Nesting

Cayenne peppers are toxic to pigeons, but we didn't know. Marcie and I had just moved to Baltimore, both amiable, glass-half-full, small-town mid-Americans. We knew grouse and quail and duck; we knew songbirds. But the barrel-breasted, black-eyed pigeons who aimed their shit at car windshields and built flimsy nests on apartment ledges were a novelty, and not entirely unwelcome. Marcie liked the soft-gray rings around their eyes and the way their heads looked bald, she said, even though they were capped with feathers. People in the city called them sky rats and gutter birds, but Marcie took a shining to them the way she had with the barn mice and gophers back home. They were living, breathing, cooing reminders of life in rural Missouri, a state that southerners consider Midwestern but the North considers the South. Where exposed brick is not a stylistic choice, but, rather, indicative of a home that is home in the truest sense: well worn, neglected, and appreciated. Loved thin.

In her ad, our Baltimore landlord had used words like modern and two-toned taupe, but only uploaded a photo of the building's front, a brick façade of columns and pediment, deceptively regal and all too assuming. Exactly what Marcie and I expected of the city, and so we said we'd take the place. We didn't hate it.

Until I was 19, I spent summers on my grandparents' ranch, baling hay and mucking stalls. And Marcie grew up gardening alongside her mother. Surrounded by so many shades of city-gray, we thought to construct an aboveground pallet garden on the roof for herbs and tomatoes. We weren't sure what to fortify the garden against, so we asked the woman next door.

"Wind and squirrels," she said. "Stray cats and, of course, the pigeons."

We set a four-foot palisade of sharp, scrapped wood around the garden, with a little swing-door for prospective harvests. And when the time came, I'd sprinkle nascent sprouts with cayenne pepper—a trick Marcie's mother used to dissuade the winged things. Every evening, home from work, we poured drinks, filled the green, plastic watering can, and climbed the back stairs to the roof. Sometimes, up there, we talked about our new jobs—hers in administration at Good Samaritan; mine, the reason we moved to the city, training linemen for Amtrak. But mostly, we talked about home, our families; mostly, we reminisced, or else enjoyed the silence, the amber rooftop light when the clouds broke. We'd yet to find much kindness in Baltimore.

On the evening we found our first sprout in the garden, we were elated. I'd forgotten the pepper bag and had to run back downstairs for it while Marcie watered the supple, waxy bud, her eyes almost level with the soil. When she'd finished, I gave it a tender pinch of the pepper, which turned to a blood-red paste on contact with the wet leaves. We stood for a handful of minutes, the sun warm on our cheeks and collarbones, holding each other at the waist and sipping our cocktails.

Back downstairs in our apartment, infected with a grower's joy and a newfangled sense of something akin to belonging, we took turns mixing drink after stronger drink, dancing and flipping our favorite records from Side A to B and back again until one of us slipped fresh vinyl from its sleeve and pulled the needle. We slid across the hardwood floors on area rugs, and when Marcie pulled up her nightgown and bent herself over the back of the couch, we fucked without bothering to tilt the blinds.

The next morning when our alarms went off for work, we were sore, exhausted, and hung over, but Marcie kissed me good morning, still, with gummy lips and acid-foul breath. She showered first and made coffee and, while I was in the bathroom, popped her head in to say she was going to drink a cup on the roof, needed some fresh air and wanted to make sure she'd closed the garden...