I read it three times. The words didn’t change. I set the birdhouse down and just stayed there on the ground until the sun came over the fence. A cardinal landed on the empty branch and looked at me like it was waiting for something.

I went inside and washed my hands. The number was still in my phone. I sat at the kitchen table with the birdhouse in front of me and pressed call.

It rang six times. He picked up on the seventh.

“Mom?” he said. His voice sounded lower than I remembered.

I told him I had the birdhouse in front of me. Asked how long he’d been the one hanging them.

“Since the second year,” he said. “I drove over at night the first time. Didn’t know what else to do.”

We sat quiet on the line for a minute. I could hear a dog barking on his end.

“I didn’t know how to come to the funeral,” he said. “Then the birdhouses felt easier than a phone call.”

I asked if he still had Harold’s tools.

“Most of them,” he said. “I kept the dovetail saw.”

He said he might drive out in July if work slowed down. I told him the guest room was still the same. He said he’d let me know.

We hung up after that. I put the birdhouse on the table where I eat breakfast. The notch faces out so I see it every morning.

I haven’t called again yet. July is still a couple months away. Some mornings I think about sanding the back smooth so the words don’t show. Other mornings I touch the notch with my thumb and wonder what Harold would have said if he saw it.

The birds found the empty branch by the second day. They keep checking it like they expect something new to appear.

I don’t know why those birds keep coming back to check that branch every morning. Maybe they remember the houses from before. Anyway I sat at that kitchen table with the birdhouse for a good hour after we hung up. The morning light hit the notch just right and made the letters stand out more than they had in the grass. I ran my thumb over each one slow. The wood still had that faint cedar smell to it, like it had been cut not too long ago. The grain felt a little rough right under the words where the knife must have caught once or twice.

Harold used to say the same thing every time he finished one. “There now, that’s got my mark on it.” Michael must have heard that a hundred times when he was helping out in the shop. I thought about what Michael said on the phone. “I kept the dovetail saw.” Just like that. I could picture him in his own place, wherever that is, holding that saw and thinking about his dad.