Enon Read Online Free PDF Page B

me to prepare for myself, bread and cold cuts and jars of peanut butter and jelly and a dozen cans of soup. I told her to call me when she got there and to say hi to her family and to send my love and regrets, my embarrassment, at not coming along. Wehugged each other and I kissed her on the forehead and said I was sorry. I said hi to her friend from work, whose name I didn’t know, and I put her suitcase in the backseat of the car. I kissed her again and she got into the car and the car pulled out of the driveway and drove off and that was the last time I saw her.

2.
    K ATE LOVED FEEDING THE BIRDS IN THE E NON R IVER SANCTUARY . The first time we went was because my grandfather, George Crosby, had taken me there once, when I was thirteen or fourteen. I had walked to his house from school, probably restless, probably bored, and he’d said that there was a wildlife sanctuary a couple miles away where we might walk around for an hour. We found Enon River, chose a random path, and followed it through a meadow to a boardwalk that crossed a marsh. It was early October, and the sun was low and behind the trees to the west. The cold that had collected itself up in the pines during the day had begun to flow back out into the footpaths. As soon as we stepped on the boardwalk, a small troupe of chickadees began blipping about in the bushes and lower tree branches around us.
    “I’ll be damned,” my grandfather said. “Hey,” he whispered.“I think that if you put your hand out, you can get them to come to you here.” We didn’t have any seeds with us, but we stood next to each other, still, hands held out, palms up. The birds circled in tighter and tighter radii, until they nodded and curtsied toward us off the tips of the bushes, no more than an inch from our outstretched hands. When the first chickadee hopped onto the ends of my fingers, I startled at the grip of its scratchy, weightless little claws, and it wheeled off back into the bushes.
    My grandfather whispered, “Heh! You’ve got to stay vary steel, so the leedy birdees dond get scared,” in one of his weird, vaguely Slavic, vaguely vaudevillian-sounding accents. We must have been a sight—a short, potbellied old man and his thirteen-year-old grandson, already several inches taller than him, but still a kid, still skinny and thin-voiced and still interested in toy soldiers and plastic tanks and blowing up his model trains with firecrackers, standing side by side on the boardwalk, facing the bushes, each holding a hand out just past the tips of the branches, standing still, squinting into the shadows and light, occasionally whispering back and forth, the old man urging the boy to keep still, but in a funny voice that kept making the boy laugh and say, “
Stop
it, Gramp.”
    Another bird flew onto my fingers. It was above my head, on a branch perhaps twenty feet up. It tipped headfirst off the branch, wings tucked at its sides, and dropped like a bobbin straight toward my palm. It flicked its wings out six inches above my hand, spun itself upright, and dropped onto the tips of my fingers. This time I did not startle. The bird looked at my empty hand, gave me a couple bemused, sideways looks, and sprang off.
    I never returned to the sanctuary with my grandfather, and the experience sifted away in my mind for years, until it emerged again one afternoon when Kate was seven years old.
    “Hey, Kate. I just thought of something really cool. It’s kind of a mystery, something I remember from way, way back when
I
was a kid.”
    “What is it, Dad?”
    “Well, let me just show you, okay?”
    We drove to the sanctuary and I walked her down the wide grass track that ran downhill alongside the meadow, high with milkweed, and the grid of swallows’ houses until we reached the edge of the woods and entered them through a leafy archway. The path turned to packed dirt and stone, with steps made out of the trunks of trees spaced every fifteen feet or so. The hill leveled out