The cockatoo does not survive this story.
Phyllis never intended to adopt a cockatoo, but Trey, Phyllis’s boyfriend, gave her his for safekeeping. Trey was not really her boyfriend. That would have been ridiculous. Trey was forty-eight years old and Phyllis was seventy-three, and sex was about the furthest thing from her mind. Every once in a while she did think about sex, but never with Trey. Lord, no.
Trey played baseball in high school, could have gone pro, he said, but suffered an unfortunate run of bad luck and ended up helping his parents with their insurance sales business. They owned a local franchise of a big insurance company that you’d recognize the name of if you heard it. Trey’s family made most of their money on vehicle insurance packages, specializing in motorcycles and boats, and had an off-the-books arrangement with a motorcycle law attorney for when clients got into accidents.
Trey rode a motorcycle. Phyllis had ridden on the back of it a few times. She had a bum leg which made it hard to get on and off gracefully, but she could manage. Trey even bought her a pink helmet. The old biddies at church certainly had a lot to say about that helmet, and about the motorcycle and the man that came with it. You would’ve thought it was some kind of scandal for Phyllis to accept a few rides around town. Ridiculous. A scandal was when Loretta Dean’s husband left her for a man. The motorcycle got Phyllis’ children and grandchildren all worked up, too. This delighted Phyllis.
Since Trey didn’t have a car, and didn’t like to fill the bike tank too often, Phyllis would often drive him places. She liked driving, and no one else ever asked her to drive anywhere.
Nobody seemed to know how Phyllis and Trey met. Shirley, Phyllis’s daughter, thought Phyllis had said it was at church, but Darlene, who was married to Phyllis’s son Lonnie, was adamant that she never laid eyes on Trey until he showed up with Phyllis one Sunday. Darlene had not missed a service in twenty years and had a mind like a steel trap, so no one doubted her. Greg, the younger of Lonnie and Darlene’s two sons, expressed concern that Phyllis and Trey might have met online, ChristianMingle or Tinder maybe, but Greg was an incorrigible jokester and no one took him seriously.
Except Shirley, who nodded grimly at Greg. “Probably a catfish,” she contributed.
“What are you saying, Shirley? Trey is no fish. Don’t say foolish things.” Lonnie, Shirley’s brother, was uncomfortable with any line of inquiry into what he considered his mother’s private life.
“Lonnie, Oprah did a whole show about it. These perverts find lonely people online, and fleece ‘em.”
Lonnie’s face was red, the way it got whenever people said things that upset him, which was more and more the older he got.
“Dad,” Ian interjected, faithfully performing his pacifying role as the eldest son, “they aren’t perverts — they’re just con artists.”
“Well actually, they could be perverts, some of them. It’s just not a requirement for catfishing.”
Darlene, Ian, and Emilia, Ian’s wife, all shouted “Greg!” at the same time.
Another mystery was how the cockatoo had come to live at Phyllis’s house. First, Trey had become a fixture there, napping on Phyllis’s couch during the day and going home at night to do whatever it was he did at night. Shower, Phyllis hoped. Then, one day, the cockatoo, whose name was Winston, showed up at Phyllis’s with Trey. In the evening, Trey said it didn’t make sense to transport a cockatoo on a motorcycle at night, so he would bring the bird home with him another day, and Phyllis couldn’t argue with that logic, but she did have to wonder exactly how he’d got the cockatoo to her house in the first place.
Trey said he could tell Winston liked her. Pretty soon, Phyllis was buying bird food once a month. She didn’t mind having him — the bird; it was nice to have a little noise in the house after nine years of widowhood. Also, the squawking sometimes woke Trey out of a protracted couch nap when he had a good loud snore rolling, and you couldn’t call that anything but a charitable gesture.
Unfortunately, Winston had a penchant for biting Phyllis whenever she tried to give him a treat or pet him. Phyllis’s son Lonnie was the only one that actually liked Winston. Lonnie spent more time talking to Winston than to Phyllis whenever he visited, and was convinced he’d taught the cockatoo a few words: “sorry” and “hello” and “please” and “Lonnie.”
The day the cockatoo died was blustery and cold, even for March. Phyllis had slept in, not wanting to get out of her warm bed. Around 11 a.m., she got up, put on her dead husband’s robe, got the wood stove going, and after a breakfast of coffee and sausage and cold tuna salad, got dressed for her hair appointment in town. Ever since Richard passed, Phyllis had eaten what and when she wanted. Sometimes she had pancakes in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep. She’d get up, rearrange the furniture in one of the rooms, fix herself some pancakes, then sleep like a baby the rest of the night.
Her hair appointment was at 1:30 p.m. with Lana, the girl that talked too much but set Phyllis’s curls just the way she liked them. She needed to stop for gas on the way, so she left the house promptly at five till one, but not before she took out the pan of ashes from the wood stove and set it on the little back porch to cool.
