LILY
When it came to my dating life, the General was a living, breathing deal breaker. The men he hated were the ones I thought I might end up being able to tolerate for a while; the ones he liked were the ones I knew were headed for the old heave-ho. It wasn’t like I was some Tinder-queen floozy; I went on promising dates about as often as I had to get my teeth cleaned. But each encounter with the General wasn’t merely memorable—it was painfully unforgettable. And if the General didn’t like them, that meant trouble. Because God help me, the idea of having a lasting, meaningful relationship while being constantly heckled by a parrot who viewed every man as his rival was not exactly how I envisioned my happily ever after.
In spite of his strong opinions about my dating life, I adored the General. He was good company and full of delightful, unexpected surprises. But it seemed as though he didn’t want to share me. Ever. Sometimes my sister sent me articles about things like the mate-seeking habits of territorial fowl with suggestive winky emojis. She definitely had a point. What other thirtysomething woman would he be able to con into buying organic vegetables for the rest of his wonderfully long lifespan?
Now I was going to introduce him to Gabe. Sexy, aggressive, scrumptious Gabe. But I had a feeling that the General was going to be pretty suspicious about Gabe’s confidence and cocky swagger. Of course, I didn’t have to introduce them just yet. Gabe surely wasn’t going to be in town for long, and I didn’t want to ruffle any feathers. Literally or figuratively. But I also wanted to be polite—my idea of Southern hospitality wasn’t asking Gabe to hang out on the porch while I negotiated with my beloved resident terrorist. And anyway, as my grandma often said, “If you’re worried about the General, honey, take it from FDR: the only thing to fear is fear itself. Seven out of ten times!”
So we left Gabe’s truck at the Willows, and I drove us back to my house in my van. I didn’t live far, and Gabe kept up the third degree for the whole drive as he made sexy adjustments to the rolled-up sleeves of the dress shirt he’d changed into before we left. Unsurprisingly, given his line of work, he knew all about dangerous and semi-dangerous animals. He cycled through them like he was reading from a Wikipedia entry. “Is it a ferret? Ferrets can be really intense.”
“Definitely not a ferret.”
“Pot-bellied pig?”
“Smaller. Less friendly.”
“Turtle?”
I pictured his beady eyes. His prehistoric toes. The way he trundled across the floor when he didn’t feel like flying. “Close, but fatter and fluffier.”
A few minutes later, we pulled into my driveway and I saw my sister peeking out of her window on the first floor. Ivan was in her arms and yanking on her hair like a bell pull. I loved my sister to bits, but introducing Gabe to one member of my family with strong opinions about my dating life at a time was enough. So I gave Daisy wide eyes and a tiny shake of my head, and she disappeared behind the lace curtain.
I led Gabe up the stairs to the second floor of the house I shared with my sister; each floor had been converted into its own apartment by my grandmother, who really only believed in two things: sugar cookies and saving money. She’d rented out the second floor to offset her property tax payments. When she passed away, she left the house to me and my sister jointly, one floor each. To me alone had she bequeathed the General. He was sweet on me, and I liked him a lot. In the world of African gray parrots and humans, that made us an unbreakable love match. Like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, though. Sometimes it was bliss. Sometimes it was chaos.
“This place is fantastic,” Gabe said, trailing behind me, looking up at the crown molding and the plasterwork on the ceiling. “It’s like out of a movie.”
A movie, yes. Sure. But what kind of movie? I thought, as I fumbled for my house keys. Rom-com?
Or horror?
We were about to find out. I said a private little Please don’t let this be too awful to whoever might be listening upstairs and opened the door.
The General had his back to us. He was in his cage, gazing out the window at the street. When he heard the door creak, he turned to look back at us over his shoulder. Any other bird—a canary, a parakeet, even one of the scary-huge crows that lived off fried chicken out of the dumpster at the grocery store—would have hopped around to face us straight on. That was what regular, normal, ordinary-IQ birds did. But not the General. He was the master of the over-the-shoulder glare. Like Dracula.
“Hi!” I said, as cheerfully as possible. In one of my many books about living with African gray parrots, which tended to tilt more toward self-help than informational in tone, I’d learned that they can “sense signs of microdiscomfort in the human voice.” I’d also heard the very same thing about Mother Teresa and Ted Bundy. The General was a many-sided mystery.
He turned away to look out the window and mimicked the sound of me locking the door right before I actually locked the door. It made it sound like the house was full of echoes.
Gabe glanced at me, clearly a bit puzzled. “Lily. That’s just a parrot.”
I set down my keys and hung my purse on the hook next to the door. It was a logical enough thing to say. But logic didn’t really apply to a creature that could distinguish between organic and nonorganic cauliflower. “And Jaws was just a shark.”
That was when the General did hop around to face us. He lowered his head and lifted his little rounded shoulders to face off with us. I felt like a toreador walking into a bullring. “How’s my Mr. Potato?” I asked.
He gave me a warm coo but then went silent as he zeroed in on Gabe. He ducked down slightly to get a better angle on the new human in the room, peering out from under a pair of primary-colored plastic keys that he’d stolen from Ivan. He poked his head between two of the keys and puffed up his feathers so he looked like a great big gray pinecone.
