“Wasps. There used to be birds, but between nests some wasps set up in there. We had them when I lived in Madison. Look.” She pointed at the hole; it was partially obscured by a pale tan resin, leaving a half-moon-shaped opening. “Brood cells.”
Sarah Jane jutted her neck forward a little and narrowed her eyes, trying to get better focus without having to draw nearer; she noticed a few small yellow bodies lazily drifting in and out of the hole. It made the gourd feel heavier in her sight than it had when she’d been imagining robins or nuthatches. Birds nest lightly. She thought about so many wasps crowded into one place, a great throng displacing some small family of two or three birds. She saw the muddy netting of the nest half-blocking the hole, dusty runover from all the activity inside. And she noted, finally, a wet spot at the bottom, a darkening patch about as big as her hand. Honey? There is no wasp honey. But the gourd had been put there for birds.
“Madison?” she said.
“Just for a short while. It was nice, though,” said Lisa, behind her now, craning in, voice low. “I think they got one of the babies before the mama left. Gourd’ll rot through when it gets a little warmer now.”
“They eat birds?” said Sarah Jane. Her stomach heaved a little.
“They eat mosquitoes. They’ll sting anything, though. I guess if something happened to a little bird in there the mama wouldn’t really be able to pull it back out through the little hole.”
“That’s terrible,” Sarah Jane almost said, but she stopped herself, because she wasn’t sure it was what she meant. Maybe it’s terrible, the dead bird inside the gourd, the gourd full of wasps hanging from the rail on the porch, the wet spot spreading on the bottom of the gourd. But maybe there was a better explanation for the spot, something about dewpoints and organic matter and the lifespan of an empty gourd. Nothing was really certain. She reached into her purse.
“I brought two. I didn’t want to answer a bunch of questions,” she said instead, handing Lisa the tapes, their bulky cases dully reflecting a little sun. She heard the hum inside the gourd grow a little louder and dutifully took a step back.
“They will swarm,” said Lisa, turning discreetly, tapes in hand. Sarah Jane followed her inside; they stood behind the screen door, watching as a few wasps ventured out to see if the shadows they’d felt required a response. “I’ve had to run inside real quick a couple of times.”
“Couldn’t you call Orkin and just get rid of them?” asked Sarah Jane.
But Lisa had a dreamy look on her face; the sentry wasps were tracing patterns in the sunlight. “I guess,” she said quietly, still under the spell of the lazy figure eights the wasps followed in the air. “But it seems kind of mean. It’s their home now, you know?”
She closed the door and turned, heading for the cellar steps. “It’s just nature,” she said conclusively, but also, as it seemed to Sarah Jane, sadly, as if somewhere in the question of the birds and the wasps there was something to be regretted, but nowhere that any reasonable person might fix the blame.
9
“Hello?”
“Big man? It’s Dad.”
“Hi.”
“Hi. I just thought I’d call and see if—hey, listen. I was thinking about getting dinner in Des Moines.” A beat. “There’s a friend from work, we thought we might get dinner together.”
Steve listened to the short silence after he’d said it; it was a rift in something. Jeremy felt it too. They almost always had dinner together. It gave shape to their days.
“Oh, OK,” said Jeremy.
“If you’d rather I—” Steve looked at the wall of his office; he was calling from work. Next to an old family portrait on the wall above the desk, there was a printout of a Love is … cartoon. Love is … the greatest feeling you can feel! It had been there for years; it came from another time.
“No, it’s no problem, Dad. I’ll fix myself something. See you later?”
“I won’t be late,” said Steve. “See you later, then.”
“Sure,” said Jeremy. It was true. He wasn’t going anywhere.
“If you’re up later, let’s visit a little,” his father said finally, trying to hide the effort it took to say it under the easy burble he used when talking to clients.
“All right,” said Jeremy.
*
He was at the Spaghetti Works in Des Moines. Sitting across the table from him, eating a piece of garlic bread, was Shauna Kinzer; she was an office manager at a lumberyard. He’d been nodding casual hellos to her for several years; a couple of times they’d had lunch, nothing fancy, just an Applebee’s out near a site they were both involved with. In the middle of fine-tuning the details on a big job, he’d asked if she’d like to get dinner, and she’d given him an easy, natural yes that filled him with a quiet warmth. He’d been nervous, worried that she could see it. It had been a long time. She’d ordered the pepperoni chicken.
“Chicken all right?” he said.
“It’s great,” she said, smiling at him. “I always try to order something I wouldn’t make for myself at home.”
Steve twirled his spaghetti against a spoon and gave a small laugh. “My house has two grown men in it,” he said. “We eat a lot of spaghetti.”