The Home for Wayward Parrots

by Wehm, Darusha;

  Copyright © Darusha Wehm, 2018

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication—reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system—without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Wehm, M. Darusha, 1975-, author

  The home for wayward parrots / Darusha Wehm.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-988732-27-5 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-988732-28-2 (EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-988732-29-9 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS8645.E347H66 2018 C813’.6 C2017-905220-9

  C2017-905221-7

  Board Editor: Leslie Vermeer

  Cover design & layout: Kate Hargreaves

  Author photograph: Steven Ensslen

  Cover photograph: Andrew Pons (Creative Commons via Unsplash, image has been modified)

  NeWest Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for support of our publishing program. This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada.

  201, 8540 – 109 Street

  Edmonton, AB T6G 1E6

  780.432.9427

  www.newestpress.com

  No bison were harmed in the making of this book.

  PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA

  1 2 3 4 5 20 19 18

  For Clara Katherine

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE — TELEPHONE

  one — Gumbo

  two — Staying Over for Dinner

  three — Break and Enter

  four — Question Authority

  five — Bush Party

  six — The Thing with Jacquie

  PART TWO — EMAIL

  seven — You’ve Got Mail

  eight — Pawz N Clawz

  nine — Café Mozart

  ten — The New Kid on the Block

  eleven — Seedy P and the Technicolor Scream

  twelve — Familiar Aliens

  thirteen — The Bird Whisperer

  fourteen — Steely Do

  fifteen — I Went to a Garden Party

  sixteen — Cleaning the Kitchen

  seventeen — Meet the Parents

  eighteen — Searching for the Greener Grass

  nineteen — Responsibility

  twenty — Too Much Information

  twenty-one — The Fight

  twenty-two — The Rainbow Room

  twenty-three — A Matter of Time

  twenty-four — Dearly Beloved

  twenty-five — The Parrot Incident

  twenty-six — Sunday Morning Coming Down

  PART THREE — POST

  twenty-seven — Seeing You Again

  twenty-eight — Letters from Cyprus

  twenty-nine — Casualties of War

  thirty — The Lady Killer

  thirty-one — Home for Christmas

  thirty-two — First the Potatoes

  thirty-three — The Pajama Game

  thirty-four — Always and Forever

  1

  GUMBO

  I WAS SITTING ON THE TOILET the first time I ever spoke with my mother. It was a bad habit, taking the phone into the bathroom, but I did it every time. Ever since I got one of those phones with the internet and everything, I’d find myself surfing while taking a crap. I figure that it’s just the twenty-first–century equivalent of reading the sports section on the john. Of course, the sports section never rings with the phone call you’ve been wanting to get for thirty years.

  Don’t get me wrong — I grew up with a mom and dad just like about half the rest of the world. It was almost like the descriptions in a badly written children’s book; we lived in a white clapboard house on a tree-lined street in a quaint little town. The reality is that I don’t even know what clapboard is, and the house was blue, except for the year my dad got creative. Mom repainted it the next summer. Blue.

  I think she liked the blue because Mom was a cop. When I was little I thought her first name was Officer. I think she would have worn her uniform on her days off if she were allowed. On the other hand, unless you lived with us, you’d hardly even know that Dad had a job. Some people thought he was embarrassed — he was a nurse — but really it was that he didn’t care about work like Mom did. Dad was a good nurse, but he didn’t love nursing like Mom loved policing. It was just a job for him and he left the patients at the hospital. Being a cop was like Mom’s religion.

  Other kids used to make fun of me because of Mom and Dad. “Does your dad wear an apron, too?” they’d ask. I knew it was supposed to be mean, but he did wear an apron sometimes. It never seemed weird to me, because it’s just what was normal in my house. Looking back, I guess I’m lucky they named me Brian; I could have been saddled with one of those horrible gender-neutral monikers you see everywhere these days. Logan, Mason and Taylor, like some kind of unisex law firm.

  I was lucky in a lot of ways, I know. My parents never let me forget that they loved me; they even spun the whole adopted thing as a way of proving it. They picked me — I was no accident. And I love my folks just fine, but I can’t say I never thought about it. To be honest, I thought about the fact that I was adopted all the time.

  I GUESS NOWADAYS YOU’D SAY we lived in the suburbs, but everyone just called it out of town. It was a half-hour car ride into downtown, but it was nothing like living in the city. Even now, Saanich isn’t like what I imagine when I think of the ’burbs. We had a quarter acre of our own and the down-the-road neighbours had a small dairy farm. The neighbourhood smelled like trees and horses.

  Growing up in Saanich was kind of weird. It wasn’t the country — I mean it was less than an hour on the bus to anywhere in Victoria, and the bus ran every day. Once I got older it seemed I spent more hours on the bus than anywhere else. That bus was like a second home until I moved into the city after university.

  But we lived a lot like country people do, I imagine. The neighbourhood kids all ran around feral in the summers. When my folks would kick me out of the house to “get some fresh air instead of spending all your time with your nose in a book,” I’d spend the entire day in the woods with Johnny Frazier, Blair McKirk and Angela Hoeffer. We’d leave our houses first thing in the morning and tear around on our bikes until six or seven at night.

