Birds of Summer Read Free

pathway to the McIntyres’ trailer and then fishtailing on up the mountain to the high plateau on which Jerry and Galya had built their new house and planted their organic gardens. By the time they turned off the highway onto the Fishers’ road, Summer was walking fast—tuning out Sparrow’s continuing chatter. An ominous tightness in her stomach was threatening to become something more unless, by hurrying, she managed to get home first. In the large grove of redwoods where she often stopped for a moment to breathe in the everlasting calm of the great trees, she only pushed on faster, until Sparrow had to trot to keep beside her. Beyond the redwoods the road became a narrow canyon, enclosed now by dense stands of fir and pine and an impenetrable undergrowth of madrone and wild rhododendron. Summer was jogging now, and in less than ten minutes they reached the beginning of the footpath. As she turned onto the path, Sparrow grabbed her hand and pulled her to a stop.
    “Let’s go on up to the Fishers’,” she said. “I want to ask Galya if Marina is back. Come with me, Summer. Please.”
    Summer jerked her hand away. “No. You know we can’t do that. You know what Jerry told us about not going up there because of the new dog. He said we shouldn’t ever go up there anymore unless they know we’re coming, so they can tie up the dog.”
    “I’m not afraid of that dog.”
    “Well, you ought to be. Jerry said it’s very dangerous. So you stay away from there. Do you hear me?” Summer felt angry—tense with the antsy feeling she always got when she was almost home—a feeling that lasted until she found Oriole and saw how she was and what she was doing.
    “Well, then. Let’s tell them we’re coming,” Sparrow said brightly, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.
    “How are we going to do that?” Oriole, quoting Esau, her old hippie guru, was always saying that going without a telephone was freeing yourself from the strangling umbilical cord of the establishment. But at the moment, a bit of establishment umbilical cord would certainly solve Sparrow’s problem.
    “Look,” she told Sparrow. “Why don’t you sit here by the road and watch for Jerry’s truck. If you see him, you can tell him we want to visit and ask him to shut up the dog. Okay? But don’t you go up there by yourself. Promise?”
    After Sparrow had promised and double-promised and seated herself on a stump, Summer started down the path that led to the trailer—“The McIntyre Trailer” as it was called, because Oriole McIntyre and her daughters had lived there for more than seven years, but it actually belonged to the Fishers, as did the land it sat on. Nicky had been born there in the tiny room that Summer shared with Sparrow, and he had always enjoyed telling Summer that she was sleeping in his bedroom. None of the teasing techniques in Nicky’s long and obnoxious repertoire made her angrier, and someday she was going to tell him exactly what he could do with his room and his trailer and every inch of the land it sat on.
    In days of luxurious double-wides set in landscaped parks, the Fisher/McIntyre mobile home was definitely an anachronism. Galya and Jerry had hauled it to its present resting place, in a small clearing surrounded by dense forest, more than fifteen years before when the land still belonged to Galya’s old Russian grandfather. It hadn’t been until several years later, when Galya’s Dyedushka had died leaving her all his property, that she and Jerry had gotten married, built a huge new log house near Dyedushka’s old one, and started their organic farming business. The trailer had been deserted for a while and then loaned or rented to various lame duck projects of Galya’s, before Oriole and company arrived on the scene. Oriole and Summer and Danny it had been then, and the beginnings of Sparrow, although that hadn’t become evident until sometime later.
    Summer had been only seven years old at the time, but