Mockingbird
From the time I was seventeen until the summer I turned nineteen, because Mom had married and moved to the other end of the state, I mostly lived alone with my dog in the house I grew up in. One summer I spent working at a local convenience store, but I wasn’t very industrious. Most afternoons I just walked to Jaybird Lake 
and fell asleep floating on the water. While I was still in high school, Mom would come back once or twice a week when she had a class or studio to attend at UALR. Finally, I left for college. She only rarely came back.
She left; I didn’t—not entirely. I lived on campus during the week and at home on the weekends. There I did laundry and slept in my own bed. When autumn came and the temperature dropped, I built a fire sometimes—a wood stove was all we had—but mostly I endured the cold, wrapping up in a blanket, spending late nights at my grandparents’, hanging out with friends until I was too tired to feel a chill. Only a handful of those days stand out in my memory now, one of them a shameful thing I did—or rather didn’t do—to the dog—but that’s another story. Before long, college became reality, and home slipped away. By the spring semester, the house truly was empty.
It gathered dust until the next summer when I returned home and to my former job at the convenience store. With a newfound industriousness, I worked as much as I could, and I enjoyed all of my time. I read Don Delillo for the first time (End Zone), as well as several other late-twentieth-century writers whose works I now forget except that they were about drugs and sex and the libertine lives of the fairly rich. I also readied the house as a rental, scraping plaster off and brushing paint on the walls, pulling up wood flooring to replace with tile, packing up furniture for the move west.
But what I remember most vividly from that summer is this: just outside my window there was a pin oak. A mockingbird would sing from that pin oak, every third song stolen from the mouths of whippoorwills and screaming car alarms, and he would sing there between four and six o’clock in the morning. It was like what I imagine it would be to have an opera singer upstairs sing several arias in the middle of the night: on the one hand, such a lovelier thing could hardly exist; on the other, isn’t there a better time to practice? I hated that mockingbird, and I loved it, too.
