October, Rae, and Cal stood in the front yard talking for a few minutes. After Rae got in her car and drove away, Cal put his arm around October; they walked into the house with Diego loafing behind.

I went to the studio early the next morning to do more work on the birdcage before October saw it. She came in around nine o’clock carrying two cappuccinos.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.” She handed me one of the mugs. “Disclaimer. I don’t make them as well as you do.”

I tried to assess her reaction to being back, tried to measure how things were between us, but I didn’t have her gift, and from my point of view she seemed unfazed and unattached, not all torn up inside like I was. Reluctantly, I asked how her trip to Big Sur had been. Her answer was ambiguous and deflective.

“Fine,” she said. “Tell me about your week.”

“How about I show you?” I was nervous, desperate for her to like the cage, and I walked her to the back of the studio so she could see the progress I’d made.

Before she was even close enough to see any of the particular details, she stopped in her tracks and said, “Woah . . .” As she continued to approach, she looked at me, then at the cage, then back at me. She walked all the way around it, ran her hand up and down the small section of bars I’d already installed, and then took a few steps back to take it all in.

“Joe . . .”

“It’s not done yet. Obviously.”

She was shaking her head. “I don’t know what to say. . . . It’s already beyond what I could have imagined . . . and it’s so . . . I don’t know . . . pretty.”

Teasing, I said, “Pretty is the lazy way to describe a birdcage.”

She elbowed me in the ribs. “I mean it. I’m speechless.”