She stared back.

He righted himself and edged his way to the far corner again while she clipped the kale to a bar of the cage. He hunched, a sullen attitude. Muttered. She had no idea what a parrot’s mutter was supposed to sound like, but she was certain that he had muttered.

Petulant bird, she thought.

“Show-off,” she said aloud, hoping that teasing might get a response.

At the sound of the word “show-off,” he righted himself and began to preen.

“Eat your treat, Rico. I went to Marvin’s on the way here so I could buy one piece of kale—just for you. Tomorrow, I might bring broccoli.”

She remembered that on her way out of the store, she had torn a strip from a notice on the community board. GRIEF DISCUSSION GROUP. There wasn’t much information on the tear strip—only location, time and date. She felt for the strip in the pocket of her cardigan. The first meeting was to take place the following Tuesday at Cassandra’s Café.

Gwen had been to Cassie’s—that’s what everyone called the place. Long ago, Cass—well known in town—had taken over the old Belle Theatre, Wilna Creek’s earliest movie house, so that she could prevent its destruction by developers. She and her partner, Rice, had transformed it into a flourishing live theatre, and after several decades, they sold it to a trio of actors who had new energy to invest. When Cass and Rice gave up the theatre, they purchased the café. Less work, less responsibility, they told everyone. They could close the café for weekends when they felt like doing so. They could take off for a week or two and drive away from the place. Cass didn’t have to schedule performances a year in advance. She didn’t have to collaborate with half a dozen or more people the way she’d done for every production while she’d managed the theatre. All this had been written up in the Wilna Creek Times.

The previous December, Cass had held a sixty-ninth birthday party for herself at her own café. She took out an ad in the paper and invited patrons to drop by for a piece of cake. Gwen didn’t go because she had no one to go with. Brigg would have had no interest. She didn’t bother telling him she’d like to go.

Now a person in town—man or woman, no way of knowing—was organizing some sort of discussion group about grief. The group would be meeting in Cassie’s backroom. Gwen weighed the decision, considered Brigg, considered grief. Maybe she would show up. After the first meeting, she could make up her mind about continuing. She hadn’t been part of a discussion group since university days. She’d certainly never joined any sort of club. During Brigg’s illness—to distance herself from his anger and constant demands—and later, after his death, she had begun to stop in at the café to sit for long periods over a drawn-out latte while reading a book from her late mother’s library. With time to herself, she was beginning to discover the contents of that library. She’d started with Arthurian tales translated from Middle English, recalling a day when her mother had held out a book and said, pointedly, “Gwen, this is not a translation. This is an exciting story that happens to be told in an earlier version of your own language—English.”