Free Bird After Bird by Leslea Tash

over onto his back and showed me his belly. Reaching down to scratch it, I couldn’t help but grin.
    “Ain’t nobody got time for ‘SAD.’ I’m going to call you…Happy. Hap for short. You okay with that, Hap?”
    He rolled onto his belly, panting. He looked like I’d just offered him a steak and a romp in the woods.
    “Hap, it is.” I returned to the letter, now transformed into painted origami.
    “Almost a shame to set this one free,” I said to Hap, but he didn’t answer. He was scratching at the door, so I took that as my cue. “Walkie time!” I said, grabbing the leash.
    I’d taken him earlier in the week for a long drive, all the way to the Falls of the Ohio to let him sniff around. The park had a great set-up for training, because if he ran too far, he was blocked by a floodwall on one side and a river on the other. The river was up, too, so he had even less room to run, but lots for his nose to explore. If we were going to succeed in search & rescue, I needed to be able to trust him off-leash most of the time.
    The property I was buying from my folks extended to forty+ acres surrounding the cabin, but I still didn’t trust Hap off-leash here. It’d been different at the lake, where the tennis ball had appeal, and my pocket full of jerky treats sweetened the pot. Here at home there were too many rabbits, squirrels, and other small furry critters. And if there’s one thing you need to start training a search and rescue dog on early, it’s to not dash off after every rabbit it encounters.
    The woods smelled full of life. A sweet breeze carried the scent of wild honeysuckle, and I could hear a chorus of titmice tweeting “Peter, Peter, Peter!” from the treetops.
    “Titmouse! What did you say? Tit mouse?” The memory came unbidden and unwelcome, but inevitable. My mother hated any language that was even borderline crude out of the mouths of her children, despite dispensing it herself on the regular. “Don’t you dare take that painting to school! I can’t have you showing off a—well, that bird! Our family has a reputation to uphold, Laurence Byrd, and don’t you forget it!”
    I don’t know why she was so uptight about appearances. Honestly, everyone in town knew how she was. Maybe she never had a hair out of place, but that didn’t make her a nice person, did it? I don’t know who she thought she was fooling. The older I got, the less I suspected she cared about fooling anyone at all.
    I won the seventh grade art show with a nice, safe watercolor Northern Cardinal pair on a holly branch—how stereotypical can you get? They were always outside my window, though. Very accessible models.
    Eventually, Mom bullied Dad into buying a McMansion in Crane View Estates, and moved away from our rustic family home—the home where my father was raised, built board after board by his own father, then added onto as needed as their family grew.
    Dad lost his two brothers young—one to scarlet fever, and the other to Vietnam. Grandma and Grandpa sold Dad the house for a song before they retired to Florida, and they’d never redecorated either boys’ room. I’d begged Mom to let me have my Uncle Laurence’s room when I was little, with its dated train car mural and his name scratched in the baseboard.
    “I don’t like it—it seems like asking for trouble,” she’d told my dad. “Your brother by the same name died in that room!”
    “Make up your mind,” he’d said. “Are you going to be a Christian or are you going to be superstitious? Because you can’t have both, and if you’ve given up being holy, holy, holy, I’d just as soon sleep in on Sunday mornings.”
    Dad didn’t often stand up to Mom, but that argument sure sealed the deal. As I got older, eventually I agreed with Mom about repainting the room, but it was years before I convinced her to let me paint a mural on the walls, myself.
    Outside my window a copse of ash trees thrived, as well as a few poplars and pines. A winding