While Aunt Christine was pulling mugs from the cupboard and stacking them near the coffeepot, I dragged Grandma Helen’s address book across the table and flipped to J. The first entry was for Joe Jared of the JJ Ostrich Operation out of Yuma. I stared down at the name, written in my grandmother’s elegant cursive, tall and sloped to the right. Joe Jared had been salivating over the ranch for decades. With our land, he could increase his production by fifty percent while lowering his delivery costs to his primary market in Las Vegas. Every few years he sent a purchase offer that Grandma Helen rejected without even reading. I didn’t have to be stuck on the ranch, no matter what Grandma Helen had thought. There was one more card I could play.
But even thinking of selling brought on guilt. If Grandma Helen had wanted the ranch sold off, the money evenly distributed among her children and grandchildren, she would have said so in her will. She’d left it to me because I could do the work. I knew how to manage the birds and was familiar enough with the billing that I could figure it out. She trusted that I would carry on with the business.
Aunt Christine continued to bustle around the kitchen, arranging plastic forks and spoons upright in cups on the counter, little bouquets of disposable flatware.
I let my finger trace down the page of the address book. Below the entry for Joe Jared, the page was a smudged mess dedicated to my mom. The first entry for Laura Jones was logged in ink. The address—some crappy apartment in Hollywood—was scratched out with three efficient blue lines; in the margin was my name, with my birthday written in tiny print underneath.
The next entry was in pencil, erased and rewritten so many times that the page had developed a small hole and my grandmother had been forced to use a third entry for my mother. That one had also been erased and rewritten so many times that it would be worn through soon. I wasn’t even sure if the Oakland address we had for my mom was current. Usually, she called to let us know when she moved, but sometimes it took her a while. Over the years, her cell phone number had become the most reliable thing about her.
“You called to tell her about tomorrow, right?” my aunt asked. She had come up behind me without my noticing. I startled and flipped shut the address book.
“Yeah,” I said. When I’d called my mom, she had sounded upset but not devastated. Her exact words were “Oh, shit.” She dutifully took down the address of the church where the funeral would be held and said she would come. It was the same well-these-things-happen attitude that everyone had, and I wanted to scream at them all. Grandma Helen had had a full life, yes, but it wasn’t supposed to be over. She had checked out and abandoned us all. No one understood that but me.
Aunt Christine plucked her oversize purse from the kitchen table and slung the strap over her shoulder. “I’ll pick you up at ten. Please be ready.”
“Uh-huh,” I said absentmindedly, opening the address book again after Aunt Christine wedged herself out the front door. As soon as I heard her engine cough to life, I dialed Joe Jared’s number.
“Helen Jones,” he said when he answered, apparently reading off his caller ID. His voice came through with such force that I recoiled from the receiver, a tickle boring deep inside my ear.
“No,” I said, bringing the phone closer so I could speak. “It’s her granddaughter, Tallulah.” We had never met. I felt cold, but my palm was sweating against the receiver. “Are you still interested in buying our ranch?”
I was taking that job in Montana.
TWO
The next morning, I got up early to collect as many eggs as I could before the funeral. Joe Jared had been excited to get my phone call, but until all the details of the sale were worked out, the chores that made up my daily life on the ranch would need to be attended to.
The sky hung heavy with the scent of a coming storm. Rain was a rare and welcome thing in the desert. Soon, the low clouds would open up as if sliced from below with a blade. A deluge would fall for an hour, maybe two, soaking the parched land and setting everything to sparkle. I loved rainy days. Everybody did. Giddy children would dance in the streets with their heads thrown back, and the adults would gather in grateful clusters to agree on how much we needed the water. Nobody owned an umbrella.
Wrestling the wheelbarrow from the barn, I shoved it through the sand to the center of the corral. The metal grate at the base of the elevated grain silo came open with a clunk, and the ostriches all swiveled their heads. The bird feed slid down a metal sluice into the trough below, and the birds gravitated toward their breakfast.
I ducked out of the way, daydreaming about Montana, where I wouldn’t spend my days being pecked at by aggressive birds that outweighed me by two hundred pounds. Up and down my arms, the welts they’d given me held every shade of bruise. I planned to collect the eggs while the ostriches were preoccupied with their meal, hoping to avoid as many nips as possible, but as they rose to their feet, I saw that the nests were all empty. All except one, in which a solitary egg rested on its side.
Confused, I scooped it from the nest. It was warm and had a good weight to it. I scanned the floor of the corral for the distinct white curves of the eggs, but there were none except the one in my hand. I cradled the egg in my arm and walked the full length of the corral, taking in one empty nest after another. The sandy rings looked like little blast marks left in the wake of some bloodless battle.
Over at the feed trough, the birds reached past one another with their long necks to poke at the grain below with quick, deliberate jabs, the way my aunt would check the temperature of a pan by tapping at it. Outwardly, everything was as expected.
From the far end of the corral, I watched as the birds finished eating and drifted away from the empty feed trough, dispersing into the corral. The hens loped to their nests and settled their desert-brown bodies precisely as they did every day. There was nothing unusual about the birds. In fact, once the hens sat down, hiding their empty nests, I almost doubted myself, but the weight of that one single egg told me I wasn’t imagining things.
My thoughts went immediately to the conversation I’d had with Joe Jared the night before. He had been eager to move ahead with the purchase of the ranch, but I had no doubt he would back out of the deal if something was wrong with the ostriches. Not that he cared about the eggs as product. He ran a meat and leather operation, hatching the eggs and raising the chicks for slaughter. But he needed eggs all the same.
Can’t run an ostrich ranch without ostrich eggs.
Still carrying the one egg in the crook of my arm, I took hold of the beak of a nearby female to check for signs of sickness. Her feathers fluffed in protest and she shifted on her nest, but I held firm and she allowed me to pull her face close to inspect for congestion or sticky eyes or anything that might signal a sickness of any kind. There was nothing. I checked one of the males too, but by all outward appearances, they were in perfect health.
I climbed up the feed silo ladder to inspect the grain for rot, thinking maybe the lack of eggs was due to a problem with the birds’ food, but there was nothing wrong there. I even took a sip from their water trough, testing for a bitter taste or funny smell. The water was cool and clean. Of course, I knew there were things I wouldn’t be able to detect, but subtle toxins would take time to do damage. I couldn’t explain the sudden stop of egg production over one night. It didn’t make sense. Nothing appeared amiss. Nothing except the lack of eggs.
I was still trying to figure it out when I saw my aunt’s minivan approaching. I delivered the lone egg to the cold storage unit and hurried inside to change.
At the beep of Aunt Christine’s horn, I emerged in a recently purchased, black cotton sack of a dress that was too tight in the shoulders but mercifully covered the bruises on my arms. I climbed into the passenger seat. Aunt Christine wore an elegant black maternity dress with a satin V-neck. She gave my dirty boots a sideways glance but said nothing.
My