Field Guide to Exotic Birds

Joseph James gets home from work late most afternoons, and he likes to stay home once he gets there. Likes to stay home, stay stoned when there’s pot around. On the hot days of summer he hangs out downstairs on the porch, reading science fiction, hidden behind the scrubby trees in front of the house. He keeps a broom in the corner of the porch, and every so often he sweeps the leaves and dead spiders and gritty dust, and sometimes he goes to sweep the porch and realizes the broom has been stolen, and he goes and buys another one.

His old neighborhood is two city bus rides away, and his mom still lives there, has always lived there. She says all the neighborhoods are pretty much the same.

On a Saturday morning he goes over there to visit her, he visits her every so often. She doesn’t answer the outside buzzer, so he waits, out on the wide cement steps of the building, and after a while he goes two blocks up the same street to see if maybe she’s at her friend Sylvie’s, or if maybe Sylvie knows where she is. It’s late enough in the morning that Sylvie won’t have a boyfriend over.

Her apartment is on the ground floor and he knocks once and she yells, “Come on in, it’s open.”

She’s at her table doing the crossword. Her yellow hair is up on top of her head, tied there in a pink scarf.

“So, Joey boy, I saw you coming up the street, how’s every little thing, how’s the love life?”

Sylvie likes to give advice about love. She told him once he should get a dog, girls always like a guy with a dog. She said it was a great way to meet them, they’d come right up to you in the park and start in about the dog. Not too big a dog.

“You want a cup of coffee?” she says. “How about a beer?”

“It’s only like eleven in the morning,” he says.

She lets out a laugh that’s half laugh, half cough, and gets him a cup of coffee, gives it to him black, and she says, “I know you like sugar in there but no can do, got some Sweet‘N Low if you want.”

It’s in a flowered teacup.

He says, “So.”

The curvy handle is too small for his fingers.

“How’s everything going,” he says. “Like with Mom and all?”

“Oh, kiddo,” she says. “You’re such a worrywart, she’s doing okay, you know, staying pretty straight, I know what you’re asking, don’t be such a nervous nellie. You know she got a job part time? How about you, you still working at the Walmart?”

“Warehouse,” he says. “It’s a warehouse.”

She chews on the pencil. It has chew marks on it.

She says, “You know what island in French is?”

“I think ‘isle’ maybe.”

After a while he finishes his coffee and stands up.

“Don’t worry, Joey Boy, I’ll tell her you dropped by. I’ll tell her you’re handsome as ever.”

When he was little he thought Sylvie was funny, her funny deep voice, and she’d say things like, “You’re a good egg,” and “See you round like a donut.” She wore blue eye makeup even when she was in her bathrobe, and she always smoked, carrying one of her little ashtrays around. He slept on her couch sometimes, his mom and her sitting at the table, talking and laughing, or sometimes talking and crying, all the little ashtrays full of cigarette butts. They took turns, Sylvie and his mom, one being happy, the other being sad, painting each other’s toenails, eating crackers.

He used to sleep on her couch later, in middle school, and high school. She would show up after school, outside the school doors or by the edge of the parking lot.

“Hey, kiddo,” she’d say when he went down the steps...