And in all that time, my sister had not set foot in Dad’s house. I’d told her she was done carrying, and she had taken me at my word. I think it was the first two weeks in two years she had slept past six. I had not told her about the notes. I’d like to say that was out of kindness. Some of it was. Some of it was that I didn’t know how.
Mr. Tucker told her for me, though that isn’t quite what he did.
She came that Thursday evening. I heard the kitchen door, and then her step on the basement stairs, slower than it used to be. I was at the bench with the ledger. She stopped on the bottom step.
She was looking at the shelves. Thirty-three birds, back on their ovals, with gaps between.
She had the mallard hen in her hand. Mr. Tucker’s.
“Leonard came to my door,” she said.
I waited.
“He stood on my step and held this out and said, ‘This one isn’t mine, and it isn’t Patty’s. Read what your sister wrote.’ And he gave me your note.” She had it, folded small in her other hand. “Then he said the whole town has been carrying ducks to Dad’s porch for better than a week, and he didn’t think it was right that I’d be the last to know.”
“Gail.”
“I read it three times, looking for the part where you say what I did.” Her chin was not steady. “It isn’t in there.”
“It isn’t in any of them.”
“Twenty-seven notes.”
“It isn’t in any of them,” I said again.
She unfolded the paper and read it to me, though I knew what it said.
“Mr. Tucker, yours is the mallard hen. W.B. 79. Dad’s book says: February. Gail home two weeks, tonsils. Down here every night in her robe. Let her paint the bill. She did it better than I do.”
She turned the hen over in her hands, and then right side up, and held it to the light. The bill is orange, and the orange goes over the line a little on the left side, where a ten-year-old’s hand got tired.
“I had forgotten I ever did that,” she said. “I had it in a laundry basket. I carried it up those stairs and I sold it across my own driveway for two dollars and I didn’t even look at it.”
She sat down on the shaving horse, all at once, like her knees had been waiting for permission.
I did not go to her yet. I’ve known my sister fifty-two years. She had something to say first, and it had been waiting a lot longer than two weeks.
“Do you know what Tuesdays were?” she said.
“No.”
“Tuesdays were the day after. He’d be so wrung out from Monday he couldn’t get down these stairs. He’d sit in a kitchen chair at the top with the door open and look down here at the light. He never complained. I’d almost rather he had.” She was looking at the canvasback with no head. “Last fall he asked me to bring that one up to the kitchen table. He said he’d like to just hold it. And I said, Dad, I have got to get your supper on and get home, I work tomorrow. I said I’d get it next time.”
She didn’t finish that.
“Every time I came down here for a jar of something, they looked at me,” she said. “All forty-seven. I didn’t want two dollars, Patty. I’d have given them away. I wanted to stop being looked at.”
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