  I can’t remember us ever doing anything particularly interesting, but we somehow managed to entertain ourselves in those days. I guess it’s not really that hard to amuse a bunch of ten-year-olds. The big excitement one summer was this abandoned construction project on the other side of the highway. Crossing the highway was a big deal because we weren’t supposed to do it. There weren’t really that many rules, but of course we had to break the ones there were. So crossing the highway without getting caught was the major goal of almost every excursion. And once we found the lot, we were in kid heaven.

  I don’t know what we found so exciting about the place. I guess the construction people cleared away anything of value before they took off. There were no dead bodies, buried treasure or working heavy machinery to be found. But at the time we all thought it was the best place ever. Angela found it first, and she never stopped reminding us it was thanks to her that we had the coolest hangout around.

  I was sitting on The Mound, this hill of dirt we claimed as the main meeting spot. It was my turn to bring the food, and I had a bunch of peanut butter and honey sandwiches in my backpack. I handed one to Johnny, who start
ed wolfing it down before I’d even managed to give out the rest of them. Typical.

  “Jesus, Johnny,” Blair said, taking the wax-paper package from me and rolling his eyes. “Your mom doesn’t feed you or what?”

  “Shut up,” Johnny said around a mouthful of sandwich. This was a daily exchange between the two and neither I nor Angela even heard it anymore. I passed her a sandwich and unwrapped my own. The four of us chewed for a while without talking. Blair pulled out a two-litre bottle of Coke wrapped in a paper bag and we passed it around like it was rotgut wine and we were a pack of hobos. We were all envious of Blair. His parents were getting divorced, and as a result he and his two sisters could get anything they wanted. This largesse trickled down to our gang in the form of Coke, bags of Old Dutch potato chips and the occasional candy bar.

  “We should go look for tools behind the shed,” Angela said after half her sandwich was gone.

  “There’s nothing here,” I argued. We’d looked for something decent every day for a week and never found anything left behind.

  “We haven’t looked everywhere,” Blair said, looking toward Angela. Everyone knew he liked her, except her and maybe him.

  “You got any other ideas, Gumbo?” she asked me as if Blair hadn’t said a word. If it bothered him, he didn’t show it.

  I was the only one in our group with a nickname, and I was never sure whether I liked the unique status or not. It was one of those dumb things that doesn’t make any sense but sticks with you forever. When we were all little, we would go out trick-or-treating on Halloween together. One year — I was maybe seven — I dressed as an elephant. I don’t know where I got the idea or how Dad even pulled it off. He was responsible for stuff like that, though if I’d wanted to be a cop for Halloween I’m sure Mom would have dug up a genuine child-sized uniform for me. I was never once a cop for Halloween.

  Anyway, I was dressed up in grey sweats stuffed with pillows and an elephant mask with giant floppy ears and a trunk that hung to my knees. It looked ridiculous, but at least it was warm. The others were already there when Mom dropped me off at Johnny’s house. She walked me up to the door and delivered me to Mrs. Frazier with her annual Halloween warning about flashlights, reflective clothing and razor blades, and I had the usual sensation of wanting the floor to swallow me up. Having a cop for a mom is a permanent state of embarrassment.

  After my blush faded, Johnny’s little sister Mary came toddling out to the door. She took one look at me and started jumping up and down and giggling. “Gumbo,” she shouted in that little-kid voice. “Gumbo, Gumbo, Gumbo!”

  At first we though she was trying to say my last name, but how would she even know what it was? She was only three. After a second or two of confusion, we all figured out that she was trying to say Dumbo. It was her current favourite movie, and the Fraziers had even bought the VHS tape for their new VCR. I guess I should be glad that she couldn’t pronounce it right. I don’t know if I could stand to be known as Brian Dumbo.

  “You got any chips, Blair?” I asked, deflecting Angela’s question. I didn’t have any ideas, but I was getting tired of digging in the dirt for non-existent treasures. They been going out to the site every day for a couple of weeks, and Mom and Dad had sent me out with them more days than they hadn’t. The novelty was starting to wear off.

  Angela wasn’t easily ignored, though. She intercepted the bag of Rip-L chips that Blair tossed me and said, “Hang on, Gum. You got something you want to do this afternoon? Digging for tools isn’t good enough for you? You got some hot book you wanna read? Or do you need to go dust for prints somewhere?” My face got hot, and I wished I’d never mentioned the Junior Detective Kit I’d gotten for my birthday that year.

  “Come on, Angela,” Johnny said, hand wrist deep in his own bag of chips. “Don’t be a jerk.”

  “Never mind,” I said, getting up and wiping the dirt from my butt. “I just don’t feel like it today.” I half walked, half fell down The Mound toward where the bikes were lying on the ground.

  “Where are you going?” Blair called after me.

  “Home,” I said, not turning around. I picked up my bike and walked it over to the edge of the lot.

  As I looked for my opening to cross the highway, I heard Angela laugh a fake high-pitched titter. I knew then that she felt bad, but it was too late. I was already halfway across the highway and heading for home.

