worried about her health. It’s just that their infrequent phone conversations had lapsed into vague topics that would be the same things you’d discuss with a stranger, all of which rendered a real relationship nearly impossible. It was after one such call that Ammalie had looked around her kitchen and thought, This is my boring chitchat life, and her eyes had fallen on a box of keys, particularly one with some red nail polish, mostly worn away by time, that being the key to the Colorado cabin. That was one of the several small moments that had hatched this big idea, so she supposed she had her sister to thank for that too.
—
The beauty of this job was that she had task after task to do, and there was none of the decision-making of having a completely open day. Rita came in to briefly inspect her work—not that she didn’t trust Ammalie, she said, but just that she wanted to discuss standards. She approved the sheet-tuck and the toilet and the tub and the windows and pointed out that it was easy to forget cleaning inside the microwave. Her final piece of advice was to always check one last time under the bed, because if there’s one thing that creeped people out, it was finding some item, not their own, underneath where they’d been sleeping.
Since there was only one cabin that needed cleaning until later in the day, Rita asked Ammalie to rake the walkways and stack up twigs and fallen branches for a future bonfire. “If you need any extra work gloves, there’s a big lost-and-found box under one of the bunk beds in your room,” she said.
