VICTOR

Victor says we made friends with the pigeons to tick him off, but this isn’t true. The pigeons found us and never let us go. One crow too, and sometimes a few blackbirds. We think the crow is the runt of his brood. He still hasn’t found a mate, three years in. Every time he takes off from somewhere there’s hesitation. He dips and dips before getting airborne. 

        I want to see Victor’s side of things. I have tried, mostly when Caden is away, fishing or visiting his mom. Sometimes Victor will come outside then, sit by me in the chair where Caden usually sits. He felt funky about this the first couple of times. He made this sad smile at me like he thought the chair would break beneath his weight, his way of showing he knows the chair is Caden’s, that Caden wouldn’t like to know that we were talking, much less sitting side by side.

        Victor won’t smoke with me. He quit a long time ago and has that annoying composure about it that people in recovery do, and I wish for his sake he would let loose. He must sometimes, but I don’t know how. He’s fed by the music coming from inside his apartment, the most depressing Nina Simone songs imaginable, or else it’s just the quality of the recording that makes her seem breathless, deprived of space and air, on the verge of walking away somewhere she could breathe.

        It’s just the three of us here. Our landlady Helen used to rent out the back as a studio, a one-room hexagon with its own flimsy entrance, and a bright blue door that opens onto some gravel and a chain-link fence and beyond it, a lot with weeds tall enough to block the ocean. Now that room is part of Victor’s place. He never opens the back door, and he won’t even let us keep so much as a bike back there. He filled the entire area with junk, covered it with tarps, as if that can protect anything from the salt air, and now we can’t walk that way to the gas station anymore, which is a shortcut of five minutes. I have heard Victor get really mad back there, exploding on our neighbor to the right, David, who also doesn’t want the junk there. I heard David calmly say, Give us our side yard back, to which Victor tumbled out several minutes of expletives, like he’d been waiting to say all that he was saying for years. 

        My first thought hearing all that had been: David doesn’t belong here. Meaning back there, in the gravel alley, being screamed at by Victor. David’s building is a real art deco building. He has a balcony up off his third floor unit with palm trees, spider plants, ferns, even a couple of orchids, and some other plants I don’t know the names of. And canaries, finches, and a budgie. He owns it, he and his partner of many years, so he’s just waiting for Victor to leave, but Victor will never leave. David smokes too, once a week, on Saturday afternoons. He has one long, slender, hand-rolled cigarette, which his husband doles out to him before returning the bag of tobacco and rolling papers back to a location only he knows. David smokes it out on the balcony, and if Caden and I are out there with the birds, we’ll talk with him from down below while we all smoke. We’ll see Victor thrash the curtains of his front window once or twice to express his disgust that we are talking so loudly, or at all. David has told us, or at least told me, in more private moments at the gas station or the grocery store or just standing at the corner of our block by the grimy fountain, that Victor hasn’t always been this way. 

        One time, on the chairs at the Fairmont’s section of the beach, after a couple of drinks, David asked me, What about Caden? Has he always…? And he stopped, maybe thinking that it was too early in us knowing each other to ask me about this, even though we’d lived side by side for almost three years. I wanted to tell him more, but I wasn’t sure what more was. Like, whose side I was on. Caden had done a couple of crazy things, but nothing that couldn’t be undone. They were mostly just words, and Victor would forget them quickly enough. People who blow their top have a weird amount of respect for other people who do. Still, David seemed to want to help Caden. When Caden gave him shit about traveling on planes with his chihuahuas, which David called his emotional support dogs, David said to Caden, The way I treat my dogs is the way you treat marijuana.

        David has a gym membership at the Fairmont and had seen me walking by while he was tanning after a session inside, in the cold basement gym. We wouldn’t have thought to drink together on the beach, to hang out at all, really, but after this one encounter, we started to. We went running sometimes too. He was maybe 25 years older than me, but he was a lot faster. He’d been running almost every day for decades. During the runs he said more than once, He’s gonna blow one day, meaning Victor. The first time he’d been laughing, running a little ahead of me. If you keep your man in check, he said another time—and even if you don’t. This time I was okay with saying more about me and Caden. Running down Miami Beach felt safer, something to do with the heat. Following Jeep tracks to the tip of the beach, David turned a little more priestly, and I turned hopeful. Caden’s talking about starting his own fishing guide thing. David murmured between near-silent breaths, trying to sound supportive. Caden talked about a lot.

