My name is Nora Whitaker. I’m thirty-six years old. I live at 418 Larkspur Lane in the Willow Bend subdivision in Meridian, Idaho, with my daughter, Birdie. Her real name is Bridget, after my grandmother, but she’s been Birdie since the day she was born because she came out chirping instead of crying. The nurse said she’d never heard anything like it.
Birdie is six.
Her father, my husband Caleb, died three years ago. He drove a delivery truck for a produce company in Boise. One icy morning in January, a semi jackknifed on Interstate 84, and Caleb couldn’t stop in time. The state trooper who came to our apartment door said it was instant. He said it like that was supposed to help.
Birdie was three. She doesn’t remember much about her daddy. She remembers that he smelled like oranges. She remembers he used to whistle at the birds in the park, and they’d whistle back.
Caleb had a life insurance policy through his job. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I didn’t even know about it until a woman from the company’s human resources office called me two weeks after the funeral and asked where I wanted the claim forms sent.
I sat at my kitchen table in that tiny apartment and stared at those forms for a long time. It felt wrong to fill them out. Like I was trading him for money.
But I had a three-year-old and a job doing medical billing for a pediatric clinic that paid me $3,900 a month. So I filled them out.
I used $85,000 of that payout as the down payment on the house on Larkspur Lane. It’s a gray two-story with white trim and a small backyard with a wooden fence and a gate that opens onto a walking path. Beyond the path there’s an open field, and beyond the field there’s an irrigation canal with a gravel trail along it.
I bought it because the backyard had a big old cottonwood tree. Caleb always said he wanted Birdie to grow up with a tree to climb.
The mortgage is $2,180 a month. The HOA dues are $95 a month. The rest of the insurance money went into a savings account at Idaho Central Credit Union and a college fund for Birdie that I don’t touch.
The first year in that house was hard. Birdie didn’t sleep. She’d wake up screaming for her daddy. She stopped talking to other kids at preschool. She’d sit by the back window for hours staring at nothing.
Then one morning in the spring, she was sitting by that window, and she said, “Mommy. There’s a bird with a broken foot.”
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