I heard my nonna’s voice coming from outside my childhood home, and rushed from my bed to the window. She stood beside a disorderly silver maple, dressed in her black widow garb, except for an uncharacteristic straw hat, ringed in faux cherries. I threw on one of Charlie’s flannel shirts but didn’t bother buttoning it. Down two flights of stairs to the street took an eternity. I could still hear her voice—it was all its verticality, climbing up and down the laddered rungs of her throat.

She sang out in spiky Italian: Il mondo sta volgendo al termine, the world is coming to an end. I put on a mask at the front door. Charlie is always making new ones, this one from a print with cherries and their stems. Sometimes the world aligns in harmonic convergence. This must be one of those times.

When I reached the street, my nonna was nowhere to be seen, but Charlie’s daughter Sally stood under the silver maple with a colander filled with wet, glistening cherries. A blood-red scar of cherry juice spread like a birthmark across her face. She kept shoving cherries into her mouth and spitting out the seeds.

“Have you seen an old woman?” I asked.

“I haven’t see anybody. I keep to myself.” Sally wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and now it, too, looked like a great wound.

“It was my nonna,” I said, “my grandmother.”

Sally spit out some seeds. “How old is she?”

I stopped to do the math. “One hundred and fifteen.”

“She must be on a salt-free diet and mainlining Vitamin D. I know for a fact that she’s ingesting plenty of fiber.”

Apparently, Sally had eaten enough cherries because she now picked them out of the colander and began throwing them at passing cars.

I was overcome with sadness at the prospect of not seeing my nonna again, and decided to go back in the house, but when I turned from the street, the house was gone.

Sally’s scream woke me. Charlie had already left for his early morning walk. When I got out to the living room, Sally was pacing back and forth, barefoot in flannel pajamas, mumbling to herself. I caught her eye and asked what the matter was. She looked back at me as if I should know. “That bird,” she said finally.

“He scared you?”

“Well, yes. I woke, sat up in the futon, and that bird said, ‘Top of the morning to you,’ in a fucking Irish brogue, and when he saw me freaking out, he said, ‘Is everything copasetic, dear?’ in a voice that sounded like my Aunt Emily’s. That’s when I screamed. Sorry about that.”

“No worries. Yeah, your dad’s really got Roscoe trained to say all kinds of shit. It is pretty spooky.”

“How can a bird do that?”

“Ah, now you’re asking questions too deep for me to answer. You know the person to ask.”

I brewed a pot of coffee and Sally and I sat apart from each other out on the deck. The fog had come in and it was nippy outside. I want to help Sally feel comfortable, not just about Roscoe, but about staying in her father’s house, with me around. That will be a trick because it’s not something that I’m comfortable with.

I gazed into Sally’s pretty moon face and the fetching gap between her front teeth. Her coloring is much darker than Charlie’s, and yet I can see a likeness around her eyes. As I sipped my coffee, I tried to imagine what it will be like for her to start over in the middle of a plague, and found myself thinking about the mess I was after Marco, my late husband died.

Sally smiled at me. “Where’d you go?”

Her question surprised me. It wasn’t as if we were in the middle of a conversation.

“You don’t have to tell me, but I noticed your mind take off on a jet and fly from one hemisphere to another.”

I shook my head. “You could see that? Are you clairvoyant, Sally?”

“Hmm,” she said, cryptically, before changing the subject. “Hey, I can tell that you’re good for my dad,”

“How so?”

“Well, for one thing, I haven’t noticed him smile so much in years.”

“I think he was just glad to see you, Sally.”

“Nah. He seems younger and like he’s got some kind of purpose.”

“His purpose is Roscoe.”

“Why don’t you want to believe what I’m telling you. Pina?” she asked, as if she were the elder.

“I don’t know . . . it makes me bashful.”

Sally laughed at that.

“What? Am I too old to be bashful?”

“Shush. I see the way the two of you look at each other. ‘Nuff said.”

“Maybe we were just putting on a show for you.”

Sally shook her head, as if I were hopeless. She finished her coffee and stood. “It’s time for my yoga practice. I want to see what that bird has to say when I stand on my head for fifteen minutes.”

“I can bring him out to the living room.”