My favorite time with the birds is sunrise. They seem as tired and groggy as me, pleased all over again that I’m bothering to feed them, breadcrumbs and bird seed and sometimes slices of fresh mango or banana. Caden was on a thing where he was only eating fruit until noon. I usually got up before him and would eat fruit too, because it was easy, and I could go sit outside with the fruit in one hand and a bag of breadcrumbs in the other and one cigarette in the band of my bra. Georgie was the only pigeon I had bothered to name. She was the only one who came to sit on my shoulder, though almost all of them at one time or another had done so with Caden. Georgie made a lot of noise when she first appeared, coos and clicking sounds, like a nervous habit, or, with my help, the slow erasure of one. The edge of me, somehow, was where she reconciled herself with whatever the day was going to be, a glut of stale Wonderbread or, if Caden had any say in it, the end of a loaf of organic sprouted seven-grain.

        Victor was up early, as usual. I would hear him turning on the sports channel to watch the recap of the games the night before. He was a Tampa Bay fan, and it helped all of us that Tampa Bay was doing well. Sometimes I would hear grunts too, and I could see through the gauzy curtains that he was lifting weights in front of the TV. But this morning there was also his voice, quiet and sweet-sounding, and after enough eavesdropping I realized he was talking to his father, whom we all just knew as Papa. Papa lived in Florida too, a few hours away, in a retirement community near the Keys. One time Papa had come here to visit, and the whole time Victor had been so nice, I remember him even putting an arm around Caden for some reason, and Papa looking up at them sweetly, like an old frog, from his spot on Victor’s lawn chair. Clearly thinking this was some little utopia, and it had made us think that Victor was going to be nice from then on. So when I heard him talking to Papa now, I knew it was BS, but I listened anyway. 

        Apparently Papa’s little girlfriend had dropped dead. This was a shock mostly because she’d been vegan. Ninety-nine percent blockage, Papa told Victor, and Victor reacted to this like the girlfriend had been a con artist, had been chewing off wedges of cheese with her bare teeth that whole time, in the shade of her ground floor condo.

        The sounds of Victor soothing his father harmonized with Georgie, like Georgie was listening, trying to make Papa feel better. Papa had been a little weirded out by the birds when he’d visited, but he’d warmed to them by the end. Most did. Anyone who called them flying rats wasn’t welcome back. Caden had stopped speaking to a couple of friends over this. I’ll make them scratch his eyes out, he’d said, his meaning Robbie’s, his ex-coworker from the boat tour company. For as long as Caden and I had lived in our tangerine house, Robbie had been part of the scene, staying over plenty nights, on a futon in the spare room off the kitchen, trying to save up for a chunk of money he owed his brother, something to do with motorcycles that hadn’t lasted that long on the road but had cost them a fortune. But Robbie had had something to say about the birds every time he was over. Sometimes he’d fling his arm like a baseball bat in the direction of the birds when they got too close. I guess the birds were just an excuse for the boys to break apart. For awhile, for forever.

        The sun had stretched all the way down our street now and Victor was in the chair next to me. I could hear the surf now, like it, too, had woken up. Victor was saying how he didn’t think Papa’s girlfriend was actually real. Unless he went to the funeral he wouldn’t really get any proof. It would be some riddle he could think about forever, whether Papa had limned Trish with his own imagination or really known her, and whether it even mattered. The tears were real, whether the woman was or not. Quickly Victor had gotten on the topic of podcasts and how he really wanted to listen to more of them. His mind moved so fast that I wondered if he was drinking, or doing something else he wasn’t supposed to. He was talking about an episode of something that had debunked a film about veganism, a film he hadn’t actually watched. He was like Caden that way, circling at the periphery of the news, but never really immersing himself. I stretched my arm out for something to do while he talked, letting Georgie tip-toe from my shoulder out to my hand and back. Out above the vacant parking spot where all the birds hung out, the crow and the blackbird were knocking into each other in the sky, not really fighting over anything. They never did. It was more that the blackbird picked on the crow, knew he was slow and vulnerable and seemed to want to put him out of his misery.     

        I heard David whistle and looked up, but he wasn’t whistling at us. He was talking to his birds, little yellow things flitting like leaves in their white and green painted cages. I waited for him to look down and catch my eye. But he was in the zone, feeding the birds out of his palm inside the open cages, so sure they wouldn’t fly out. Then he moved to watering and spraying his plants, and he talked to the plants the same as the birds. Then he nodded at me, like we were in on something. Victor was still talking, and maybe all we were in on was that, Victor going on forever, in need of a real friend and thinking I was one. At that moment I thought, David is my friend and I’m his, and Victor is a long way off from this, and something about David’s snarky face made me never want to leave here, as terrible as it was, as dark, as un-Miami with our low stucco ceilings like some limestone cave, and the dirty vinyl blinds that I wanted to tear from their hinges. 

        Victor would talk sometimes about all the old guys in his meetings, saying they seemed like they’d just gotten sober yesterday. I told him that he was being judgmental. All of them were probably saying the same thing about him. I was glad that he never seemed to mind this. He would look at me with his big lips turned down and say, When you’re right, you’re right. I knew that he wanted to be a part of things, but didn’t know how. That the routine of the program had stuck enough, but the lessons hadn’t. 

