Megan Bergman - Birds of a Lesser Paradise - Stories

Florida, she said. I made them go. They never travel, you know. They deserve it.

Mom had begged them to leave; they hadn’t wanted to. I think Mom saw the cruise as a premature thank-you for taking care of me, a chance for them to rest before the cancer worsened and she needed more help.

The party crowd was old, dignified, their un-made-up faces welcoming in the low light. Bakers, lawyers, farmers, quilters, retired teachers. They wore heavy knit sweaters to keep out the Vermont wind, long velvet skirts, artisan earrings. The kitchen and dining room tables were crowded with potluck fare. Masking tape marked the plastic trays and wooden bowls: Daniels Family. Griffin. Please return to Bob C .

Pepsi, please, I said to the sullen man behind the card table bar. Maker’s on ice for my mom. Stir in a little orange juice to make it healthy.

Point to your mother, the bartender said.

Mom waved.

Mom had one breast and a habit of moving towns when she got bored, dating men who could never hold her interest. She liked it that way. But now her cancer was back and she was weak. She held on to the kitchen counter as she greeted friends, mostly people my grandparents knew. She smiled, but I could see the dark circles around her eyes, her hollowed-out cheeks and thinning hair. I memorized her body, her voice. Everything she did felt like the last time. Everything she said felt like the last word.

Last summer Mom and I had lived in a single-wide in Moab. We’d patrolled a stretch of the Colorado River in a rubber boat, Mom’s dog, Aida, running from end to end. Every night we heated a simple dinner, usually scrambled eggs with black beans and diced peppers, and held court over a splintered picnic table next to the trailer. Mom drank warm wine and read romance novels, Aida safe on her lap. At sunset, a lone coyote would come to drink at the river, the water between us like a moving fence.

What will it be tonight, I always asked him. Chicken? Rabbit?

At night I imagined the coyote coming to me like a dog, resting his head on my knee as I groomed his coat with my fingers, leaving tufts of hair on the dry ground.

Watch out for a pack, Mom had warned me. You’re bite-sized.

By December I had already tired of the gray Vermont winter and found myself wanting to return to red-rocked Moab, the dusty bike trails and wide-mouthed sky. I loved to run and in Utah I could go for miles without ever seeing another person. But Pawlet was the right place for Mom to be.

One of Mr. Simons’s poodles, Fauna, forced her head underneath my dangling fingers and leaned against my thigh. Her coat was sculpted perfectly, a living, breathing, manicured hedge.

Hey, lady, I said to her. Nice ’fro.

Aren’t they marvelous, Mr. Simons was saying across the room, pointing to his moccasins. Millie made these for me when I was in college.

Thirty-six years ago, Millie said, adjusting the tortoiseshell comb at the nape of her neck.

Millie Banks was a hundred years old. She was slight and stooped, and wore her white hair in a loose bun on her crown. Brown leather boots peeked out from underneath her plaid flannel skirt. When Millie spoke, no one interrupted. We looked at her as if a centenarian were another species. I followed her as she walked down the hall to the living room.

Every year Millie played the violin and led the string trio in carols at Mr. Simons’s party, and every year I stood at the back of the room pretending to sing, watching her face. She was legendary. When she was seventeen she’d fought off a cougar in the woods behind her father’s dairy. Talked it down for half an hour in a calm voice, I’d heard, then poked its eyes out with her thumbs when it finally lunged. People often asked to see the claw marks on her calf; they knew she’d oblige. It was her story, part of her myth.

Millie lived alone, drove her own tractor until she was ninety-two. Split her own wood. She and Mom had much in common — except their longevity. They were independent outdoorswomen, native Vermonters.

I wanted to be near her, siphon off a handful of her years and give them to Mom.

Millie turned the corner just as Erik Sanderson caught my arm.

Hannah! he said, popping a shrimp tail into his mouth.

Erik was in his early thirties, good-looking but strange. He lived down the road from the place we were renting and was interesting as hell, but I’d have to find a way out of the conversation. Even though I wanted to talk to him, I couldn’t stand to make Mom worry any more than she already did — she’d think I was flirting.

Don’t take up with someone like that, she’d said recently, referring to Erik. I heard words she didn’t add: when I’m gone.

Pawlet was the kind of place where young girls fell in with older men and got pregnant; slim pickings led to cross-generational romance. Mom was insistent that I stay single and go to college.

Erik means well, I’d said.

I’d recently found myself thinking of Erik at night. He was robust and competent, a survivalist who wasted nothing. He lived in a tricked-out shed with a woodstove and a composting toilet. I liked his wild eyes, the gray hairs in his beard. I liked the way he looked at me; he didn’t talk to just anyone. He was the kind of man who made you feel safe.

He’d suck the joy out of a young girl’s life, Mom said. He’s always waiting for a financial meltdown, the apocalypse — Lord knows what he’s got stashed in those outbuildings.

Hear the coyotes these last few nights? he asked, standing close enough for me to smell the wood smoke in his sweater.

I nodded. I had, only because our dogs woke us at weird hours, howling responses through the windowpanes into the dark night.

They make Mom nervous, I said. She’s keeping the horses in the front pasture, under the lights.

Erik speared a sauced-up minifrank with his toothpick.

Coyotes, he said, got my friend’s beagle down the road. One drew him into the field and the others converged from the tree line. Brutal. I saw.

Is this a ship in a bottle? I asked him, pointing toward the mantelpiece. I couldn’t stomach any stories about death.

More of a Plexiglas box, Erik said. You can cut a custom box with any old band saw.

You could always draw Erik onto the next thing as long as you talked how-to’s. How to transplant a raspberry patch. How to keep foxes out of the henhouse.

Erik had been learning Chinese and stockpiling reading glasses, scrap metal, and tampons. I’ll be rich in the next barter economy, he claimed.

I found a jacket that might fit you in the church lost and found, Erik was saying. Kid’s down jacket, I think.

People began filtering in from the kitchen to cluster near the piano where the string trio had assembled. I caught Mom’s eye across the room.

Erik tugged his ear and looked at the threadbare Oriental rug.

Mr. Simons tapped his wineglass with his fork.

Time for carols, Erik said. He nodded at me and moved toward two French doors that opened onto a patio. Mom left the kitchen and stood behind me, held me by the shoulders.

The house became silent as Millie tuned up, resting and readjusting her wrinkled chin on the violin. Guests thumbed through the lyric bulletins with the righteous glow of people who are about to SING.

I found myself dreading the carols. This year, something inside of me was too sad, too tired to hit the notes.

Erik rested his forehead against the back door. I imagined he was used to colder rooms and was coming up for air in the corner by himself. He wore a leather vest over his sweater, chewed a toothpick.

Just as Millie lifted her bow, Fauna shot out of the doggie door into the backyard. Fauna! Mr. Simons yelled, running toward the door. Erik looked at me, then bolted outside. As Millie’s bow began to smart the strings of her violin, I watched him disappear behind the tree line, iced grasses knee-high and strangling his legs. The carol was anemic, though a few continued with the song, unconcerned. Dogs will be dogs, someone said. Through the window I could see Mr. Simons pacing the back patio. I wondered how fast Erik could run.