the milk and the wave
I taught Davey the milk first, because it is the easiest. You put the saucer on the sill at dusk, I said, and you do not watch the bird drink. He wanted to know why not. I did the thing where I don’t answer, the thing I learned from the one who taught me, whose name I never knew, only her kitchen and her cold hands.
The milk is not for the bird, I told him. It is so the one who sent it knows we paid. He asked who sent it. I gave him the saucer to carry instead.
Then the wave. We went past the second house, where Vera was already out in the cold at her own holding, and I did not stop her; you do not stop a woman mid-toll. We went to the end, to the wall, and I waved at it the way you’d wave at a window, and Davey waved too, and the brick was warm under his hand, warm where the blue door used to be, and he didn’t think it strange. Good. It isn’t, to him, yet.
Last the word, at my own door, going in. I say it my way, back to front, though I have said it so long I have forgotten it was ever otherwise. Davey said it after me, and the door stayed a door one more night.
He has the saucer and the wave and the word now. He does not have the cost. I have carried it, and it has carried me off in handfuls, and one day soon he will set the milk out and wonder why his hands have got so old.
Pull a thread:
- the bird on the sidewalk — the bird, the toll
- Davey doesn’t know the rules — Davey, learning the rules
- the dawn count — Vera, who does her toll at dawn