Birdy Waterman 01 - The Bone Box

told, he jokingly called her Birdzilla. She used to wait on those very steps for him to come home from one of his extended fishing trips or from the lumber mill where he’d worked in the off-season.
    Birdy let the memory pass as she knocked. She knew the door wasn’t locked, but it seemed that her mom and her boyfriend of the moment required the courtesy of a warning. Neither owned a car, so a vehicle check wouldn’t tell her if anyone was home. Birdy hadn’t liked what she’d seen the last time she opened the door without knocking. No child ever wants to see her mother doing that .
    Natalie Waterman twisted the knob and the chintzy aluminum door swung open a sliver. Birdy’s mother stood quiet for a second. Dark eyes scanning. Silver-streaked black hair going every which way like a turn indicator on an old car.
    “You keep coming,” Natalie said. “Don’t know just why, but you do.”
    The door opened the rest of the way, and Birdy, feeling like she had when she was ten years old, went inside the small living room. The TV was blaring, smoke curling along the dingy yellow ceiling, leggy houseplants clawing their way toward the saggy curtain-framed windows that looked out over a chicken pen and a woodpile.
    Just like it always had.
    Birdy hugged her mother, who remained stiff. “I come because I love you, Mom. Even when you don’t make it easy. I still do.”
    A cigarette dangled from Natalie’s nicotine-stained fingertips, and she braced herself as she allowed the physical contact with her oldest daughter.
    “My, my, aren’t you the giver,” Natalie said, falling into the recliner pointed at the home shopping channel, where a bubbly actress was promoting Christmas candles and wreaths “guaranteed to freshen a room with holiday smells.”
    It was the type of item Birdy hoped her mother would buy. She’d offered to help get the trailer home in order, but Natalie always refused. Charity, she said, was for losers and that simply wasn’t her at all.
    Birdy pretended to ignore the sarcasm that seemed to pour from Natalie’s cigarette-puckered lips. “You looking for your sister? She’s not here. She’s at home with her no-good husband and her litter of no-good brats.”
    Her mother—a charmer, she wasn’t.
    “No, Mom,” Birdy said, softly. “I came to see you today.”
    Natalie’s eyes stayed fixed on home shopping, but she answered her daughter.
    “Look at me. I must have won the lotto,” she said, without even trying to offer a smile. “If you want some coffee, I’m out. Might have some instant in the cupboard somewhere.”
    “I’m good,” Birdy said, as she took a seat across from her mother in the familiar green La-Z-Boy recliner that had been artfully crisscrossed with black electrical tape and silver duct tape. It had been her father’s favorite chair. She ran her fingers over the armrest.
    “I’m going to Walla Walla to see Tommy,” she said.
    Natalie sucked the life out of her cigarette before answering.
    “What for? Haven’t you done enough to that boy?”
    “He’s not a boy,” she said. “He’s almost forty.”
    “Fine, but why are you going to see him?”
    “Because he wrote and asked me to come. And besides, Mom, I have never felt right about him going to prison.”
    “A little late for you to say that now.”
    “I liked Tommy. I probably even loved him, even if he was my cousin.”
    “You are making me sick now, Birdy. Let it be. Go back to the dead people you seem to love so much. Leave the living alone.”
    It was cruel remark and it hurt. Natalie was a sharpshooter when it came to piercing her daughter’s insecurities. She always had been. Where most mothers sought to comfort a child, Natalie seemed to seek ways to hurt. Counselors and teachers, mentors and friends, each had tried to convince Birdy that her mother’s cruelty was a sign of her own insecurities, but that did little to alleviate a girl’s pain.
    “I knew you’d be supportive, Mom,” Birdy said, in a futile attempt at jabbing.
    “Leave Tommy alone,” Natalie said. “Let him be. Let sleeping dogs lie. You got that, Birdy? You’re never satisfied with the way things are. You understand?”
    Birdy’s neck muscles pulsed. Her neck. It was like a barometer of her stress.
    “I understand what you are saying, yes,” she said. “But I don’t agree with it. I don’t know what Tommy will tell me when I see him, but I do know I want to hear it.”
    “All you need to know is that he’s