“Daddy,” Wilma calls the new one, after a man who never stayed in one place. Is it because her natural father left an indelible stain on her soul? A void which she can never fill? She resists that explanation, But even at four, she remembers trying to talk to him when he came home from work. He’d be looking over her shoulder for Momma. Wilma still keeps the smaller cage Daddy came in. The newer one she got him is fancier, and twice the size. Daddy does not sharpen his beak on the cuttle bone; doesn't pick seeds from Wilma’s hand. When she loosens her hair and musses it with her palms, Daddy appears to watch with bead-like eyes. Wilma sings about curving wings of robin's egg blue. She imagines Daddy is yearning to join in. But no sound comes from the synthetic throat or passes the cotton tongue. Wilma pins her hair up. She needs to put her face on and get to work. She is saving for another, even prettier cage in which to hold him.

The old woman's face belongs on a coin; her profile is that sharp and fine. Her son is lost. Not lost, dead. He died with his best friend, his dog. The two were swept off a seaside patio together. Oh, it was a terrible, terrible hurricane season. And now it is Christmas. They say the absolute worst of life experiences is for a mother to lose her child. They are right. The pain of it blooms under her ribs: her son is both lost and dead. The poor dog had been pregnant when the hurricane winds came. A firefighter had somehow delivered the puppies and brought one, the lone survivor, to the sharp-featured mother. She wanted to name the puppy after her son. Completely unseemly, she knew. So when anyone asked, she told them her dog's name was Bruno. But she never called him anything but Ricky. And she lets him take his meals from her son’s embroidered chair, the name Richard stitched and across the seat in golden thread. She holds Ricky tighter and asks him if he fancies another sherry. She drinks this one for him, too.