        “Ginnie,” Victor said now. “What’s your plan?” He meant about my job. I wanted to leave the hotel. I wanted to become a professional closet organizer, and whatever else I could pick up alongside that. Caden didn’t make enough money for me to not work.

        “Um,” I said. I pulled open the bedroom window and took another cigarette from my pack on the sill. Somewhere in there, Caden rolled over in bed to muffle the sound.

        “David,” Victor was saying now, “One of these days…” 

        “One of these days what?” David called back, the spray bottle falling to his side.

        “One of those birds is going to fly away.” 

        David shook his head.

The problem with the hotel is that you could feel like you were a part of it, meaning a guest. I was a concierge now. I had moved up from check-in. I had to wear stiff white shirts under black suits, and I had two identical ones. One that I paid for and one that the hotel paid for. Caden ironed the shirts for me. He loved to do it. He had the energy of a dog when he ironed. Deep concentration, and a look of pure joy once he glided out from the collar and corners to the plains of white, like he did this for a living, or could. 

        My hair had to be in a bun just above my neck for my suited up look to work. If my hair was down it would just make me look short and sloppy, and I would find glinty red strands stuck to the suit jacket all day long. If my hair was up it seemed to make me neater all around. It seemed to make me want to eat more carefully, too, a napkin tucked into my shirt collar in the staff room at lunch, leaning far out from my body to bite into a powdered donut, the kind of thing I’d eat around 11, just when I’d thought I’d held out on breakfast long enough to make it to lunch, to the springy, weightless salads Petro and I would buy from the new place in the outdoor mall. 

        And all this would make me better at dealing with whatever questions the hotel guests would come at me with. The worst ones seemed to come in the morning. A surge of something left over from the spirit world would jolt them upright in their impersonal beds. They’d wander downstairs for the coffee, laid out a couple of hours before the breakfast buffet, along with donuts and better croissants than you could ever expect from a hotel continental breakfast. And then they’d walk over to me with their paper cups. The other day a woman had asked me if I had a massage place to recommend for her husband. It needs to be the kind where they finish with a—you know, she said, tilting her hands like she was pouring sand out of them. In that moment I wanted to get to know her better. Or as much as I could from the other side of the desk, which she could barely see over. Get to know her because I felt like I had to, to make what she’d said less awkward. On my 10:30 break I’d try find her by the pool, sit down, talk about the farthest thing I could think of, the farthest thing from her husband getting finished off by a girl, in back of the parking lot in the strip mall in North Beach.

        She smoked too, and sat so small on our turquoise mesh lawn chairs, her feet far in from the end. In front of her, an iguana walked slowly by, but she had her chin up and her eyes closed, and out here, her inch of gray roots looked almost as blonde as her highlights, so I could see why she didn’t bother to touch them up. I had plenty of my own cigarettes, but I went over and asked her for one, left my jacket with Billy at the parrot cages so I would look less like I was trying to provide her a service. 

        “Sorry,” I said, standing over her. “It’s really not right of me to ask a guest for a cigarette.” 

        “Oh, you’re just lovely,” she said. “I could use the company.” 

        I lay back on the chair next to her and wondered how long I could make fifteen minutes feel. I also wondered where the woman’s husband was. I could sense the dread in her that I used to feel with men, before Caden, that feeling when they left you for some expedition with their friends and you had to figure out how to fill your time. Her husband was golfing, she told me. He was here wooing some people from a company he wanted to work for. She and her husband had been coming here for years and were now trying to fulfill a fantasy of moving down full-time. Her husband had ten years or so before retirement. Then they would move down to the Keys, or maybe Bermuda. She sold jewelry through a company that sounded like a pyramid scheme, which she said she could do from anywhere.

        “Well,” I said, “I’m sure whoever he’s with knows where to find a happy ending.” 

        She laughed. “He’ll just have to hope it comes up naturally in conversation.” 

        “Any friends down here?” 

        “Just Winn’s work friends, and their wives. We’ll be seeing a couple of them for dinner.” 

        “I have to get back,” I said then. “But if there’s anything I can do for you today, it’s on the house.” 

        “Really?” Like no one had ever asked her what she wanted.

        “Sure,” I said. “Go look at the spa menu and choose something. It’s in the basement, down that ramp.”

        “That means so much. You know, I never bother with any of that stuff, but maybe I should.” 

        “This is the place for it,” I said. From the far side of the pool I stopped to wave to her, thinking I might never see her again. 

        But when my shift ended at 3, I found her sitting at the tiki bar next to a couple of honeymooners half her age, listening to the story of how they’d quit their jobs to travel around the world for a year. A year had turned into two, but now they were just plain married, expecting their first kid, and about to start new jobs in some city in the midwest, near where one of them was from.