“No, no, I need to make peace with Roscoe.”

I stayed out on the deck until Charlie returned from his walk, musing about the idea that somebody might love me, and my resistance to it.

This morning Sonoma is the second coming of Pompeii—flakes of ash falling from a yellow orange sky. We saw images of San Francisco in complete darkness at ten in the morning. In Sonoma the air quality reading was surprisingly decent. Apparently the smoke had risen very high in the atmosphere. A layer of marine air (I think that means fog) served as a buffer.

Charlie and I walked to the square. People carried on as if all this was normal. Deliveries were made to restaurants operating at quarter capacity. Tourists window-shopped in their masks. When weirdness becomes the norm you either roll with the punches or go mad.

It’s been two weeks now since Sally’s moved in. Charlie and I have danced around the inconvenience and we both know something has to give. The condo is too small for three people and a parrot in the middle of a plague.

Charlie took my hand and led me over to the duck pond—the site of our first meeting. We sat on the same bench, but no longer six feet apart. A single mallard glided around the pond and Charlie commented on him: “Everybody is a little lonely these days.”

I agreed. Since Sally moved in, I’ve felt unbalanced in a way that reminds me of loneliness. Lonely in a crowd. I asked Charlie how his work with Roscoe was going.

“I wouldn’t call it work,” he said.

“What would you call it? You’re in there with him for eight hours a day.” I didn’t like how that came out; it sounded so bitchy.

Charlie offered a thin-lipped smile. “Roscoe has an insatiable appetite for language.”

“So you’re feeding him words eight hours a day.” That too sounded bitchy. I couldn’t help myself.

Thankfully, Charlie changed the subject. “I’ve rented an apartment for Sally in Sonoma. It’s a really nice place, down on Broadway. I haven’t told her yet. I wanted you to know first. The problem is she can’t get in until October first.”

“That’s three more weeks. Maybe I’ll move back into Vince’s condo until she moves out.”

“Or I could take a driving trip with Sally,” Charlie said. He had a skeptical look on his face as the idea of the driving trip unfurled. “Okay, let’s see, because of the fires you can’t drive north, can’t drive south, and west you have the Pacific Ocean.“

“Sounds like you’re heading east young man, with your girl and your parrot.” Somehow saying this set us both off laughing. I hadn’t laughed so hard for a long time, not in modern memory, and the unspoken tension between Charlie and me lifted at least as high as the marine layer.

Sally was thrilled to hear the news about the apartment Charlie rented for her and said that she’d be happy to cook dinner. I didn’t look forward to the prospect and ended up chiding myself for assuming that whatever she cooked would resemble hippie chow.

I wasn’t far off. Sally made an African peanut stew that was moderately palatable. Along with a preponderance of peanut butter, she added sweet potatoes, brown rice, and collard greens from her garden. Before leaving the Lost Coast, she filled the back seat of her car with her harvest, and we are still in possession of more collards and kale than any three people could eat in six months. This dish was definitely stick to your ribs type fare, but I’m not sure whether my ribs will ever be the same.

“Any ideas for a wine pairing?” Charlie asked.

I suggested the heartiest red in Charlie’s cellar but Charlie doesn’t have a cellar and the only decent red we had on hand was an Oregon Pinot, which didn’t have nearly the tannin or starch to stand up to the stew.

Charlie, compensating for my polite response, was full of compliments for Sally’s dinner.

“Sally never used to cook,” he said.

“I cook all the time now.”

“Remember how you’d say, a contemporary woman should not spend any time cooking, because that reinforces the stereotype that a woman’s place is in the kitchen.”

“Yeah,” Sally said, shrugging, ”I said a lot of stupid shit, but at least there was some logic in the thought.”

“So you’ve evolved,” Charlie said.

“Or devolved.” Sally aimed a fat forkful of peanut stew into her mouth.

Charlie smiled at me and at his daughter. He clearly looked like a happy man. And, yes, I am beginning to believe he loves me.

Sally blotted her lips with her napkin. “I think we should do raw tomorrow night. I’m thinking a raw vegan lasagna.”

Neither Charlie nor I responded and I sat there trying to come up with the perfect wine pairing.

“Or should we do broccoli balls and cauliflower rice sushi?”