Little Bird, page 1
This Book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, duplicated, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN (print) 978-1-64548-061-7
ISBN (ebook) 978-1-64548-062-4
Cover Design and Interior Formatting
by Qamber Designs and Media
Published by Black Spot Books,
An imprint of Vesuvian Media Group
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious and are products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual events, or locales or persons, living or dead are entirely coincidental.
To the grief-stricken and sad. Skelly was my lifeline when I wrote this book. May her infuriating and constant presence be a comfort to you as she was to me.
Other Books by Tiffany Meuret
A Flood of Posies
DAY ONE
The morning was always too bright after a bender. Well, perhaps not a bender, but a carefully controlled evening of adult beverages that had gone slightly off the rails. She’d allotted herself two drinks in which to imbibe, but after her second pour noticed she only had enough vodka left for half a drink and figured why not kill the bottle? The additional serving had been more than the half drink she’d anticipated. That was a packaging issue and she refused to be held accountable for their manufactured deception.
Sunglasses pinching the bridge of her nose to protect herself from a light-induced migraine, she went to sip at her coffee and remembered she’d yet to make any.
Po, her chihuahua, yapped at her from his usual spot in front of his empty food bowl.
“Coming,” she said, though this did little to soothe him. It wasn’t until the food cascaded into his plastic bowl that he quieted long enough to scarf down his breakfast, acting as if he hadn’t eaten in days. His last meal hadn’t even been a full twelve hours earlier, to which the vet would complain about his ever-growing weight again, but the vet wasn’t the one living with the mouthy beast. Life was too short to deny the little guy the simplest of pleasures, things like a good meal and a long nap, both of which he’d mastered in his two years of existence.
Monday arrived whether she approved or not, and though she worked from home she still needed to maintain some semblance of structure. She fiddled with her failing espresso machine, a wedding present regifted to her in the divorce settlement. The thing didn’t always turn on and sometimes needed to be unplugged and plugged in again before it’d power up, but she had a way with her patched-up appliances—a few good curses and a whack to its side always woke it up. She packed a double shot and waited for the water to heat.
Po, long finished with his kibble, leaped onto the plush pillowtop chair she kept near the kitchen table for him. Her coffee hadn’t even dropped before he began to snore.
Only eight in the morning and she was already dreaming of bedtime, but here she was, same as every day–Monday through Friday, eight to six, all federal holidays excluded. Her laptop whined as the fan kicked on, circuits daring to spark under the constant strain of use. The coffee tasted sour, but she chugged it down in a gulp before checking her email.
She called her service Premium Client Unlimited, a name so intentionally vague that nobody could hold her to any sort of standard, as no one could even describe what it was that she did. If pressed, she usually referred to herself as the silver-tongued spinster. Realistically, she was a glorified carrier pigeon, a messenger, emailing the clients of her clients to resolve disputes when business owners, independents, and freelance workers had run out of ideas. Sometimes she collected payments, sometimes aided as an intermediary when communications crumbled. The gold plan was $99—which was the package that most people still willing to entertain her nonsense usually chose.
For that price, her customers would receive one fifteen-minute phone call, three email translations, and her handy guide to navigating the modern customer, which was largely populated with spiraling analogies of her own creation, and a pocket guide to responding to angry complaints in the digital realm. She banked on the fact that nobody bothered to read it, but on the rare occasion someone asked her to extrapolate on her parable of pepper in the fan, she would respond with, “Think back. You’ve actually already answered the question yourself.”
To this day, no one had contested this assertion. Well, no one besides her ex-husband, Stuart, who managed to challenge everything and anything about her as if he was looking to impress a corporate sponsor in the sport of it. But she wasn’t thinking about Stuart today. The divorce meant she was done thinking about Stuart. Period.
This was where the magic happened, where her clients emailed her their customer service woes, often in expletive-filled rants, that she, in turn, translated into professional soundbites to encourage positive discourse between her clients and her clients’ clients. This, of course, was impossible, as clients were terrible creatures with discounts-for-brains and herbivore teeth that weren’t terribly sharp, but so persistent and dull that the thought of hearing them chew up another complaint made one want to scream until their voice box radiated itself to death. Naturally, her clients were no exception, but they paid her bills—most of the time.
Her Monday inbox was an impressive sight—swollen under the load of business-casual bickering and hurt feelings. A normal Monday populated about two-hundred-and-fifty orders, most of which were simple one-off conversations that she could spin in her sleep. Completing these would take her into lunch, and she’d spend the rest of her day responding in varying degrees to follow-up emails and new orders.