        Caden would be expecting me. What for, I didn’t really think about. Nothing in particular. I saw that Rafi was bartending and decided to hang at the bar. Caden had been banned from the hotel last year because of a situation that wasn’t totally his fault. He’d want to go somewhere else tonight. I sat next to the woman and waited for her to realize. I felt swaddled by the balmy air of our little artificial beach, glad that Caden couldn’t show up. Not that I was afraid of him. Just tired. 

        Rafi made me a margarita, stiff and well-salted, no hint of sweetness. He made my presence known, but not before I mouthed to him asking if he knew my new friend’s name. 

        “Hey Wanda,” he said then. “Ginger just got off.” 

        “Oh!” She turned, leaned on me and squeezed my shoulders. “Now, how long have you been sitting here?”

        “Only a minute.” I felt inferior, like without my jacket with its gold plated name tag, it was now Wanda’s job to take care of me. She introduced me to her young blonde friends, but she, or they, or all of them, seemed to have exhausted every direction of their conversation and soon they left us to go swim before dinner. They thought I knew her better than they did. 

            There was this dance we had to do, two and then three drinks in, see who could be the more composed one. At least, I was working on this. I got angry when I drank. If it was with Caden it would turn into a fight. If it wasn’t with Caden, it would be about Caden, a doomsday feeling that I would drag everyone into. Even near-strangers like Wanda. But she was already there, joking with me about divorcing her husband. 

            Soon I was convincing her to skip dinner with him to hang out with me. She said it was possible, but he’d have to meet me before he agreed, make sure she was really just hanging out with another woman. Sounds like my boyfriend, I told her. 

            Just then Caden called Rafi on the tiki bar phone. Rafi was quick with these things. “She’s not here,” he said, fake searching around for me, for my entertainment, “but let me see if she’s by the pool.” He sent Caden to our electronic hold music.

            “Who, me?” I said. 

            “He said he’s called just about every other line.” 

            “Oh god.” 

            “Ginnie,” Rafi scolded, rattling his cocktail shaker in the air. 

            “He does sound bad,” Wanda said.

            “He just gets anxious,” I said.

            “He gets possessive.” Rafi stared me down, then looked at Wanda. “I’ve been telling her this for three years.” 

            There was no one left at the bar but us. Once it got dark, guests would start appearing out of the shadows of the palm trees and bougainvillea. For now, it was a milky blue, and I wanted to go no further, in the night, in intoxication, in life.

            “He needs to—” I wasn’t sure how to finish the sentence.

            Wanda’s husband never came by. He called her from the room, complaining of sore muscles (from golfing?, Rafi and I asked her) and asked to speak to me. 

            “I’m the concierge here,” I said to him. “And your wife and I hit it off.” These were the kinds of smooth declarations I could be counted on to make when drunk. I looked at Wanda as I listened to her husband sleepily wrap up the conversation all on his own, like a man calling his daughter from a business trip. You girls have fun, or something like that. I thought about the real favors concierges were asked to do, the cover-ups we were brought in on, for a big tip or, if the guest was a celebrity, no tip at all. Just the honor of being a part of something secret. In my old role at the check-in desk, I never learned anyone famous had been there until they’d gone. Now it was my job to be briefed on celebrity visits, spend days preparing for them.

            When Rafi was finally free, the three of us made our way in silence to the main entrance of the hotel, but somewhere along that quarter-mile walk down the shiny marble floor, I was thinking there was a good chance Caden was out there, parked in his car across the street, in the taxi lineup. I grabbed Rafi and Wanda’s hands and told them to stop. 

            “Look for a red Corolla for me,” I said.

            “Caden’s?” Rafi said. “Shit, you think he’ll be here?” 

            Wanda pulled me over to the gift store while Rafi scoped out the street. We stood next to a mannequin wearing a blue bikini and a sheer blue and yellow scarf patterned with diving dolphins, tight around her neck like a choker. I leaned on the mannequin’s shoulder. 

            “Honey,” Wanda said. “This is just your starter husband.” 

            “And we’re not even married.” 

            “Even better.” She took my hands, inspecting my rings, then held hers out next to mine. “You like turquoise too.” 

            “It’s easy to love.” 

            “You’re not a ring-wearer without some turquoise, I think.” I was worried she’d start selling me on her pyramid scheme. But that felt like someone else, another version of her that she’d already shed.

            Rafi returned. “I think we’re good. No Corollas.” 

            I didn’t move.

            “Why don’t we take the boardwalk?” Wanda said. “We’re only going to a different hotel bar, right?”     

            We went back the way we came. Soon Rafi veered off to the W to meet a guy from a dating app. He was like that, slippery and spontaneous. No matter how insignificant the guy turned out to be, I would hear about him later. But I never heard about the plans. He anticipated nothing from anyone. 

