Kipper had not moved from my wrist, and the little steel band on his leg caught the light from the waiting room window. I held the paper up beside it. The band said 0914. The certificate said 0611. Jaxon watched my face the way he used to watch the bobber when he was seven. “Gram,” he said, “the man from Bar Harbor called me yesterday. He said that if the papers do not match, the parrot can be taken, that anybody can report it. I drove straight here from Orono with the folder. I thought I had ruined everything.”
I did not answer right away. I looked at the index card in the square printing of Armand, which was clipped to the certificate, and I turned it over. There were three lines on the back, in blue ballpoint, dated the spring of 1996. I read them silently once, and then I handed the card to Dr. Ouellette, who had come out from the back with her reading glasses pushed up in her hair, and asked her to read them aloud to my grandson. She cleared her throat. “The first one would not eat,” she read. “He died on the Friday. I could not tell her.”
She went on. “So I went back to Brewer the next morning, and the lady let me pick another from the same clutch, and he picked me. Same shop. New band, 0914. He is the one. The paper is wrong but the parrot is right. Armand.” Dr. Ouellette lowered the card. “I have his chart from 1997,” she said gently. “Band 0914. Every vaccination, every wing check, every visit. A paper that names the wrong band is a clerical matter. The shop only needs to sign a correction, and I happen to know the owner.”
Jaxon put both hands over his face. When he spoke, it was muffled and wet. “I almost sold him,” he said. “I almost sold the only thing Grampa left that still talks.” Right then, in the middle of the waiting room, with the receptionist holding her breath and an old man in the corner lowering his newspaper, Kipper stretched his neck, ruffled his gray feathers, and spoke in the gravel voice of Armand, slow and warm as a kitchen. “Hon, put the kettle on. I am coming in.”
A single wrong number on a sheet of paper cannot undo thirty years of a voice at the same window every morning.
Nobody moved. The receptionist dropped her pen. Jaxon lifted his head and stared at the parrot, and I saw his face change, the way the sea changes when a cloud passes off the sun. “Gram,” he said slowly, “when does he scream?” I thought about it. “When the house is empty,” I said. “When nobody answers him.” He nodded. “He is not screaming,” he said. “He is calling for Grampa, over and over, and nobody answers.” I had known it for two winters, but I had never once heard it said out loud.
We drove to Brewer that afternoon in the old truck of Armand, the three of us, with Kipper in his carrier on the seat between us and the heater rattling. The pet shop had changed hands twice, but the owner who had kept the records, a tiny woman of ninety named Mrs. Lindqvist, still came in on Thursdays. She took one look at Kipper and said she remembered the fisherman with the gray beard who stood in her doorway and wept over a dead chick. She signed the correction in a hand like a spider on a window, and stamped it, and kissed Kipper on the beak.
On the way home, Jaxon took out his phone, opened the ad, and deleted it. Then he typed a message to the man in Bar Harbor, and showed it to me before sending. Not for sale. Never was. I am sorry for the trouble. A minute later the man wrote back that he understood, and that he ran a small rescue, and that if we ever needed advice on enrichment toys for an older parrot, he would be glad to help. Jaxon read it out loud and gave a laugh that cracked in the middle. “Everybody I meet turns out to be nice,” he said, “except me.”
I told him that was not so. A boy who drives two hours with a folder because he is afraid his grandmother might lose her friend is not a bad boy. He is a young man who has not yet learned what a thing is worth. He took that in silence, with his eyes on the road. At the stop sign in Whitneyville he reached over and rested his big hand on my wrist, right where Kipper likes to perch. “Gram,” he said. “Can I come down every other weekend? I want to learn to talk to him.”
He did. Every other Friday, he arrived with a laundry bag and an appetite, and after supper he sat on the floor by the harbor window and talked to the grey parrot for an hour, easy and low, the way he had seen his grandfather do it. He said good morning in the voice of a boy of nineteen. He said it three hundred times. On the twelfth Saturday, Kipper cocked his head and said, in a perfect copy of that young voice, a little hoarse, a little too loud, “Good morning, Gram.” Jaxon sat down on the rug and cried like a child.
The new perch stays by the window where the boats come in. In the evening, when the harbor goes the color of pewter and the lights come on along the wharf, Kipper sidles to the end of the branch and watches. Then he says what he says every night, in the voice of the man I married, slow and Down East. “Fair winds, hon. Go to bed.” I used to be unable to bear it. Now I answer. I tell him that the kettle is on, and the door is open, and the boy will be down on Friday.
The orange oilskins of Armand still hang in the shed. I take them out sometimes and smell the salt in them. I have come to think that nobody truly owns a voice, and nobody can sell one. You can only keep it company, and let it keep you. Kipper is thirty one this spring. Dr. Ouellette says he may outlive me, and Jaxon has promised, with a hand on the cage and a look I know from his grandfather, that he will take over the kettle when I go.