Today was slightly more boisterous than the norm, a cool three-hundred-and-sixteen orders already populated. Sometimes, she marveled at her success at filling a niche in the industry that nobody knew they needed. In all actuality, they did not need it, but they didn’t know that. Some days she reveled in her good fortune. She, a bonified, platinum business bitch, spewing arrogant slogans like: “A fool and his money are easily parted,” but that never lasted. Most of the time, the concept of her business just made her sad. She’d feel guilty, like a vampiric con-woman looking for the next mark. Then, one of her clients would email her something utterly obscene and she’d forget all about her previous reservations and ensuing existential crisis.
Until the next day, but that was for her to worry about later. For the moment, she was flush in the center of a confidence boost, proud of the small uptick in business.
The hours whizzed by with the furious clicking of her typing. One of her more consistent clients, Jackie, was at it again, and once he got rolling, he was a tough boulder to stop. One of Jackie’s customers was disputing an invoice and threatening to call the cops on him for theft. This was a bluff, but it was bluff enough to send Jackie into a fury spiral so monumental he mentioned to Josie he had a few buff cousins up north that would be thrilled to assist him. This, too, was a bluff, and it was Josie’s job to translate his attempted assault into a professionally appropriate message.
Although, committed to memory, she checked her pocket guide for a proper translation. Sometimes physically looking at it helped clarify her instincts.
PREMIUM CLIENT UNLIMITED
HANDY TRANSLATION GUIDE
I see your point= And it’s stupid
I understand why you feel that way= And it’s stupid
I just wanted to check in= to see what stupid shit you are going to make me deal with today
Is there anything I can help you with= I’d rather eat my arm off the bone than help you
Would you like to schedule a meeting to discuss further= I would like to tell you how wrong you are again, but this time to your face
Can you please clarify= Explain your nonsense
I do not like to leave an unhappy client= Not because I like you but because you’ll trash me all over Yelp
I apologize for the inconvenience= The inconvenience to me for having to deal with you
What would you propose= I hate your presence in my life and will give you whatever you want to ensure that I never have to speak to you again
Cordially= fuck you
Warm regards= fuck you
Hello= fuck you
How are you= fuck you
As per our last email= Can you read? Also, fuck you
It was a working list, scribbled and scratched and written in the margins of a formerly white scrap of paper taped to her laptop. The responses were instinct now, and she’d provided a less offensive outline of them in a PDF to all her gold-level clients. On occasion, she would lose business to the proactive few who utilized it, but those were usually the most satisfied of any of her clients, and the ones she pursued for testimonials and reviews, of which most happily obliged. Therefore, bringing in more new clients and replenishing her well.
Then there were the Jackies. He was the type to keep her on retainer as if she were a posh New York lawyer. His business is what would eventually replace her espresso machine.
Jackie,
I understand your feelings here, and I, too, would be very frustrated. Yet, instead of upsetting the situation further, I suggest letting your client lead this conversation. This will promo
She attached her most popular form letter—resolving financial disputes was her most prolific service—knowing full well Jackie would ignore all of it. He had a knack for upsetting his customers beyond recognition and then paying her hundreds of dollars to avoid a lawsuit costing thousands. She liked Jackie, yet couldn’t stand him. She supposed she felt that way about most people.
Conveniently, as if sensing the wayward thoughts of her daughter from her San Diego marina, her mother texted her.
I saw a seal today
Was it a seal or a sea lion?
Probably a sea lion I guess why
Curious
It was spitting water around like a whale
A whale?
You know like a whale with their blowhole it was cool
Neat
Did you get the toilet fixed?
NO but I use the marina bathroom. Arv said he would
fix it next time he was up
Who’s Arv?
My neighbor
Oh
You should come visit me
Maybe in the spring
So a few months
Easter break
okay
k
Josie set her phone face down on the table, hoping to discourage any further conversation. The phone buzzed several more times, but she ignored it.
Po squirmed in his seat, well attuned to her shifting moods, which signaled the time for a treat and a cup of tea. Her morning dose of ibuprofen was no longer containing the foggy lull following the previous night’s bender. She tossed a milk bone to Po, who didn’t deign to remove himself from the chair, then prepped her electric kettle and a fresh set of pills. This would get her through the second half of the day with as little ass-dragging as possible.
An entire row of her pantry was dedicated to tea, both bagged for convenience and loose. Green tea was her favorite, followed closely by almost any other form of tea, with black tea making the list only due to obligation. She drank it rarely, usually only when her sinuses were jammed up and she couldn’t taste it very well.
As she gazed out the window overlooking her brown yard, she spotted something odd. For years nothing had grown in the neglected dirt lot Josie called a backyard, and she had no idea why anything had sprouted now. A green bud surfaced dead center in the brown expanse, standing out like a marble in a riverbed. Probably a weed. It’d been a wetter winter than her desert town was used to, but even then, this weed must possess fortitude far beyond her negligence. She wondered what kind of plant would spontaneously bloom in such a way.