            Wanda really looked like a tourist, something about her small black Prada bag, hung diagonally over her shoulder, and the long jean shorts rolled just above her knees. She was fit, very tanned and shiny, with no hair visible anywhere on her body except the tight curls coming to just below her ears. She walked slowly, not with the confused fatigue of a tourist, though, but with the unhurried air of someone who lived here, or came from a European country where 10 o'clock was not late. 

        But it was late, if you counted by the number of times Caden had called me. Enough times noticing me hit the side button to decline the call that Wanda took the phone from me, put it in do-not-disturb mode and then inside her bag.

        “But you’re going to have to figure out another way to deal with this, long-term.” 

        “I know,” I said. 

        “I want to get eyes on him.” 

        “We could go home, I’m only a couple blocks away. There’s some vodka there.” 

        “Great!” 

        “And if you’re there, he won’t kick up a fuss.” 

        “Cheaper, too,” Wanda said. 

        “And you can meet my birds.” 

It’s hard to say who was more surprised, the four of them at the table outside, seeing me stroll of up with a 50-something woman, or me seeing the four of them—Caden, Victor, David, David’s husband Bruce, peacefully coexisting over a game of cards. 

        “There she is,” Caden said, and he only seemed relieved, not mad, to finally see me. Straining, though, just a little, to appear calm. A parent trying to loosen his grip on a nearly adult child.

        “Ah,” Wanda said.

        “I’ll hear about it later,” I said.

        “With his type you always do.”

        “This is nice,” I said, when we reached them. “You resurrected the table.” 

        “Took four of us to carry it out here,” Victor said. He outstretched an arm for me to come sit on his knee. I went, but only for a moment, giving him a sideways hug, and a kiss on the top of his head.

        The table was covered with pretty blue and white terra cotta tiles. It had been in the back alley gathering grime and moisture for months. It was too heavy, too big, too cumbersome, to fit in any of our apartments, but it worked for cards. Under the half-roof of our carport it was protected from the elements.

        “Who’s this?” Victor asked. He held out a hand to Wanda, but didn’t stand up. The birds were lined up along the rain gutter above us, watching. I saw Georgie paying the least amount of attention, preening under her wings, the alpha taking a moment for herself.

        “Wanda,” Wanda said, offering him a limp-looking bronzed hand, a delicate door-knocker that Victor cupped between both of his.

        Victor looked different then, like ordinary people could sometimes transform when they were frozen in a photograph, some secret charm emerging from wet eyes, undulating facial planes. 

         I heard David mutter something to Caden, and Caden leapt up. “Wanda, let me get you a drink. I have Tito’s, I have limes, I have a Rockstar, and I have beer.” 

        “She doesn’t want Rockstar,” David said. 

        “You know, when it’s late and you’re trying to rally, nothing wrong with it,” Caden said.

        “I’ll have a vodka soda and lime, Caden,” Wanda said. “Sounds just perfect.”

        Caden returned with her drink and a metal chair, which he unfolded next to him and offered to me, then went back inside and emerged awkwardly with the bucket chair from our living room, something we’d found on the street. I’d washed the cushion three times at the laundromat to kill the bedbugs Caden was sure were living in the seams, invisible to the naked eye. This he placed next to Victor, and Wanda curled up in it with her drink like a small cat in a large dog’s bed.

        “So how do y’all know each other?” she asked no one in particular.

        “We live just up there.” David pointed to his jungle balcony.

        “This a Thursday night tradition?” 

        “Oh, no,” Victor said. “We’ve never done this. In fact, I don’t even remember all the rules to this game.” 

        “He’s adding them as he goes,” Bruce said. “Amendments.” 

        “It’s called Grandma,” Victor said. 

        “The rules died with Grandma,” David said. 

        Caden smiled from behind his fan of cards, though all I could see were his eyes. I took off my jacket and put it on the back of my chair. I leaned forward to unbutton one button of my shirt.

        “Doll,” David grinned at me, “You look like you’ve just finished your opening set at the Pink Flamingo.” He meant in Vegas, where the two of us had gone once when he and Bruce were going through a short-lived breakup. To anyone who didn’t know what the Pink Flamingo was, it must have sounded enough like home, somewhere you’d find on a side street in South Beach proper, like the bar with the jukebox we went to, now and then, never remembering it existed until we were standing in front of it. 

        “What instrument?” I asked him.

        “Your voice, of course.” 

        “Ah.” I was not as good a girlfriend to David as I wanted to be. Not as quick on the draw. But I know he didn’t feel this way. I got most of his references, and that was more than most people.

        “This is the life,” Wanda said, after awhile.

        Caden looked at me as if to say: See? 

        “You got us on a good night,” Victor said. He had angled himself in his chair, the broken neon green and yellow weave leaving an open flap beneath his butt, so that he was mostly facing Wanda, even though the card game was somewhere to the east of her. They sat lower than everyone else, like grownups at the kids’ table.

