Chapter 15: Nothing to Rehearse

On Friday I hummed through an entire visit so that I wouldn't coach my daughter.

The visit was at the Linden Ridge town park, because Inez had told the caseworker she needed her kitchen for luncheon baking.

She sat on a bench thirty feet from us with her purse on her knees and a thermos she did not drink from.

She didn't wave, and she didn't smile.

She had her stopwatch in her lap.

I sat on a different bench with both hands under my thighs, humming the wolf's part from the picture book.

"Mom, you're humming very loud," said Birdie.

"I'm not saying anything."

"You're saying it with your nose."

"Practice whatever you want," I said. "I'm not going to tell you how."

She nodded and went off across the grass.

A woman was walking a corgi near the swings.

Birdie stopped in front of the corgi, stood up very straight and cleared her throat.

"Hello," she told the dog. "My name is Birdie Kimball. I said true things about my mom and I got cookies."

The corgi sat.

"A lot of cookies," Birdie said. "More than you'd think."

The corgi licked her whole hand.

"That's what Grandma did, too," Birdie said. "Except she didn't lick."

The woman holding the leash looked across the park at me, and I hummed a little louder.

Birdie's second audience was a man eating a sandwich on a bench.

He was in a hard hat, on his lunch break, and he had not asked for any of this.

"Do you get paid when you say true things?" she asked him.

"Kid, I get paid when I show up."

"Do you get cookies?"

Keep reading free with an account. Start When She Regretted Her Lies from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.