No surprise that the memorabilia of her childhood was for sale—little plastic homunculi on rhomboid plinths inscribed I LOVE YOU THIS MUCH; Playboy drinking glasses; a lacy and emphatic Cross Your Heart bra. Her childhood was as ugly arranged by color and category as it had been in the kitchens and rumpus rooms and Spencers Gifts of her hometown. Wheat-patterned, avocado-hued: vintage. That’s how it worked. Your belongings marched alongside you, as you moved toward death: thrift shop, vintage shop, antique store, museum. Look, Thea’s chrome childhood bread box, with the Bakelite latch and the identifying badge: BREAD.

Behind the front counter, a woman in a strapless plaid dress shot through with gold stood sorting through a parliament of macramé owls. The owls smelled, no doubt, of tuna noodle casserole and Virginia Slims.

Thea leaned on the counter. The woman turned, holding a beige owl by its top and bottom, like a town crier with a proclamation. She was plump, luscious, with cat’s-eye glasses, carmine lipstick, tattooed wings spread across the territory below her throat and above her breasts, her cleavage creasing the bottom. Her hair was the red pistachios used to be. “Something you’re looking for?” she asked Thea.

“Yes,” said Thea, and got shy. “Do you have a doll section?”

“Not really. I think we got a Pee-wee Herman. Or there’s her.” She pointed to a trepanned bisque head in the display case. “Other than that—not really. Here.” The woman grabbed a photocopied brochure of local vintage shops and circled a number on a map. Soon she would age out of those glasses, or out of the implicit irony: she would be an actual middle-aged broad, not a young woman playing the part. “Try here. Amanda. On Burnett. She’s got a ton of dolls.”

All grackles were beautiful the way all babies were: if you liked them, yes. Otherwise, only an occasional specimen. They were not hummingbirds or cardinals; they did not flash. Sunlight revealed the iridescence in their dark plumage like poison in a glass. In the morning and evening, they held meetings on telephone wires: you drove under conventions of grackles, their shadowy bodies, their long pensive tails. The birds of Portland, Oregon, had wanted nothing from Thea except her dropped crumbs, which they busied away all busboy-like. In Austin, on the lawns of bungalows, grackles had a patient, dangerous, purposeful look. They seemed to walk more than most birds. Outside the vintage shop, the one-footed grackle hopped along the concrete blocks. His mouth was jacked open. He eyed Thea: I’m a bird, but I could fuck you up.