  IT WAS SOMETIME IN THE SUMMER of the construction lot that I first discovered it might be possible to find out who my real parents were. I never called them that out loud; I knew that Mom and Dad would die if they heard me say that. But that’s what they were in my mind. My real parents. And I could maybe find them someday. The thought of it consumed me the summer I was ten years old.

  And it consumed me every summer, every winter, every spring and fall for twenty more years, until the one morning I was in the john reading comics on my phone and it rang.

  2

  STAYING OVER FOR DINNER

  IN A LOT OF WAYS, the four of us shared one combined childhood. I would probably have been perfectly happy just to sit in my room, reading my books or making an inventory of my toys, but Mom and Dad made sure I got “out with people.” And people meant Johnny, Blair and Ange. We were in and out of each other’s houses without prejudice in some combination or another. I think there were probably times when a group of us would find ourselves in some house and we’d realize that the kid whose house it was wasn’t even there. It was this closeness that made what happened with Jacquie even more awful.

  For all the time we spent at each other’s places, I hated going over to someone’s house for dinner. I wasn’t exactly a picky eater — I’d try anything and there wasn’t much I really didn’t like — but it drove me crazy to have food served in the wrong order. It has always been obvious to me that there is a clear order in which dishes should be put on plates, but no one else seems to understand it. As I got older I was mostly able to just let it go, but when I was a kid it made eating at someone else’s house an almost physically painful process.

  And then there was everything else that was horrible and awkward about being part of that incredibly intimate family ritual of dinnertime. All the other kids’ houses were weird and I never knew how to act. I dreaded going over for dinner. Especially at the McKirks’.

  For the longest time, we all tried to stay out of the McKirk house as much as possible. By the time we were about nine, everyone knew that Mr. and Mrs. McKirk were going to get divorced, but they were desperately trying to make everything okay for their three kids. Blair had an older and a younger sister and the McKirks were more concerned with making sure their kids were not damaged by the divorce than they were with hating each other. It meant that there wasn’t a lot of fighting in the house anymore, but instead there was this oppressive atmosphere of conciliation and pacification. It was a great source of treats and you could get away with almost anything at Blair’s, but we all felt it. It was just wrong.

  Even before things broke down for the McKirks I hated eating over at Blair’s. There were just too many people. Mrs. McKirk’s sister lived ten minutes away, and she and her family were over more often than not. There would sometimes be ten or more people at the dinner table, all of them talking at the same time. It was like feeding time at the zoo and I was some poor visitor who got locked in after closing time.

  I only went over there a few times, but each time it was the same. A wall of noise as everyone talked at once, some cousin braying with laughter, Blair’s uncle drinking beer after beer and getting louder and louder. It didn’t help that Mrs. McKirk couldn’t cook anything that didn’t come with microwave instructions. The only good thing was that with so many people it was easy to leave the table early and hide out in Blair’s room. After the divorce he got a PlayStation and his own TV. We spent hours playing Twisted Metal, clowns shooting as we drove our tanks into each other. You could still hear the noise from the dining room over the video game soundtrack.

 
If it was the Wild West at the McKirks’, the Hoeffer house was like a morgue. Angela’s parents were both professors at the university, and I sometimes wondered how two stereotypical bookworms could have produced a hellion like Angela. She was the first to pick up a frog, the first to jump her bike over the creek and the last to be the voice of reason on any of our adventures. Her parents looked like the most exciting thing they’d ever done was break the spine of a book. Secretly, I wished my parents were more like them. I doubted they ever forced Angela to “go out and be with people.”

  But dinner at the Hoeffers’ was no fun — it was more like going to school, but you’re the only student. Every bite was punctuated by some question about your interests, what books you’re reading and what course you think you’d like to take. I wondered if Angela and her brother Tony had to answer those same interview questions when they didn’t have company, too. The only upside was that it was quiet.

  It was quiet at Johnny’s house, too, if you don’t count the noise from the TV, which was always on. It wasn’t that Mr. and Mrs. Frazier ignored us, exactly; they just let us fend for ourselves. The good news was that nine times out of ten we’d get to have pizza for dinner when we were at Johnny’s. The downside was that it also meant we probably had to deal with Johnny’s little sister, which at best meant watching some dumb kids’ movie on the VCR and at worst meant cleaning up puke.

  I always tried to get out of it, but with two parents whose jobs required shift work, I was at someone’s place to eat a couple of times a month until I was old enough to take care of myself. I learned to make Kraft Dinner when I was eleven and by the time I was thirteen I could roast a chicken and vegetables without help. For me, like for the ancient humans, learning to cook was a survival skill.

  IT’S NOT THAT JOHNNY, BLAIR, ANGELA AND I stopped being friends in high school. We bussed in to the same school in the city and we chatted on the bus ride, but once we arrived at the enormous building in town we were individuals again. Looking back, it seems like we stopped hanging out the first day of grade ten, but it probably took a few weeks to drift apart. The high school was huge — there were more than five hundred kids, and we soon learned that it wasn’t cool to hang out with kids from your neighbourhood anymore. As we got older and met more people, I think we figured out that we really didn’t have that much in common.