The Bird Market of Paris Read Online Free PDF Page B

Nona and Poppy’s home to our own house in Coconut Grove on Royal Palm Avenue. The house was set back from the street, shaded by wild trees no gardener ever tended, with a colossal banyan tree in the front that had to be a hundred years old, its gangly roots reaching for the ground like Rapunzel’s penny-colored mane. I’d braid the roots and swing over the pebbled driveway like Tarzan. A sinkhole on the property filled with rainwater during storms, and I’d toss pebbles into the mysterious chasm, wondering how deep it went, and if it would someday swallow the house. I had my own room, and I snuck into the neighbor’s yard to swim in their pool when they weren’t home. I liked our new digs, but Poppy had to drive nearly an hour in traffic to pick me up for weekends with him and Nona.
    â€œDoes your daddy ever smoke funny cigarettes?” Poppy asked me one day as he drove me west in his silver Honda hatchback.
    My dad was a five-pack-a-day Marlboro Red chain-smoker. He always had a cigarette in his hand, even in photographs from before I was born. Nicotine perfumed every crevice of the house, cleaved to the back of every breath. I was probably a pack-a-day smoker from secondhand smoke.
    Nona had smoked for forty years, too, a constant cloud of cigarette fumes anointing her head like a nicotinic halo, but she quit in her sixties, then sat on the couch every day after she retired watching Days of Our Lives and General Hospital , cracking sunflower seeds. Instead of ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts all over the house, they overflowed with a deluge of crunchy black shells.
    But Poppy was referring to the thin rolled cigarettes my dad and some of his friends smoked. These were the cigarettes blowing by me at dinner parties, passed from adult to adult, a tiny Olympic torch with a hypnotic burning ember at the tip.
    â€œFunny cigarette” plants grew in our backyard and on our roof in a homemade greenhouse built with pine stakes and opaque plastic panels. On sunny afternoons, when the western sun hit the panels, the dark silhouettes of dozens of plants shimmied in the breeze, like a crowd of people with hundreds of flickering hands. My dad had been cultivating a healthy urban “funny cigarette” farm for years. He called them his “tomato plants,” though they never bore any tomatoes. Sometimes he’d have me turn on the faucet outside that propelled water through the irrigation system to the plants on the roof. They grew taller than I was, wild and pretty, the color of a praying mantis. My dad would harvest the plants and leave the crop in sticky, fragrant piles drying all over the house on oilcloth tarps. My parents had been batik-wearing, daisy-carrying hippies in the 1960s; of course there were “funny cigarettes” around.
    â€œYou have never seen any funny cigarettes?” Poppy asked again. “What about your daddy’s friends, do they smoke funny cigarettes?”
    Saying yes would ignite an investigation. I insisted I didn’t know anything about the funny cigarettes.
    My dad was a manager at the Ferrari and Porsche Collection in Miami, and my mom sold cars at the Subaru and Saab Collection. This was the 1980s, when every other car on the Miami streets was a shiny, expensive import.
    My mom or dad picked me up from junior high every day in a different fancy car belonging to one of their dealerships. Every afternoon, boys from school waited outside the building to see what make and model of car would roll up. Maybe today it would be a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud, a Porsche 911, or a Ferrari Mondial. I had the reputation of being a drug dealer’s kid. I knew a few kids whose parents were drug dealers, children of people who bought cars from my dad, kids I had playdates with on weekends. They had tigers and bubbly Jacuzzis and waterfalls cascading into their giant pools and projection TVs in their mammoth living rooms. The closest I had to a tiger