Shelly does her best to hide the ghosts from Grandma. She keeps burying them in her dresser when she’s not home. She tucks them into her hair and her clothing when she walks into the house, so she can carry them down the hall without being stopped. Her room slowly fills up.

Most nights Grandma makes dinner and they eat together while Grandma tries to talk to Shelly.

“How are you?” she asks.

Shelly shrugs and pokes her pasta with a fork. “Fine,” she says.

Grandma lets her get away with it.

“I have a job tomorrow,” she says, instead of pushing Shelly for more details about her day. “I thought you might like to come with me.”

Shelly looks up, surprised. “Really?” she asks. “What kind of job? Is it interesting?”

Grandma smiles. “A family keeps finding things knocked over in their apartment. They say they have a poltergeist, so it’s probably a bird.”

Sometimes, birds crash into the windows of tall buildings and their spirits pass through the glass without their bodies. Birds can be destructive because they flap around trying to get free and throw things about.

It’s not interesting work at all. Another animal. Shelly wants to tell Grandma that she’s gotten good at people, that she has a room full of them to prove she can do bigger things.

“Birds are boring,” she says, instead. “They just squawk until you catch them and put them outside. They give me a headache.”

“Birds are a good way to make a living,” Grandma says. “Birds will always crash into buildings.”

“I guess I’ll come.” Shelly looks down at her pasta again. It’s boring work, but at least she’ll get to go again. “Do you think there are a lot of chicken ghosts on farms?”

• • •

The bird family is nice—it’s two women with a little girl. They offer Grandma and Shelly lemonade when they arrive and walk them to the living room of their high-rise apartment.

“I thought it was just Maria throwing her toys around at first,” one of the women says, as she shows them the cracked glass in picture frames that were knocked off the wall. “Hannah or I would put them away on the shelf and then they’d be scattered everywhere when we got in.”

Hannah nods. “When we found the pictures all knocked off the wall, we knew Maria wasn’t just trying to get out of trouble. She’s only four. She can’t reach them.”

“Besides,” says Hannah’s wife, “two days ago we were watching TV and something knocked it over.”

The bird is sitting on the top of a bookshelf. Its feathers are ruffled up and it looks about as disgruntled as a bird can look. Grandma hands Shelly her lemonade and takes down her hair.

“Don’t you worry,” she says. “We’ll see to your poltergeist problem.”