Selena leaned her forehead against the cool plaster of the wall. She still didn’t know how to feel about gods or spirits or anything like that. For every staunch disbeliever like Postmistress Jenny, Quartz Creek seemed to have multiple believers. She wondered how her aunt had felt about spirits. Amelia had never mentioned them, but then again,Selena’s mother had usually been present, and that would have been like waving an entire matador in front of a bull.
She had certainly never mentioned roadrunners.
“Right,” said Selena. “It must have gotten bored by now.” She went to the door and opened it a crack again.
The roadrunner was gone. Selena poked her head out, scanning the porch, and saw nothing. She gathered up her courage to step outside, still scanning, and then Copper trotted past her, off the porch, and squatted next to the path with a meditative expression.
Selena let out a shaky laugh. “Right. Just a weird damn thing that happened, then.”
She turned back to the door and saw scrape marks in the blue paint, at chest level.Claws,she thought,two and two.The roadrunnercouldjump, it seemed.
A quick shudder ran through her skin, only briefly felt before it was dispersed by the desert sun.
At the potluck dinner a day later, she told the story about the roadrunner trying to get into the house, to general laughter and shaking of heads. “They’re weird birds,” Lupé said, gesturing with her wineglass. “You ever seen ’em hunt a rattlesnake? It’s something. They do it in pairs sometimes, one playing decoy and the other stabbing it in the back of the head.”
“They mate for life,” white-haired Gordon said. “The pairs you see doing that are mates.”
“You’re the bird-watcher,” Lupé said. She shook her head. “Friend of my brother’s worked wildlife rescue and they had a roadrunner come in with a broken wing. Said it was the worst bird he ever worked with. It was always trying to stab his feet, and once it figured out that didn’t work, it laid in wait for him to come into the run, jumped off a ledge behind him, and got him in the back of the head.”
“Good god,” said Selena. “Was he okay?”
“Yeah, but it took off a chunk of his scalp. He wore a motorcycle helmet into the run after that. Said he was never so glad to release a bird in his life.”
Selena shook her head. “I guess I was right to be nervous.”
“That was a very unusual situation,” Gordon said. “Yours was probably just curious. Roadrunners generally aren’t afraid of people, but I’ve never heard of one attacking a human outside of captivity. The biggest problem is that they’ll get territorial and go after a dog or a cat.”
“Maybe it saw Copper,” offered one of the other women at the table, who Selena wasalmostsure was named Elizabeth.
“I guess that’s possible.” Selena mulled this over. “That makes more sense than that it was trying to get in the house.”
“Theyarevery curious,” Gordon said. “I wouldn’t put it past one to poke its beak somewhere, wanting to see what was going on.”
“We had a wren get into the café last week ...” Lupé said, and began spinning out a story of a panicked bird and attempts to wrangle it. Selena let the tide of conversation wash over her. It was only later that it occurred to her that neither Grandma Billy nor Father Aguirre had said anything at all.
Chapter 10
It was just after sunset and Copper wanted to go out.
Selena was feeling like an early night in. They’d been planting again today, in the heat, something called succession planting, and then she’d gone around and watered every little mound of dirt to wake the sleeping seeds.
Then she’d been pulling weeds. There were fewer weeds in the desert than there had been in the city, but they all seemed very angry and covered in spikes.
It hadn’t seemed like much work at the time, but she’d found herself ready to drop by midafternoon. Even a nap hadn’t revived her much.
“Desert air,” said Grandma Billy. “You’ll get used to it.”
“I’m only staying a few weeks,” muttered Selena, as if she had not been here for three weeks already, as if she had not just planted an entire garden’s worth of seeds.
“Sure,” said Grandma. “Sure.”
Had it really been three weeks? She tried to do the math in her head, and that’s what it looked like.
It had been ... easy. She woke up and ate and she worked in the garden with Grandma Billy, and she had lunch. Three or four times a week, they walked into town and had the evening meal with Father Aguirre. She wasn’t expected to talk, and if she did, nobody acted as if she’d said anything unusual.
And Grandma doesn’t tell me, when we’re walking home, that I’ve offended everybody and they’re too polite to say so. Father Aguirre even told me last time that he was glad I’d been coming, that it was nice to have a new face at the table, and he said it like a person, not like a priest.
Grandma had, in fact, promised to take Selena out foraging for young prickly pear pads to sell to Connor at the store. It was beginning to seem like the only way she was going to make money was the same way the locals did.
