“Peaceful,” he answered, looking at her finally.
“Good,” she told him, smiling. “The next time you sense those old fears about to take hold, I want you to remember the special feeling of peace we created here together. My hope is that it will help you to stay calm and get your words out the way you intend them to sound. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Now,” my mother said. “Should we try this interview again?”
“Yes.” Heekin felt himself breathing more easily. He felt the words come more smoothly too. “Can you tell me about your childhood?”
“I grew up on a farm in the South. My mother was a quintessential farm wife. She disciplined me with a switch and believed children should be seen and not heard.”
“And your father?”
“I loved my father,” she said in such a way that implied she had not felt the same about her mother. “He was tough too, but he treated me like I was special. Unusual as it was for a man in rural Tennessee, he knew perfect Latin and taught it to me. Not that I have much use for it these days beyond the occasional Latin spoken at Mass in the gym.”
It was then, with some prodding on Heekin’s part, that she told him the story of the birdhouses her father had built and what she’d done after he was gone.
“That must have been heartbreaking for you,” he said when she finished. “And you mentioned that he passed, but you never said how.”
In an instant, my mother’s eyes welled. Tears did not spill onto her cheeks, but they suspended on her lower lids, on the verge. Even after so many years, he could see how the question had pricked at something raw inside her, so Heekin told her to never mind. It was something no good reporter would ever say, but he didn’t care. “You don’t have to tell me, Mrs. Mason.”
“Rose,” she said, pressing her index fingers to the bottom of each eye as though to shove those tears back inside. “You can call me Rose.”
“Rose!” my father called from upstairs.
The timing caused them both to laugh. “Apparently, someone else does,” Heekin said, making a joke.
And yet, my father’s voice broke whatever spell had been working between them. “I should be going,” my mother said, standing from her chair. “I hope the things I’ve shared help with your story and impress your editor.”
“I feel certain that they will,” he told her.
At the door, Heekin worked up the courage to mention the nature preserve he first discovered when he’d been stationed at the Dover Air Force base. Despite the roar of military planes overhead that so often startled the birds, the place had been his only escape. “Even if I was too afraid to fly, it was comforting to watch those little creatures do it. And if you’re patient and still long enough, they land right in your hand. Anyway, if you like I could—”
“Rose!” my father called. “I need your help getting to the bathroom!”
“You could what?” my mother asked Heekin.
“I could take you there sometime,” he said, rushing out the words before my father could distract her any further. “No interview. Just a friendly field trip.”
He expected my mother to politely decline his offer. But she didn’t hesitate. “I’d like that very much.”
Heekin smiled, reached in his pocket, and gave her his card. She took it and thanked him before closing the door. As he walked to his car and climbed inside, glancing back at the house, he replayed their last hour together, in particular the moment she took his hands in hers.
I shouldn’t have told you all those things,” Heekin said as we pulled off an exit ramp after nearly two hours on the highway north. At the stoplight, his car stalled for what must have been the fifth time. He pumped the gas and worked the ignition until it started again just as the light turned green. “Blame the long ride. Blame the fact that you remind me so much of her.”
I stared at my reflection in the glass of the passenger window, trying to see the parts of me that led him and so many others to think of her. Outside on the derelict sidewalks, I watched a woman carrying shopping bags that looked too heavy for her stringy arms. I watched a hunched man push a grocery store cart heaped with empty bottles. It felt as though we were touching down in some strange place, a tiny bird from the preserve gliding its way into some far-flung country on Rose’s globe.
When we turned onto the streets of a barren neighborhood, one last unexpected question slipped out: “Did she ever tell you how her father, my grandfather, died?”