Freddy shook a Kool from his pack and lit it. He put an arch in his voice, “Excuse me, do y’all mind if I smoke?”

“I like them too much,” Zona said as she mashed hers out. “I better go check on Walter.”

Blaine waved his daughter-in-law over to him and spoke quietly. “Was there some kind of precipitating event? What the hell really happened?”

“A neighbor—this guy, this asshole hurt his back at work and is collecting disability. If you ask me, it’s a bullshit claim. He sits in his garage and drinks beer all day, or you’ll see him doing real heavy labor, like he’s got the strongest back in the world. Anyhow, he comes over here and says Walter’s birds are too loud. Calls the city. They come out and say Walter isn’t zoned for an aviary. You know how Walter lives for those birds. Well, not only do we have to get rid of the birds, move them out to the stables, but they want us to tear up the construction. If I were a man I would take that guy out with one punch. One punch! End of conversation. End of problem.”

“I can’t believe Walter is cowed by some guy with a bad back,” Freddy said. “He’s a damn Sumo.”

Zona said, “Yes, but he’s not mean, and he really gets into the Christian lifestyle. So now it takes a half hour to drive out to the stables. It takes an hour to cut up fruit. You have to bleach the tables, the cutting boards, and all the paraphernalia because of salmonella, which can wipe out a flock overnight. Lories eat fruit and nectar; they aren’t seed eaters. That’s the big downside on lories. You do that twice a day and try to run a business and it will snap you. Of course, the city is right. We aren’t zoned for an aviary. So there you are.”

“And I’ve got to sell the stables,” Blaine said. “I wish we’d dumped the business ten years ago and bugged out for Mexico. We got an offer for seven million at the time, but we were taking in a hundred and ninety-five thousand a month clear. Now I’m stuck. Our traffic is down by half, the lease payments and payroll are killing us. The next thing, I really will be living in a double-wide. In fact, I don’t see any way to avoid it.”

“We’ll all be living in the double-wide when I pay for this last caper,” Zona said. She picked up the laundry basket and headed upstairs.

Blaine looked over at Freddy. “So you really love it over there, in Central Africa?”