By the time the Kelton County Volunteer Firefighters arrived, the whole house was engulfed in flames. One strong gust was all it would have taken, according to Fire Chief Kenneth Paxton. He explained this to the family later — that the pan of ashes cooling on the back porch had likely been blown back onto the house by the wind and caught the splintered wood of the railing, or the chipping paint on the exterior wall, or the little fabric window dressings — it wouldn’t take much, is what he said. Chief Paxton came to this conclusion after speaking with Phyllis, who returned home at 4:15 p.m., hair set and colored, mouth agape at the sight of the flaming structure that used to be her home. Smoke billowed clear down Route 206 to Charlie’s AutoTech and Tackle.
But before all that, Greg, who worked as a dispatcher for the public transit authority, heard about the fire on the scanner and alerted the family phone tree. Emilia was only a few minutes away at Parker Chiropractic where she worked in the front office. Her day had gotten off to a stressful start. She’d neglected to fill up the gas tank when she last drove Ian’s car, and he was running late for work that morning. He blamed her for his being late, she retorted that he shouldn’t wait till the last minute to leave. And now his grandmother’s house was on fire. Emilia left work immediately and was the first family member to arrive on the scene.
Greg had a slightly longer drive, which meant more time to imagine the disaster that awaited him. He tried to think of something else and came up with a long-forgotten memory of playing bank robber and police at Phyllis’s house with Ian: Ian, the policeman, catching Greg red-handed as he made a dramatic leap off the porch with his imaginary haul of train passenger loot. Ian, pointing his finger gun, “Hands up! I’m taking you in,” unable even in make-believe to shoot his little brother. Greg, gleeful, shouting, “Bang! Too slow, lawman!”
Greg parked his truck next to Emilia’s Corolla. After an awkward greeting, they stood side-by-side, watching the blaze. Emilia and Greg had never been alone together despite having been brother- and sister-in-law for six years, and they were realizing now that they did not know how to navigate the dynamic of just the two of them. Greg tried to think of a way to break the ice. Emilia beat him to it.
“Thank God Phyllis was out.”
“Yes! Yes.” Greg rubbed a hand over his mouth as if deep in thought, then froze, and appeared to be trying to hold a thought back with his hand. Apparently deciding not to fight it, he dropped his hands back down at his sides.
“You think she took the bird with her to the hair appointment?”
“Oh my God!”
“Yeah,” said Greg. “I thought probably not.”
“What do we do?” Emilia turned away from the fire to face Greg, one palm on each of her cheeks in a caricature of alarm.
“I’m not going in after it, Emilia.”
“But shouldn’t we tell the firemen?”
“You think they should walk into a burning house for a cockatoo?”
Wide-eyed, Emilia pushed her fingers up into her hair, making her eyebrows look as though she’d had a face lift. It looked funny, and Greg laughed.
“Are you laughing?”
“No! Well, yes. Not about the cockatoo.”
Emilia seemed stressed.
“Emilia,” Greg said gently. “It’s too late for Winston.”
They both turned to face the house where flames were licking the roof, and the firefighters looked bored as they sprayed upward from the relative safety of the ground.
“He had a good life. There are worse ways to go.” Emilia didn’t say anything, so Greg kept talking. “At least Trey didn’t get hungry one day and eat him when he couldn’t bum a ride to the store.”
“Greg!”
Greg kept his gaze leveled at the house, his face impassive.
“I’m sorry. I guess I’m thinking about food because I’m a little hungry. Do you smell chicken?”
“NO! Greg, no.”
“No, I’m sorry. That was bad.”
A somber couple of minutes passed before Emilia spoke again.
“Poor Phyllis.”
“She’ll be okay. The house can be rebuilt.”
“Winston was pretty mean to her.” She sighed. “I don’t know why.”
Greg raised an eyebrow but did not chance a look at Emilia. “I don’t know why she kept that damn bird.”
“You don’t think…”
“What? That it was birdslaughter?”
“I don’t think that!”
“Cock bit her one a-TOO many times?”
“Okay, that was bad.”
“You’re right. Not my best. You might be on to something though, with the revenge thing. Maybe Phyllis got tired of waiting for Trey to pop the question.”
“Stop.”
“Well she doesn’t exactly have all the time in the world to wait.”
“Greg!!”
“Don’t worry, Winston’s probably already eating that big cracker in the sky.”
They were becoming giddy, giggling, drawing looks from the firefighters nearest to them. They knew they were being awful but they couldn’t stop. They had found a release valve for all the pressure the extended Henderson clan had been under.
