Chapter 23: The Spring Show

Officer Cobb opened the tin at the front desk with the caseworker standing beside him, both of them wearing the thin blue gloves.

Birdie had asked to come, and she watched from my hip.

Under the wax paper lay forty-eight butter cookies in four neat rows.

Under the cookies lay a small pink book with stickers on its cover, and a gold pencil clipped to its spine.

The pencil had been the rattle.

Cobb opened the book to the first page and turned it so I could see.

In a young, shaky hand it said Birdie's first word, spelled the way a grandmother hears it: Gwandma.

Below that, in the careful capitals: Everything she ever said, and I loved every word.

A note was tucked in the back.

I am not allowed to visit. This is not a visit. It was always hers.

The caseworker read it twice.

"I'll keep the book in the file until the court is finished," she said. "Then I'll bring it to Birdie myself."

Birdie nodded.

"And the cookies?" Cobb asked.

"I don't want them," said Birdie.

"Not even one?"

"No."

Officer Cobb looked at me, and at the caseworker, and then he took one out of the tin, ate it in two bites and chewed with great care.

"Those are good," he said, and sounded sorry about it.

"That's the problem," Birdie told him.

Three weeks later, Little Acorn Preschool held its Spring Show in the gym.

The play was The Three Little Pigs, and Birdie was the wolf.

She had wolf ears on a headband and a tail made of a gray sock, and she had been quiet in the car the whole way.

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