I’d known the General since I was a kid. I knew that puff. It meant he was about to say something brand-spanking-new.
I rewound through the handful of words that Gabe and I had said since we walked in. I looked him hard in the tiny black eyes.
“Daaaaa-dun . . .” sang the General. Oh my God, it was Jaws. He was singing the theme from Jaws.
“You’ve never even seen it!” I whisper-barked.
He shook his narrow shoulders. He lifted his beak. “Daaaa-dun!”
Why was I even surprised? For reasons we’d never know, he had the Gettysburg Address down pat. He knew my grandma’s sugar cookie recipe by heart. On days when there was no garbage pickup and I was sleeping in, he mimicked the sound of a garbage truck so I’d go flying out of bed, confused and gathering up recycling. Of course he had Jaws in that little walnut brain. Of course he did.
“Hey, man,” Gabe said and began approaching him.
He leaped up one rung and hung his head. “Da-dun! Da-dun! Da-dun-da-dun-da-dun-da . . .” He snatched the keys off their hook and gave them an almighty cage-rattling shake. “Intruder!” he barked around the plastic ring. “Thief! Interloper!”
One floor directly below, Ivan was just going down for the night. “Shhhh!” I put my finger to my lips. “Do you want your dinner or not?”
The General silenced his cries and dropped his keys. Next to me, Gabe snickered, and the General glared at him.
For a moment, I thought the worst might’ve passed. If we got out of this with a new theme song and some scattered insults, it’d be a total win. At least he hadn’t made the Noise.
Gabe studied him curiously, with an adorable little smirk. His eyes twinkled with interest, not fear. A definite bonus. “Is he an African gray?” Gabe asked.
I nodded. “He’s a Timneh. Chubbier and calmer than the Congo gray. I inherited him from my grandma with a shoebox full of cash for vet bills. She rescued him from an estate sale. Before that . . .” I thought back to the time he’d seen a clip of Martin Luther King Jr. on television and said It was very nice to meet you! “. . . it’s really anybody’s guess.”
“He’s awesome,” Gabe said, studying him closely. “I’ve never seen one in person. How old is he?”
This was one of those questions that was probably best left to the General himself. “How old are you, Mr. Potato?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know!” the General chirped back.
“No way!” Gabe laughed. But as he leaned in closer, he gently placed his hand on the small of my back.
Uh-oh . . .
I watched the General’s eyes widen in disgust, and he screamed, “Unhand my lady, you swarthy villain! Unhand her this instant!”
I grabbed the old tablecloth from where I’d draped it over the back of one of my kitchen chairs. Unfurling it with a snap worthy of any cut-rate magic show, I let it fall down over the cage. As he was plunged into partial darkness, he made a disappointed, “Wah-wahhhhhhh.” Exactly like a slide whistle.
“I’ll get your dinner, OK?” I said to the tablecloth.
“Potatoes?” he replied and then made the sound of the can opener cranking. He preferred canned potatoes and always had. “Nom-nom-nom!”
“Not for dinner.”
“Booooooooo!”
Next to me, Gabe pressed his fist to his mouth to stifle a laugh. I fiddled with the tablecloth and said softly, “Sorry.”
He didn’t seem weirded out or even spooked. He seemed totally delighted, and I was so relieved. “It’s OK,” he snickered. “What a riot.”
The General went back to his just-for-me warbles and coos. I’d always thought he was a riot too, but I’d gotten awfully used to apologizing for him to everybody who came by. It was really refreshing not to have to do that this time. “I’ll get his dinner squared away. Make yourself comfy.”
“Getting comfy here isn’t going to be a problem.” He glanced around my place—at my houseplants, at my sofa, at my piles of yarn, and also at my drying rack lined with my favorite and least sexy bras—and smiled.
That’ll teach me! I hustled over to the drying rack and hurriedly tossed handfuls of bras into my bedroom. “Do you want a drink or something?” I asked as I scurried back to the kitchen and flung open the fridge, feeling a bit embarrassed that he now knew I had a fondness for gray racerbacks. Hardly the stuff of erotica. “I probably have a beer in here somewhere.” I bent down to check the half shelf below the cheese drawer where all my hardly used things ended up, like single beers and flavors of yogurt that I didn’t mean to buy. But then I felt his hand on the small of my back again and I straightened up. He pointed at the big pitcher on the top shelf. “Is that lemonade?”
He was so close that I could see the chiseled line of his pecs through his shirt. I swallowed hard. “Ginger mint.”
“You made it?” he asked.
I hoisted the pitcher from the fridge with both hands. “It’s my favorite.”
“Then that’s what I’ll have,” he said as he very slowly began to run his eyes over my face. And my body. It was sexy, it was sensuous, and it just melted me. Like a Popsicle on a July day. Or a pat of butter on a hot pancake. Or . . . I stared at my trusty old cookie sheet by the sink. That was it. That was the feeling.
Like the chocolate on a freshly baked snickerdoodle.