142 Ostriches. April Davila
I knew what he wanted to hear.
He held up his hands the way I would approach an agitated ostrich in the corral. “Don’t freak out.”
I groaned and spun toward my bedroom.
Devon was right behind me. “My mom was twenty-four when she married my dad. It’s not all so young.”
“It’s not all so old either.” I threw my dress into the corner of my room and undid my bra. I pulled on the oversize T-shirt I used as a nightgown.
“All I’m saying is that it wouldn’t be so unusual, us getting married.” His voice softened. “People do it all the time.”
I didn’t put much stock in marriage. At best, you got what my Aunt Christine had: a business arrangement that left you home alone with a houseful of kids. At worst, you lived a life bent by compromise until you woke up one day worn-out and bitter because you let someone talk you into a life you never wanted in the first place.
He sat on the end of the bed, then reached up and took my hand. He kissed it. “I only want to know what’s going on in your head,” he said. “Because from out here, it kinda seems like you’re fixing to bail.”
“I’m not bailing on you,” I said, sitting down next to him. But we both knew that wasn’t exactly true. Part of the lure of the forestry job was that it was decidedly a step away from marriage and kids, the two things Devon wanted. For him, those things were the natural next phase of life.
“We don’t have to decide anything tonight,” he said and kissed my hand again. “But can you try to keep me in the loop? I want to know what’s going on.” He kissed the skin on the inside of my arm, being careful to avoid the welts the ostriches had given me. He pushed up the baggy sleeve of my nightshirt and brought his lips to my shoulder. It was a fair request. I really didn’t mean to keep things from him so often.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “For not telling you.”
We kissed again. I helped him out of his pants and left them in a pile on the floor. I rolled onto him and my hair fell in his face. He traced my forehead with his thumb and gathered the hair behind my neck. “I love you,” he said.
“I love you too,” I said and felt an overwhelming guilt for all the things I wasn’t saying. How could I explain that I needed to leave? I needed to go out into the world and stand in a place of my own choosing. Devon wouldn’t understand that. He had chosen the cement plant. He had his own apartment. He was building a life that worked for him. I wanted that for myself: to make choices and know that I was responsible for all the good or bad that came of them. I’d spent my life doing what other people wanted me to do. I finally had a chance to do something on my own and I wasn’t going to give that up.
He kissed me and I closed my eyes. Everything was a mess, but there was nothing I could do about any of it right then. I ran my fingers through his hair and forgot myself in the feel of him for just a little while.
FIVE
“Have you changed their routine lately?” the vet asked. I had called him that morning when I woke to find the corral still empty of eggs.
Bob was a short man with a comb-over that did little to shield his shiny scalp from the sun. “Different food? Anything?” He stood in the corral with total confidence despite the fact that his head came only as high as an ostrich wing. Most people were intimidated by three-hundred-pound birds that towered eight feet tall, and only the foolhardy didn’t respect such powerful legs. Tipped with prehistoric-looking claws, the two-toed foot of an ostrich could easily disembowel an enemy.
“Our schedule’s been off ”—I hesitated—“with all the funeral arrangements. And it’s just me now.” I couldn’t seem to adjust to that. I picked at a hangnail, felt the pinch of it in the tender skin of the nail bed. I wasn’t used to my grandma’s absence.
It would be good to sell and move away, if only to be somewhere that didn’t hold so many memories of her. Every doorway held an echo of her footsteps. Every bit of wire fencing had been strung by her hands. Every bird in the corral had grown up under her care. I kept being ambushed by feelings of loss and guilt and regret. Simply walking around the ranch felt unsafe. Several times a day, it struck me, again, that she was gone.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Bob said. He had wild, bushy eyebrows that looked out of place under his balding scalp. “Your grandmother was a good woman.”
I nodded and relaxed a little when he refocused his attention on the birds.
He ran his hand along the spine of the nearest female and pulled down her beak to inspect closely before gently guiding her into the crook of his fleshy armpit. The hen fluffed her feathers, shifting forward on her feet, but with her head low, she couldn’t kick. Bob tested each wing between his fingers, then pressed gently along her rib cage. After he inspected her from tip to toe, he had me hold her steady while he took a small blood sample.
Sweat spots formed on Bob’s shirt. I followed him over to the feed trough, where he crouched to pluck up a wayward grain of corn. He pulled an empty vial from his pants pocket and took a sample of water. It looked clean and clear.
“Thoughts?” I asked.
He lifted his gaze from the center of the corral to take in the bigger picture of our surroundings. The storm from the day before was a fading memory and our little plot of land was a clean thumbprint in the sprawling sage scrub of the Mojave Desert, about a hundred miles east of the San Gabriel Mountains, with Highway 66 marking the eastern edge of the property. The gravel driveway climbed the subtle slope from the highway to where the house and the barn sat on opposite sides of the walnut tree. Every fall the branches of the giant tree sagged under the weight of its green pods. The thump of each one falling to the ground come September coincided with the dwindling of the eggs in the corral and marked the beginning of our off-season. Grandma Helen collected the fallen walnuts in paper grocery bags. In the kitchen, the medicinal scent of the green husks would infuse everything as she spent hours listening to public radio, peeling the skins and setting the exposed craggy shells on a rack to dry.
I would retreat upstairs to waste away the hours on social media, happy to have a little downtime, but Grandma Helen didn’t do well with downtime. When we weren’t outside fixing things that had been put off during the busy summer months, she was inside smashing walnut shells with a hammer and teasing out the wrinkled, meaty flesh. Then, after every weak spot in the fence had been mended, the barn hosed clean, the feed silos stocked, the oil changed on both of the trucks, the tumbleweeds cleared from the corral, and every last walnut shelled and packed into the freezer, Grandma Helen would pace, waiting impatiently for the birds to lay eggs again, as if the routine had varied at all in the forty-six years she had been raising ostriches. But apparently, she had been right to worry. Because there I stood, surrounded by birds in the middle of July, without a single egg in sight.
“I’ll run a few tests on these samples, rule out anything serious,” Bob said, “but dollars to donuts, it’s stress.”
“Really?” It was hard to fathom what a flock of ostriches could possibly have to be wound up about.
He rubbed the back of his neck. “A change of ownership. That storm. See it all the time with chickens. Doesn’t take much to set them off.”
Ostriches didn’t have much in the way of brain power. They operated on instinct and flourished with routine. I thought about the many unfamiliar cars that had been coming and going. “How do I get them to start laying again?”
He pulled a notepad from his pocket and set to scribbling. “Try one of these supplements. You’ll want something with folic acid and choline. Just add it to their meals.” He handed me the list. “That should help them bounce back.”
I studied Bob’s messy scrawl. There was a farm supply store north of Victorville where Grandma Helen and I shopped. They had a section devoted to poultry care that would likely have the items on Bob’s list.
“You take care