She has just paid to get the electricity back on, so she dates the check for the middle of next week, after payday, and tries to think of something to say to distract him from looking at it too closely. “What’s that on your truck?” she asks.
“Goose-catching stuff,” he replies.
She tucks her checkbook into the back pocket of her jeans and returns her hand to Turtle’s suspended grasp. “You catch geese?”
“We’re having the big goose roundup today.”
Taylor looks from his glassy face to the truck and back again, unsure of what one says in this exact situation.
“Canadian geese,” he adds, to shed more light.
“Is that, like, a sport?”
“No, it’s a citywide crisis,” he says, hitching his brown Parks and Recreation jacket on his shoulders with the air of a man who considers himself something of a goose expert.
“We’ve got these Canadian geese that come down here to the lakeshore,” he explains knowledgeably, “while they’re supposed to be on their way to somewhere else. Stopping for a little break, supposed to be. But everybody goes down there with their darling little child and a bag of day-old bread to feed the geese, and next thing you know, these birds have no intention of moving on. No intention whatsoever.”
Turtle is tugging with a light pressure on Taylor’s hand and looking at the toes of her new sneakers, which clearly want to head toward the schoolyard. But Taylor needs to be polite. This fellow may look nineteen, but his power over her life right now is infinite. “Well, I guess you wouldn’t want every AWOL goose in Canada hanging out down by the docks.”
“No, ma’am, you certainly do not. There’s goose poop piled up to kingdom come down there. But our main interest is in protecting the welfare of these birds. It’s poor wildlife management to allow a bird to live on handouts. A lot of these birds, and I’m not exaggerating this, ma’am, a lot of these birds have become too obese to fly.”
Taylor clamps her teeth together so hard, to avoid smiling, she’s afraid she’s going to get a cramp. “Where are you taking them once you round them up?”
“Shipping them out to eastern Washington,” he replies with satisfaction. “It’s no party out there. Not a lot of rainfall.
These geese will have to slim down and learn to fend for themselves, I’m telling you. Hard work will straighten out their bad habits pretty quick.”
“What if they’re just too lazy to learn better ways?” Taylor asks in a solemn voice. “You think they might just waddle on back west?”
“Oh, no, ma’am, there’s no chance of them coming back here. No chance at all. Not where they’re going. This trip is going to separate out the men from the boys, you might say.”
“The sheep from the goats,” Taylor says, nodding, a studied frown on her face.
“That’s right,” the manager says. He folds Taylor’s check without a glance and places it carefully in his shirt pocket.
“I have to be going now,” he says.
“You certainly do,” she says. “I sure hope you catch all the perpetrators.”
Charged with Taylor’s confidence, the manager practically sprints back to his truck and drives away in a hurry.
“I wish somebody’d give us some day-old bread,” Taylor says to Turtle. “Don’t you?”
She nods. “With strawberry jam.”
The pair of them turn their toes out and pretend they are obese geese, waddling to school.
Late Saturday morning Taylor is headed south through steady rain toward the airport, wishing with all her might that she were flying somewhere too, instead of driving a man in a wheelchair to meet his plane. She’s still on the Handi-Van roster as a substitute, and this morning she is filling in for Kevin. He isn’t speaking to her but he let her drive his Saturday shift, since there was nobody else available, so he could go to a computer fair. Taylor feels uneasy about the baby-sitting she had to settle for; Turtle is with an elderly Chinese neighbor who wears a red wig and black stockings with brown plastic sandals. She sews uniforms for cheerleaders and baseball teams in her home, and seemed a safe enough bet. Unfortunately she doesn’t speak English, so Taylor has no idea what she’s being charged for the baby-sitting, and prays she’ll come out ahead.
She has only one passenger at the moment, the man going to the airport. Taylor likes his looks: he’s about her age, and has nice eyes that remind her a little of Jax. “You heading for someplace where the sun shines?” she asks him.