        “Wanda’s going to move down here soon,” I said.

        “Alone, I hope,” Victor said, grinning at her like the big sapphire on her ring finger wasn’t an issue, but a fun plot twist.

        She smiled, then tried to suppress it without actually looking away from him, like she was checking to see how much he really cared, who would look away first. 

        “Got any kids, Wanda?” 

        “Oh, no,” she said. Back at the bar she’d told me she’d tried. “Enough times,” she’d said. She never got past the second trimester. “Don’t smoke,” she’d said after that, though we’d been passing Rafi’s Juul back and forth, waiting for him in a swinging chair by the pool. He was hoarding the mint-flavored pods for me because they were about to be banned. “Now I couldn’t imagine if I’d had them,” she said.

        “Overrated,” I said, because that’s all I knew. I was proof of this, I said. My parents had only had me, and I was always disappointing them. It was easy to, when there was only one of you. I was here because they were in California. If I couldn’t have California, this was the next best thing. The climate was right. And the distance from them was right. 

        “Good,” Victor said now, leaning into her and pressing a hand to her knee. 

        “What’ve you got?” David said.

        “Huh?” Victor seemed annoyed.

        “Play,” Bruce said. He could step out from behind David when he needed to.

        Victor opened his big bottle of Circle K fizzy water and took a few sips before doing what they wanted, keeping the game moving as fast as it was meant to go. Caden shook his head. Any other night, that would have drawn something out of Victor. He might grab Caden’s arm, twist it a little in a direction it wasn’t supposed to go. Caden might knee him in the stomach. They were about the same height. Things could escalate to bottles thrown, birds flying, or they could just as easily result in them lying on the asphalt of the empty parking space laughing. Tonight he was on his best behavior for Wanda. He was going to dazzle her with his water drinking and questions. He would save the talk of himself for me, for the next morning, when Wanda had gone back to her husband.

        One of the crows swooped down in front of Wanda and flew back up to the roof gutter. 

        “Jesus murphy,” she said. 

        “I hope Ginnie warned you,” Caden said. 

        “It’s just their way of saying hello,” I said. 

        “They’ll steal the lime wedge right out of your glass,” Victor said. 

        Wanda seemed to reconsider me then. “Are they...pets?” she asked. 

        “Not to me,” Victor said. 

        “But to Ginnie,” Wanda smiled. 

        “More like a rescue mission,” I said. 

        “Hey, Georgie,” Caden said, like Georgie was a person, like she would be able to remember something that no one else, in that moment, was able to. She came down to land on his shoulder. 

        “Georgie’s our favorite,” I said.

        “She’s the only one that listens to us,” Caden said. He turned his head sideways to feel Georgie’s presence. Georgie rubbed against his cheekbone for a second. Her eyes looked checked out in the light coming from Victor’s bedroom. It was only how she cooed or nuzzled, how close she stayed, that told us the feeling was mutual. 

        Victor won the game of Grandma despite trying the least of anyone, or so it seemed to the rest of them. 

        “I can see this is boring Wanda,” he said. 

        “No, no,” she said. But it was. She and I had been sitting too far apart to carry on a conversation while they played.

        “And you still won,” David said, letting his cards fall against the table, then sweeping everyone else’s up into a pile.

        “Don’t I always?” 

        David winked at him and looked around for the card box. 

        I whistled to Georgie and she came to perch on my knee. 

        “Don’t let her shit on your uniform,” Caden said. I tried to look at him like it was six years ago. Like I could love him through the endless commentary and corrections.

        We could have kept going somewhere else. When I brought up the place with the jukebox, asked Wanda if she’d ever been, she said, Julio’s! and clasped her hands, and I said, I think that’s the one, and Caden said that sounded right, but Victor said, Why throw down fifty dollars when we have a perfectly good jukebox here? I’ll play that album I was telling you about. To Wanda. What album? I felt jealous. I realized I wasn’t that special to Victor. I was appreciated when no one else was around.

        David and Bruce walked away, holding hands, but then they called to me to come over to the steps that led up to their apartment.

        “This is a nice thing you did for him,” David said.

        “She’s married,” Bruce said to David, with a sleepy affection. He couldn’t care less what happened to Victor.

        “Her husband’s no good,” I said. 

        “So?” Bruce said. This was not the first time I felt Bruce saying to me: When will you ever grow up?

        I thought about telling them about the happy ending. Wondered whether this would paint the picture I wanted it to. Just me and David alone on the beach, it would make sense, but now, at one in the morning, it would be too much information for them to process. 

        Wanda disappeared inside our apartment building, following Victor to the sound of the music. The front door stayed open as it usually did. Maybe Caden and I would go in there with them for awhile. All of us together was better. Victor could toss back anything Caden said to me, protect me. This time of night he would be full of questions. Asking me what I was doing all those hours earlier before I brought Wanda home. With a smile on his face. But the way his teeth hid behind his mouth, I knew he would roll away to the wall when the time came, sleep until long after I had gotten up the next morning. Skip work and have some reason for it that sounded airtight to him, when he spoke it aloud to me. 