This weed must be a renegade, which was respectable.
Ibuprofen digested, she chose an oolong tea as the end cap to her short work break. She was about to resume the daily grind when the measured beeping of a reversing truck interrupted her rhythm. It was close, very close. Like, in her front yard close. She did not appreciate this at all.
Over the few years she’d spent in this cul-de-sac, she’d grown quite attuned to its daily schedule. The house to the west kept a timely, evening routine. A small car left every evening around seven p.m. and arrived back around seven a.m. The one next to that housed iguanas and an old married couple who largely kept to themselves aside from major holidays. The two houses directly across from her were infested with children that sprinted banshee-like through the streets every evening and weekend, but all were school-aged and blessedly absent during working hours.
Then, there was the house to the east of her—a ramshackle thing overrun with untreated termites and oil stains, serially rented out to the lowest bidder, none of whom ever lasted more than six months. The landlord made infrequent appearances when it was unoccupied to prune weeds in the hopes of attracting another sucker to sign his likely illegal rental agreement. Josie had witnessed many a type wander through those walls—some with families and kids, some with coolers and midterms, and some with nothing but folding tables and a few boxes. The place was a black hole—sucking at the tit of decency until it was nothing but a used husk of its former self. It’d seen some shit, that house, and it’d stolen a bit from every person that had ever dared to leave it.
Without having to look, she knew it had found another soul to claim. The beeping stopped, and the rumbling engine of the moving truck cut away. Tea in hand, Josie pulled her front curtains back a finger’s length to snoop.
The moving truck was on the smaller side, not big enough for a large family with equally large amounts of crap to move. One, two people tops. She waited for someone to reveal themselves so she might get an idea of what kind of neighbor she’d have for the next few months. College kids were loud little assholes that didn’t care about the weeds or the termites or much else either. Single men were depressingly silent, yet tolerable because of it. Single women, however, especially older white women, were the ones Josie detested the most. They were chatty and lonely and demanded attention at every possible opportunity. These were the neighbors Josie observed through her peephole, waiting for them to disappear into their home long enough for her to escape to her car. These were the type to demand camaraderie in their singleness, to demand friendship, reciprocity optional.
When her new neighbor finally walked into view, Josie cursed to herself before taking a long, bitter sip of tea. “Of fucking course.”
A salty-haired woman, perhaps sixty plus years old, appeared at the rear of the truck attempting to coax the back latch open. She wore a purple fanny pack and a beige camping hat with a feather dangling from one side. Josie pulled back from the curtains, afraid the woman might catch her spying and want to chat, but the woman was more enthralled with the latch of the truck than entertaining neighbors. After pulling on it for a minute with no success, the woman kicked the latch with her steel toe boots and it popped free.
Josie let the curtain fall and went back to work.
The woman emptied her truck in a matter of two hours. Josie knew this because she had been watching her through the curtains the entire time—in between emails, on her way to and from the bathroom, just to stretch her legs, or because of a loud thud that made Josie wonder if the woman had gotten herself crushed under a refrigerator.
Po was also distressed, sprinting toward the window at every scratch, sniff, bang, or creak, hairs standing in a line down his spine as his snout pulled the curtain up from the back of the couch. He constantly yapped as if perpetually forgetting this woman existed despite having barked at her all afternoon. The new neighbor had probably already figured out Po’s name just by the sheer amount of times Josie had shouted at him to knock it off, a command he adamantly refused to obey.
By six in the evening, the moving truck had sputtered away, and Josie relished the thought of some peace and quiet. Queuing up her favorite post-work playlist, she fixed herself a vodka soda and ate a granola bar before diving into a bag of stale tortilla chips.
By the time dinner was eaten, she’d already refreshed her drink twice. Her third vodka soda—a little less soda in every iteration—left sweat rings on the arm rest of her suede couch, long since destroyed by both the dog and her drinking. She hadn’t bothered to keep Po off the couch in a year, not after she puked all over one of the cushions and stained it strawberry daiquiri pink.
“Sensible,” she said to Po simply because he was the only other one there. “Tonight, I need to be sensible. No hangovers. Right, Po?”
Not that it mattered much. None of her Tuesday customers would know she was hungover. In fact, she often performed her best work when a little wrung out. Still, it was never wise to start a week off in the same fashion she ended the weekend.
The television blathering in the background, she decided to toss her third drink in the sink and call it a sensible evening when headlights darted across her window. The new neighbor, probably coming home after returning the moving truck. They flickered again, and a third time shortly after that as if the woman was circling the cul-de-sac.
