“You’re not.”
He laced his fingers into mine. Devon’s hands were rough from his work at the plant and his fingernails always held thin lines of white cement dust no matter how much he scrubbed. They were strong, reassuring hands. “Thank you for coming,” I whispered.
“Of course.” He lifted my hand to kiss it and my sleeve fell away, displaying the collection of bruises on my arm. He winced.
“Stupid birds.” I pulled the fabric back into place.
“You should hire someone to help out,” he whispered.
“I know,” I said. I had intended to. When I was a kid, still too young to be in the corral, Grandma Helen had a guy who helped out during the summer months. A dark-skinned man with a stern face. I thought his name was Carlos, but when I flipped through Grandma Helen’s address book, there was no one by that name listed. I figured I could probably drive into Victorville and talk to the guys who stood on the corners hoping for work. I had even looked up the word for ostrich in Spanish, to augment my intro-level language skills. Avestruz. That was before I set things in motion with Joe Jared. He would bring his own guys in. All I had to do was keep things running long enough for the sale to go through.
I hadn’t told Devon about selling the ranch. He knew about my job with the Forest Service, of course. It wasn’t a secret. He had supported me through the application process despite his reservations about my being gone for months at a time. We had agreed to see how it went, maintaining our relationship long distance. But now, with Grandma Helen gone, I could hardly expect the birds to take care of themselves while I was away. He probably thought, like everyone else did, that I would give up the Forest Service job and stay on at the ranch. With everything that had been going on the past few days, I hadn’t had a chance to tell him otherwise.
“Devon, I—”
But before I could say any more, Pastor Phillips took the stage wearing a black suit and a plum-colored tie. A portly man with white hair, he walked slowly to take his place at the front of the church. He invited everyone to take their seats, but the small crowd was already sitting, waiting for him like schoolchildren, faces tilting up from the first few pews.
“I’ll tell you later,” I whispered.
Pastor Phillips spoke about finding God’s grace in hard times. He held out his hand toward the small wooden urn and told us Grandma Helen was in a better place. She would have hated the whole thing. She had never understood Aunt Christine’s embrace of religion.
Faith and motherhood were intricately entwined for my aunt. It was as if the nurses, while swaddling her firstborn, had tucked God into that striped hospital blanket right alongside the baby. The Heavenly Father came home with them that day, and religion became a part of their lives as much as sleepless nights and dirty diapers. Over the years, as she brought home each new baby and her collection of striped hospital blankets grew, Aunt Christine became more and more serious about her faith.
It didn’t make sense to Grandma Helen. When pressed, she would say that the desert was her church, the perfect rhythms of nature her hymns, the elegant wisdom of the ecosystem her Bible. She put her trust in the shifting sands that surrounded her and said that if there was a God, he resided in the wind and the moon and the unrivaled yellow of a desert marigold.
I planned to spread Grandma Helen’s ashes in the desert, after all the religious observances. Grandma Helen had said goodbye to her husband in the same way, many years before. I had never known my grandfather, but it was nice to think of them together again, their remains blowing across the great expanse of the desert in swirling gusts of wind. Pastor Phillips carried on, quoting the good word and expounding on God’s love, but my mind returned to the ranch, worrying over that one lone egg.
I shifted in the pew, anxious to be done with the service so I could get home and check for more eggs. Without them, I could forget about selling the ranch. It wouldn’t be worth the barren land it was built on.
THREE
When the funeral finally ended, I rode home from the church with Devon in his banged-up SUV. Halfway there, a fat drop of rain, carried ahead of the storm by the wind, burst against the windshield.
Watching in the rearview mirror, I could see the nine cars that followed us in a solemn procession from the church to the ranch. They were spaced evenly behind us on the highway, like a line of ants winding over the pale Mojave Desert.
Another drop exploded on the windshield, then another. I wished it had been raining the week before. If it had been raining, I could have believed that Grandma Helen’s death was an accident. The highway might have been slick, her vision obscured or perhaps confused by headlights on the wet roads. But the day of Grandma Helen’s death had been clear and sunny from dawn to dusk.
I considered the framed photo of her I held in my lap. I had snapped the shot myself, a few summers ago, after I graduated high school and Grandma Helen began paying me for my work on the ranch.
With my first paycheck, I bought myself a phone. The trip into town took most of the day, and when I returned home to the ranch, Grandma Helen sat reclined in one of the wicker chairs on the front porch, the green glass of her beer bottle wet with condensation, her head resting against the outside wall of the house. I joined her on the porch and pulled my new gadget from its box. I touched the unmarred glass of the screen and left a perfect fingerprint.
Grandma Helen had been skeptical of the utility of a cell phone way out there in the desert. Service was spotty at best, and carrying anything shiny into the corral with the ostriches was akin to filling your pockets with birdseed. They were quick and curious and drawn to any unfamiliar object.
Preoccupied with the device, I experimented with ringtones, sending unnatural trills and toots into the otherwise tranquil evening. To emphasize her opinion of my purchase, Grandma Helen made up her own names for the sounds as I tried them: chicken fart, sinkhole, dying dog. I ignored her, but she kept on, cracking herself up. I snapped a picture of her chuckling at her own jokes. The low light streamed in over the mountains in the west and it caught a glint in her pale blue eyes, the lines around them lifted in an easy smile. That moment, with her arm slung over the back of the chair, her hair loose around her face, that was how I wanted to remember her. It was nice that Aunt Christine had framed the photo for the funeral. It was just the kind of thing I never would have thought to do.
I cracked the car window and lifted my face to breathe in the scent of water in the air. Devon flicked the wipers to clear the drops that had begun falling in earnest. The sign for Wishbone Ranch came into view on our left like a miniature billboard, its tall lettering bold against the whitewashed wooden planks. Devon slowed.
His tires crunched against the gravel as we pulled off the paved road. The driveway marked the corral’s southern border, and I strained to see if there were any eggs, but the brown-quilled females were all sitting on their nests, blending into the desert landscape. Again, I questioned what I had seen that morning.
The darker male ostriches milled about the corral, necks stretched high, feathers rustling. Of the 142 ostriches on the ranch, most paid no mind to the comings and goings of cars, but one bird always made it his business to track visitors.
Grandma Helen had called him Theo; I didn’t know why. He was about eight feet tall. His black wings were tipped with white, same as his tail. Fine floss coated the ashen skin of his neck. He was a textbook example of a male ostrich and would have blended seamlessly with the flock except that he could not resist the urge to inspect any vehicle coming up our drive.
Within seconds of Devon’s car turning off the highway, Theo found his stride beside us, nothing but the thick wires of the corral fence separating us. Normally, he would have escorted us all