        When things got to the point that Wanda and Victor were sideways in his bed, turned away from the TV and us, I said to Caden that we should leave them. Caden gave them a look of disgust, like all this could be prevented, or should be. I tried to take his hand to pull him off the couch, but he fumbled, realizing too late. So I was halfway out the door by the time he got up. I called goodnight to the sleepy people on the bed and knew I would see Wanda again, sure she’d find her way gracefully back to her hotel room, that she’d done this all before. 

        In bed, we could hear them on the other side of the wall. Caden laughed, loud enough for them to hear. He turned on his stereo to the Costa Rican bird sounds he liked to wake up to, and slowly turned the volume to the maximum. We heard a break in the rhythm next door, then Victor say, “Those damn birds!” Caden howled into his pillow. Then Victor seemed to channel his frustration into whatever he and Wanda were up to. There were groans, cries, laughter. But then he was talking again, talking too much, explaining something to Wanda as he crawled and searched and thrusted. 

In the morning I was outside at six, trying to make the most of my one day off. I cleaned off the card table, trying to remember which glasses were ours and which were Victor’s. Then I brought out some crumbs of hint of lime-flavored Tostitos for the birds because we were out of bread. I quickly felt guilty about that, seeing them struggle with the tang of the artificially flavored powder, tossing the small triangles in the air and onto the ground, then pecking at them a second time, reconsidering the offer. I went back inside to get them some expensive crackers made of seeds and thought, if nothing else, having my own business would mean I could buy the birds Mary’s Gone Crackers without guilt. Maybe I could also have a sanctuary for them somewhere outside the city, a place where smart people could study my smart birds. Then I thought about being outside the city with Caden.

        It was cold enough to need a sweater, cold enough to need a bird. I tucked Georgie under my cardigan and listened to her settle down. I was waiting for Wanda to come outside. I thought she must still be here. I wondered what kind of relationship she had with her husband that she could still be here without him really knowing or caring. Maybe that was the way to go. I tried to listen to the noises behind Georgie, detect life behind Victor’s window, but I heard nothing, just muffled music from inside someone’s car parked down the street. Then, eventually, the click of a lighter somewhere close by, which startled me. It was odd to hear at this time of morning. I let Georgie go and walked around the side of our building, found Wanda there standing in the open door to Victor’s kitchen. 

        “Sorry, honey,” she said.

        “For what?”

        “For not joining you.” 

        “I get it.” The best thing about smoking was being alone. “I’m glad you’re still here.” 

        “The longer I wait, the less I want to go back.” 

        “Does he know where you are?” 

        “Haven’t heard from him.” 

        “Is that how it is?” 

        “A lot of the time. I just come with him because I want to be here.” She had told me this the day before.

        “Honey,” Victor called from within.

        “I’m talking to Ginnie,” she said to him. “Come join us.” Then she looked at me to ask if that was OK. I nodded. Soon we heard the front door exhale open like a fridge.

        “My favorite girls,” he said to us when we emerged from the back. I worried for him. I thought this all might have ruined Wanda’s relationship with Miami, or at least this stretch of the beach. She would try again, with her husband, to do her part. This was, as I saw it, to be a doormat. She would stay away from us. 

        How nice this scene could be if it was not quite here, outside our orange stucco hut. Victor had brought out his stovetop coffeemaker and three bakelite espresso cups and saucers in different colors, Easter colors. I chose pink, Wanda pale yellow, and Victor, seafoam green. All I could think was this wouldn’t be nearly enough caffeine to fix us, wake us up. Except the novelty of this, the company we were all keeping, would help. Some level of accountability that Victor and I no longer had with each other. 

        A week later she would be days gone, and he would only feel accountable to us again, to me, to his father. I would come home from work one night, maybe it was Thursday, and find no one home in my apartment or Victor’s. The curtains still, but the front window open a crack. The birds thought this was strange too, deciding to watch from a safer distance, from the roof of the building on the other side of David’s place. They had seen everything, of course, but couldn’t tell me. The Latina who showed up in an orange two-door, Victor taunting Caden from his chair, Your drug dealer’s a woman? 

        You would think I would have known, gotten used to the signs. I could always tell when Caden had smoked weed, the red eyes, his head bobbing slightly off his neck, the way he laughed so much harder at anything funny I said, which only made me resent that he didn’t always laugh that hard. Victor thought he knew the whole picture, but Victor had conspiracy theories about all kinds of things, and I only believed some of them. I just never thought coke had been a part of it. Who needed coke to stay out until 4 in Miami? The sounds were enough. The lights, the laughter pouring down the street, the music coming from the Lamborghinis and the Mercedeses and the Ferraris. It was like a parade, you could only follow it. Don’t you ever wonder, Victory had said to me more than once, Where all the money is going? I said he probably just owed someone, not for anything sinister. Just life stuff. Credit card debt and maybe student loans. Honey, you are out of it, Victor had said.

