When they rid themselves of me at last—when I stood with my hand on the door of my packed car—my father said, Wait. He went into the garage, then emerged holding a wire cage in which two small, green birds were jailed. They were on sale, he said.

I drove with the cage buckled to the passenger seat. The relentless racket of the birds was like the panicked pitch of a tripped alarm. I was unable to tell whether it was directed toward me, toward one another, or toward the sky that passed above them out the window and the other birds they saw—if they saw them—strung on cables and perched on light posts, or else drifting in slow, aimless circles.

The smaller, uglier bird was the male. He tormented the female—unless she liked that kind of thing. He’d chew her neck and crowd her to a corner, where, if he could manage it, they’d fuck. When I refreshed their little dishes of seeds and water, he’d eat first—making a mess she’d clean up.

If I covered their cage with a heavy cloth, they went silent in the sudden dark and did not stir until I lifted it. To clear my head, I’d sometimes leave them cloaked for days. Then, flung without warning into cruel daylight—that was when I loved them most, if I ever loved them. I’d take the stunned, sedated female in hand. Her body looked plump, pliable, but felt hard, hollow. Under my thumb, her heart twitched.

Then she stopped eating, and soon I buried her beneath the arborvitae behind my building. The next morning, I crouched to where she lay headless on the dead grass. From a ground-level window, the landlord’s fat white cat opened its mouth—a black cavern on a snowy hillside.

The little widower, the fresh bachelor—I stood in front of his cage. Wildly he climbed the bars. He wanted to blind me—he was blunt about it with his body and his shrill speech. I offered my index finger. He clamped it hard, which hurt, but not as much as I’d thought it would.

A few years later, my parents died—one after the other—from speedy, unforeseen diseases. My sister—a stranger, twenty years my senior—drove from where she lived and loaded her car. She left me the house key. It hung from a fat pink dolphin fob. In a fun font, the fob said Florida Is for Lovers.

When I let myself in, there was a very still, sun-cooked smell in the house. I hung my jacket, wiped my shoes on the rug, and went to the marble-topped, mirror-backed cabinet where they kept their bottles and glasses. I offered myself a drink, which I accepted.

I took my tumbler of cognac to my mother’s mohair reading chair. I plopped my legs onto A History of English Country Houses, which lay open on the ottoman. Her potted plants, I saw, would not last. I poured another drink and went upstairs.

In their bedroom, I opened Mother’s lacquered stack of velvet-lined drawers. My sister took the aggressive jewels—the diamond shoulder dusters, the silver slave bracelets, the Italian choker. But here was a plain gold chain fixed to a locket with a photograph of a man—not my father—inside. Here was a thick copper ring set with a large black stone that streaked orange when I slipped it onto my finger.