The Bird Market of Paris Read Online Free Page A

month for two years until I had the entire set. The books had faux leather bindings, and each page was edged with gold, so when the book closed the fore edge gleamed like treasure.

 
    Chapter 3
    The year I turned nine, my parents offered to take me to Walt Disney World a month after my birthday instead of having a birthday party. Maybe it was a kindness because I didn’t have enough friends to warrant an ice cream cake and bouncy house. But the lack of a party dogged me, and I couldn’t sleep till well past midnight the night before my birthday. Nona snored in bed beside me as I plotted a party for myself.
    On my birthday, my parents had to work late selling cars at their respective car dealerships—Ferraris for my dad and Subarus for my mom—so I was alone with Nona and Poppy that afternoon and had just over an hour to prepare.
    I had invited four girls from school to arrive for my party at four o’clock. I didn’t use invitations bought from a stationery store like the invites other kids dispensed for their parties: card-stock status symbols insinuating the scrumptiousness of the cake and the bounty of the take-away party favor bag. I wrote the invites on lined paper and decorated them with Magic Markers—hearts, flowers, and swirled flourishes in each corner—and passed them to the girls at lunch.
    Nona baked my favorite coffee-flavored cake, ten thin layers, including two layers of hardened caramelized sugar and chocolate icing with a little rum in it. She drove me in her blue weather-worn 1965 Plymouth Valiant, which didn’t have air-conditioning, to the five-and-dime where I bought party favors for my guests: a fuzzy bunny statuette, yellow plastic sunglasses, a small green plastic tub shaped like a trash can containing green slime with eyeballs in it, a Strawberry Shortcake doll knockoff, four packs of cherry Pop Rocks, and a small stuffed puppy dog.
    At home, I spent half an hour layering the prizes with tissue paper, wrapping paper, and tape, so we could play my favorite party game where we sat in a circle and passed the wrapped present around as someone played music in the background. When the music stopped, whoever held the present peeled one of the layers of wrapping. The person to peel off the last ply of paper kept the present.
    I slipped on a dress emblazoned with a pattern of cherries and a bright green sash at the waist, the full skirt whooshing over my thighs with a thin layer of scratchy crinoline beneath it. Poppy had designed and sewn the dress for my birthday after I chose the fabric from the hundreds of bolts of cotton in his design studio. I loved caressing the exotic fabrics, holding the eyelet to the light, swathing myself in the soft jersey and charmeuse, and inhaling the scent of the rough muslin, a fragrance like milk and popcorn, when Poppy ironed it.
    It was warm for October, and we had multiple fans whirling as I played Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall record on the turntable, an album I had been wearing out since summer. The mellow groove of “Rock with You” mingled with the yeasty smell of baking bread. I yearned for pink party streamers and a “Happy Birthday” banner, like the one I’d had the year before, but it was too late for that.
    Four o’clock came—no guests. I called one girl and she said her mother wouldn’t let her come. At five thirty, another girl called to decline the invitation. I didn’t have the other girls’ phone numbers, so I asked Nona to look them up in the white pages. Nona said if they didn’t want to come, I shouldn’t chase them.
    She brought me the latch hook rug I’d been working on and told me to add more yarn while I waited for my guests. Nona was gifted at arts and crafts, skilled at stained glass, and could sew almost as well as Poppy.
    Poppy often took me to visit Nona at Miami’s National Parkinson’s Institute, where she worked as an assistant physical