        I don’t know why I thought it was none of my business. Maybe because I didn’t want my business to be Caden’s. Before she’d left, Wanda had told us that all she wanted was her own money, hard-earned, none of it coming from her husband, Not even interest. To never have to ask for anything, make a case for it, feel guilty. Do you know how hard that is? she had asked, mostly aiming the question at Victor. I didn’t. I had the opposite problem. I worked harder so that I could pay for Caden without feeling it, so that I could do it without noticing the absence of the money, without getting angry at him. But I didn’t tell her that. I just said, I’m starting now. And she said, Girly, that is so good to hear. But Victor shook his head. 

        “What?” Wanda asked.

        “Wasting time on that dipshit.” 

        Wanda nodded, as if remembering something. “You can do better.” 

        The morning had been a little odd, Victor told me later. He had sat out there longer than normal, almost like I was waiting for Wanda to come back or something. Three cigarettes instead of the usual limit of two. Normally he wouldn’t have been out there past eight in the morning. Caden had seemed surprised to see him, too, when he came outside. Caden had held our front door behind him for a second, like he’d forgotten something, was trying to decide whether to go back for it or not, looking at Victor the whole time, annoyed, or so Victor had thought. Georgie had flown down from somewhere, hearing the sound of the door, and landed on his shoulder, and Caden had said, Not right now, Geor, and flung her off the back of his hand. Victor had laughed at him, which Caden hadn’t liked, and he loped toward the orange car.

        Now Victor was saying to me, “I went to jail for you,” which was the kind of thing Caden would say. 

        "The drunk tank,” I corrected. 

        “The drunk tank,” he said. “I never even went to the drunk tank when I was a drunk.” 

        I told him thank you, and to keep going with the story. 

        “Well,” he said. “When he was coming back from the car with his little fluorescent colored dime bags I may have said something to him.” Something along the lines of, You piece of shit and, Where are you getting the money for that? 

        Caden had challenged this, which was embarrassing. “How do you know?” he taunted Victor. “You don’t know anything about my life.” 

        Victor had said, “Not for lack of trying.” 

        And like a child Caden had said, “I don’t want you to. I want you out of my face. It’s bad enough to have to share this place with you.”

        Victor got quiet and calm. “That’s life, son. Once you can actually pay your rent, maybe you’ll be able to see...” 

        “Don’t son me,” Caden said, and pushed Victor where he sat in his chair. The chair tipped backward a couple of inches and then bounced forward. Victor hadn’t known how far back it would go and braced himself by holding on to the trunk of the small palm planted next to our front door, then moved his hand to a palm leaf for support and released it like it was a strand of someone’s hair. It occurred to Victor that the girl in the orange car was still there, leaned over to the passenger side window, a white smile on her face. Something about that seemed to compel Victor to stand up and push Caden so that he fell backward on the asphalt behind his car. The girl’s head bobbed to get a better look at his pale limbs splayed. Victor told her, Get out of here. She called back, Seen a lot worse. Then, a pause while they just stared at each other. Are you his dad or something? But then she obliged, rolled up her black windows, turned up her music and drove away. 

        David saw Victor punching Caden while he was lying on the ground. He called the police. He had two and also no dogs in the fight. He, too, told me there must have been a restlessness in the world that morning, one that had inspired him to go out on his balcony and look around at things. He always planned to sit out there, spend hours in the wicker rocking chair reading or something, but this was the first morning he had really considered it. Something about how dry the air felt. He had looked at the leaves of his plants and flowers and seen not dew, but dust. And the sun hiding behind thick clouds that would bring a storm, but out there. On the water, not overhead. The light was kind of brown, like a blind had been lowered somewhere. And though he didn’t care much for our birds, David noticed that they were hanging back, like they’d renounced Caden, saw he was going to be devoured and decided from an evolutionary standpoint to reject him.

        But when the cop cars drove away, one each for Caden and Victor, Georgie followed the car with Caden in it. It would be many more hours before Caden or anyone told me where he was. Georgie swooped low and high above the roof of the car, hoping to slow its progress, or maybe she was showing them the way. David watched Caden crane his neck out the window and then out of the back of the car. She’s following me, see, Caden probably said to the cop. Because they would be thinking about which one was more guilty. There had to be someone. 

Liz Colville is a writer based in Nova Scotia, Canada. Born in Virginia and raised in New Jersey, England and Cyprus, her fiction and poetry has been published in The Oddville Press, The Southampton Review, Lungfull, The Awl and elsewhere.

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