Free Life Guards in the Hamptons by Celia Jerome

might keep going.”
    Grandma Eve ate some pistachios. “We can hope.”
    “What about during the day? Does it tweet then?”
    “Not a peep, damn it, or we’d have it caught. There have only been a couple of sightings after the first few days when someone spotted it, just enough to keep the jackasses with the binoculars out in force.”
    “I saw the cars this afternoon. Practically on my lawn. And no one got a photograph of the bird?”
    “No, but they identified it from a reliable description, they say, verified by the top birder in Suffolk County. And now they are everywhere, making ruts, raising dust, taking up the farm stand parking, setting their tripods smack on a cabbage. Come six o’clock when we close up the stand, I threaten to have all of their cars towed, government endangered species people included. And I have Kelvin at the garage on speed dial, too. Word got out how much he charges to reclaim the vehicles, so they leave. The environmental people threaten to get a court order allowing them to stay, but they know they’ll never see it at night, anyway. The birds are supposed to be diurnal, fast asleep in a burrow or something at night. Noone wants to be the one to step on a rare bird in the dark.”
    “But it doesn’t sleep at night if it’s calling.”
    “We don’t mention that, or they’d be here in tents and sleeping bags, in the pumpkins.”
    I had another bite or three. “So they bother you during the day and the bird keeps you up at night?”
    She nodded and sipped at her tea. She looked older than she did last month, the lines on her face deeper, her hands bonier. And she’d only eaten three or four of the pistachios.
    I wiped peach juice off my chin and fed Little Red a tiny crumb from the pie crust. “Okay, the oiaca and the traffic are both nuisances. What do you think I can do about it?”
    “You can talk.”
    “To the birdwatchers? If they don’t listen to a witch—”
    “Don’t be snippy. I’m too tired for that. Talk to the bird, of course.”
    “You must be thinking of my mother. She’s the one who chats with dogs.”
    “I am not thinking of your mother. I know very well my own daughter’s capabilities. It’s you I need. You inherited enough from her to be able to do it. You talked to the troll, didn’t you? And the lost colt and the fireflies.”
    “But they were telepathic creatures. They talked to me. I could only try to communicate with pictures and hope they understood. What kind of drawing could I do for an off-course avian? One that no one sees, either.”
    “I didn’t say draw for it, I said talk to it.”
    “There’s no way I could chat up a Patagonian peahen. What language do they speak in Patagonia, anyway?”
    “It doesn’t matter. You need to calm it down, figure out what it eats, how to get it home.”
    I swallowed a mouthful of lemonade wrong and sputtered. “Me?”
    “Who else? The so-called experts who are ready to put tranquilizers in bowls of water? The fools with theirbutterfly nets? Or the self-righteous twits prepared to let nature take its course and let the bird die?”
    None of those plans appealed to me. The rest of the pie did, so I slid some more onto my plate. “I wouldn’t have the least idea what to talk to it about.”
    “You’ll make it up, like one of your stories.”
    “But it’s a bird!”
    “A bird that is going to die out there, tweeting its heart out in loneliness. The nights will get cold, the fields will be stripped. What will it eat? And what about the rest of its species? Who knows if they need this one’s genes to stay viable? What if it’s a female, already pregnant?”
    “But … but …”
    “Don’t tell me you don’t know how or you won’t try. As much as I hate to admit it, you inherited genes from your father, too. You care.”
    “Of course I care. I don’t like to see any creature suffer. But my father?” Grandma Eve never had a good word to say about the man since he moved to Florida, except