He could build anything. He built all the cabinets in his house. He built a broom holder. He perfectly replicated an antique jelly cabinet his wife had gushed over at a fair.

He didn’t build her birdhouses, though. She collected those. She had them everywhere. She had them on tables in the living room and she had them hanging from the eaves. She had a glass birdhouse in the middle of the kitchen table with salt and pepper-shaker birds perched on its lip.

When she’d get a new one, she would bring it home and put it by her chair, get supper done, clean up, put the grandkids to bed if they were over, and let the cat out onto the porch. Then she’d make a glass of iced tea and sit down and put on the news and pick up her birdhouse.

She’d roll it around looking at how the roof was joined to the wallboard. She’d run her finger along the grain of the perch. She’d hold it up and eyeball it for plumb.

Then she’d look into the hole.

He never knew what she saw in them. Tonight, he made sure all the doors were locked and set up the coffee pot for in the morning. He went and brushed his teeth and put on his t-shirt and shorts. He went back out to turn off all the lights except the one next to her chair. He stood by the porch door watching her look down into that birdhouse. He listened to the trucks going by on the highway for a while then he went to bed.

Next day while she was at work, he called for some lumber. When she got home, he was in the front yard watering her flowers. She came up and gave him a peck on the cheek and he said "Come on over here for a minute." They walked past the swing he’d made her when they moved in and walked around the side of the house to the back and she stopped dead in her tracks.

Sitting under the white oak that spread its branches across the whole back yard was a birdhouse big as a shed. It was sitting up about ten inches off the ground. She trotted over to it, ran her hand along the sturdy mast of a perch. She stared hard at the pitch of the roofline and traced the path of an errant drop of red paint on the outer wall. Then she went to the hole. And she crawled in.

He leaned against the perch for a few minutes listening to the whip-or-will and the crickets in the Alabama heat. Then he crawled in behind her.