An Ornithologist's Guide to Life Read Free

she averted her eyes. “I think you could love a person,” he said. “The right person.”
    Martha looked up at him and laughed. The smell of gunpowder filled the room. “Like a reverend? Like someone practically a decade younger than me?”
    â€œYes,” he said simply. Then he kissed her full on the lips.
    Later, naked in the canopy bed, Martha propped herself on one elbow to look down at him. That day she’d walked into his office he’d had on khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. She had studied him closely then too, like she was now. His face was round, boyish. That day in his office she’d said, “You’re the reverend here?” And then she had burst into tears. Later, she had told him about those missing days, days when she could have run over someone, gotten AIDS, done anything—” God knows what,” she’d said, and he’d burst out laughing. “Sorry,” he told her, “me being a minister and all, the God thing struck me as funny.” She wasn’t sure what to make of him. Not then nor weeks later when he took her to a corny Italian restaurant and paid the roaming accordian player to sing “That’s Amore” to her.
    â€œYou courted me,” Martha whispered from her side of the canopy bed.
    Even though his eyes were closed he smiled.
    â€œI came in every day just so I wouldn’t drink, and you let me sit there in your office week after week until one day you said—”
    Reverend Dave opened his eyes. “‘Let me buy you dinner.’ And you said yes.” He was playing with her hair, wrapping pieces of it in his fingers, then letting it fall free. “I never did that before. Asked out someone who came to me for help.”
    â€œSure. I bet that’s what you say to all the drunk forty-year-olds who’ve fucked up their lives. It helps to make them feel special.”
    The Reverend pulled her close to him by the hair.
    â€œHey,” Martha said.
    â€œShut up,” he told her. “You don’t know anything.”
    He had told her that he was supposed to visit his family in Grand Rapids during his three weeks off.
    â€œFor all you care I could have gone to Michigan and left you behind.”
    â€œI know this,” Martha said, keeping her hair tangled in his hand. “I know I hate this town and all this morbid history. I know I want to go downstairs to Ye Olde Tavern and have a drink. I know more than you think I do.”
    â€œShut up,” he said again. He was kissing her, leaving her no choice.
    T HEIR TOUR GUIDE is a teenager named Stuart. He has Buddy Holly glasses pus-filled pimples and a deep voice that Martha is certain belongs to someone else. Every time he talks he startles her. Reverend Dave keeps asking questions about oxygen and bats and spelunking, but Martha is having trouble listening. The cave looks fake, like the backdrop for a movie or the re-created environments at zoos. When no one is looking, Martha touches the stalagmites, knocks them with her knuckles as if she can prove them false.
    â€œWe’re in the cut-rate cavern,” Martha whispers to the Reverend. “We missed all the good ones.”
    He steps away from her. He has not forgiven her for what she said back in the parking lot. All it would take is a touch or a kiss, and she would have him back again. Martha stays away. She pretends she is part of a family from Georgiawho knows all the answers to Stuart’s stupid questions. She is certain the family has been here before and so technically they are cheating when they shout out the answers. Still, they act smug.
    â€œHave you been to Luray?” Martha asks the mother. They are making their way through a long tunnel. The Reverend’s red-flowered shirt disappears around a corner.
    â€œThey’re really commercial,” the mother tells Martha. “We like Endless best.”
    Up close Martha sees that the woman is probably