Emilia and Ian were fighting almost daily, though no one else knew about it. Lonnie, Darlene, Ian, and Greg had been at odds for months over whether and how to get Phyllis to stop driving. Ian and Darlene wanted Lonnie to talk to Phyllis about putting her affairs in order, but Lonnie couldn’t bear to think of his mother dying, much less remind her that she would. Greg was barely making ends meet on his county worker salary, wondering what he was doing with his life at thirty years old, single, working a dead-end job in the same town where he grew up. And of course there was this thing — whatever it was — with Trey to worry about. The strain of it all, then the panic at hearing Phyllis’s house was on fire, the adrenaline of relief at learning she wasn’t home for it, was just too much. For Greg and Emilia, at least, it culminated here, on the gravel driveway, with the two of them eventually making squawking sounds and laughing so hard they had tears in their eyes, so that the firefighters began to wonder whether they shouldn’t call in a mental welfare check, or at least get out the space blankets to treat for shock.
Phyllis didn’t shed any tears over the cockatoo. She had grown up on a farm and knew there were worse ways to go than smoke inhalation. And it was true that the bird had become almost obsessed with biting her. Trey, on the other hand, did seem to be upset. In fact, he damn near cried, throwing himself huffily from couch to chair to doorframe, sighing “poor Winston” and “that poor bird” at various intervals. He would follow these expressions of grief with talk of how expensive the cockatoo had been, how it was some kind of rare cross-cockatoo species, how, although he couldn’t remember exactly how much he had paid for it, and what did that matter because you couldn’t put a price on that kind of companionship, it had to have been in the neighborhood of four or five thousand dollars. At this, Phyllis had laughed loudly and said, “If you paid $5,000 for that old bird you got yourself robbed.”
Phyllis went to live with Darlene and Lonnie while her house was rebuilt. In the meantime, Trey found another woman’s couch to pass the afternoons on — a woman much closer to his own age. Trey soon married her and moved in with her and her two daughters. The girls, whose mother had always expected them to pitch in with laundry, dishes, and other household chores, were dismayed by Trey’s aversion to physical labor. Trey sometimes grew tired of having three females nag him, and would go visit Phyllis in her new house. He started referring to Phyllis as his adopted grandma, which annoyed Phyllis, but she kept her mouth shut since he was still nice to her even though his cockatoo (which was rumored to have been a cockatiel retailing for around $400) had perished on her watch. The ladies at church never stopped talking about the motorcycle rides and the pink helmet, and that was, as the saying goes, a feather in Phyllis’s cap.
After the fire, Greg and Emilia did not grow closer. Greg still thought Emilia was dull and a bit annoying. Emilia continued to find Greg’s sense of humor idiotic and his manner of dress depressing. But, for a half an hour while they waited for Phyllis to arrive, so that she wouldn’t be alone when she learned she was no longer the owner of anything but an Oldsmobile 88 and whatever was in her purse that day, while the house burned and the firefighters grew increasingly uncomfortable with the inappropriate behavior, Greg and Emilia could say terrible things and not be polite and not worry over the right thing to do. It was a feeling like playing hooky from school, or flying on a red-eye; the feeling that time was suspended and nothing counted. The jokes weren’t even that funny, though Emilia nearly peed her pants laughing. Still, in a way, Winston, a cockatoo with a forty to eighty year lifespan (or was it a cockatiel with a fifteen to twenty-five year lifespan), ascended to a kind of immortality that day. Even years later, when conversation stalled at uncomfortable family get-togethers, Greg could sigh and murmur, “oh, Winston,” and Emilia would crack up and the tension would dissolve. Watching his brother make Emilia laugh would remind Ian how cute Emilia was when she laughed despite herself, and then Ian would, for a little while, try to make his wife laugh more often.
The family did not reach consensus on whether to stop Phyllis from driving until the day she drove her Oldsmobile into the glass front of a Dunkin’ Donuts, having confused the gas pedal for the brake. But Lonnie and Shirley did sit down with Phyllis to discuss her affairs. Phyllis’s will, drafted over a decade prior, had burned up along with their childhood photos. Phyllis agreed to make an appointment with an estate attorney and left with an updated will and a power of attorney that wouldn’t name any would-be suitors or adopted grandsons.
Shirley started calling Phyllis every evening at 6:30 to make sure there hadn’t been a fire or other catastrophe, and to complain about her coworkers and neighbors for twenty minutes or so. Once Phyllis was in her new house, Darlene would pick her up on Wednesdays to get lunch and do their grocery shopping. Darlene instituted a Friday night family meal which she prepared while Lonnie went to pick up Phyllis, driving her back home after dessert and coffee. In other words, life went on — for everyone except Winston.
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Hey, that was alright! I enjoyed it. I will think of Winston many times in the near future. "Oh Winston."
I like the slow descent this story towards the end. Hard to nail that parachute pacing, but you don't really well here. #poorwinston