Read Online An Ornithologist's Guide to Life by Ann Hood - Free Book Online

remembered. Tillie was in California. That’s where she lived. Dan’s boy slept here now.
    Her heart still beating fast, Dora dropped onto the chair at Tillie’s old desk, where photographs of Tillie as a teenager stared back at her. She had taken ballet forever, then without warning switched to modern dance. Even though Dora never really enjoyed those later performances, she’d enjoyed watching her daughter. In one of the pictures, Tillie sat on the grass at Roger Williams Park, strumming a guitar, grinning. Braless, the outline of her nipples poked through thecotton tee shirt. Dora lifted the picture to look closer.
    Right after Dan had died, that very next winter, Tillie had a breast cancer scare. They’d done a lumpectomy, some radiation. Dora had flown out to San Francisco to be with her, had driven her through the maze of unfamiliar streets to doctors and hospitals, keeping her tone upbeat even as her gut ached with fear. When Madeline Dumfey drove Dora to Logan Airport for her flight to San Francisco, she asked her if she felt life was being unfair to her. Bill gone. And Dan. And now Tillie sick. Dora had been surprised by the question. Life unfair? She had known three big loves, she had borne two children, she had traveled as far as China, she was old and alive, she had her own health. She had listed these things to Madeline. “But to lose everyone,” Madeline had said. “Really, Dora, you must let yourself get angry. You must.” Someone, Dora no longer remembered who, had once said that one death was a tragedy, but many deaths were a statistic. Dora told Madeline this and Madeline had blinked back at her in that way she had, part disbelief, part disgust. “Really, Dora. That’s a terrible thing to say.”
    Now here was Madeline, dead, and Tillie fine except for a small ugly scar on her left breast. Dora did not feel equipped to understand any of it. What of all those boys she’d held who’d been killed in the Pacific, at Omaha Beach, at sea? What of the other men she’d loved, dead now too, both of them? Bill’s partner had died right at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in front of a Winslow Homer painting, of a massive heart attack. If that hadn’t happened, it was possible that she would have run off with him.
    Standing, Dora heard the low hum of a voice downstairs.She followed it, carefully holding the banister as she walked. There in the kitchen, hanging up the telephone, was Peter. He looked at her, weary.
    â€œIt could be any day now,” he said. “She’s dilated two centimeters. Her back hurts.”
    Dora allowed herself to ask the question that had been on her lips since Melinda had first called back in the spring.
    â€œWhy the hell didn’t she get an abortion?” Dora said.
    â€œShe’s Baptist. You know. Super religious. She thinks she’ll go to hell for something like that.”
    â€œThat’s plain stupid,” Dora said. She sat across from Peter. “What kind of nincompoop is this girl?”
    He laughed. For the first time it did not sound like a harsh bark. Dora laughed too.
    S HE TOOK HIM to lunch at the Rue de L’Espoir. “You can’t sit waiting by the phone,” she told him as she hustled him into the car. “Having a baby can take a very long time. I was in labor twenty-eight hours with your father.”
    Dora ordered her martini with her lunch. She always enjoyed a good martini.
    â€œMay I ask,” she said to her grandson, “how all this came to pass?”
    â€œCome on, Gran,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “You know how girls get pregnant.”
    â€œI’m not sure I know how teenage girls get pregnant by boys who don’t even love them,” she said. The martini was perfect, dry and cold.
    â€œLove,” he said, practically spitting out the word. “What good is loving someone? Then they die, or leave, or don’t love you back.