It started, like most of my worst ideas, with my neighbor Dave standing in my driveway holding a cardboard box that was making noise.
“Before you say anything,” Dave said, “she’s very quiet during the day.”
The box was not being quiet at that exact moment. The box was doing something between a cluck and a shriek that I felt, deep in my bones, was going to become a problem. I asked Dave what, specifically, was in the box, even though some primal part of me already knew and was already composing the speech I would give at our HOA hearing, months in the future, that I did not yet know was coming.
“Her name is Henrietta,” Dave said, like that settled anything. “She lays eggs, Sam. Real eggs. Every single day. Do you know what a fresh egg tastes like versus a store one? It’s a different food group.”
I want to be clear that our HOA, the one governing our very tidy, very beige neighborhood, has a rule against livestock so specific it names chickens by species, which tells you everything you need to know about the last person who tried this. But Dave had a way of talking that made terrible ideas sound like community building, and I had, at that point, had two beers and a mildly boring week, which is exactly the weather system that produces bad decisions in a grown man.
“She can’t live at my place,” Dave said. “Karen’s allergic.” I did not ask how a person becomes allergic to a chicken specifically, as opposed to feathers or dander generally, because I sensed this was a story with more detail than I currently had the energy for. “But your garage,” he continued, “is basically empty. You keep, what, a bike in there? One bike?”
I did, in fact, keep one bike in there. This was an accurate and slightly insulting assessment of my garage’s contents.
We set Henrietta up in the corner, in a converted dog crate lined with an old beach towel that Anna is, to this day, unaware is gone, and for the first two days, it actually worked. She was quiet in the mornings, mysteriously docile, and produced, as promised, one genuinely excellent egg, which I ate in secret, standing over the sink, like a man committing a small crime, which I suppose I was.
The trouble was not the chicken. The trouble was that a chicken, it turns out, makes a sound at exactly 6 AM that no amount of garage insulation can fully contain, a sound that traveled, apparently, directly into our bedroom window, where Anna sat bolt upright at dawn on day three and said, with the calm, terrifying clarity of someone who already knows the answer to the question they’re about to ask, “Sam. Why did I just hear a rooster.”
“She’s not a rooster,” I said, which was true, and also not remotely the point.
“Why did I hear a chicken, then,” Anna said, “from our garage, where we keep one bike.”
I told her the whole story. Dave, the box, Karen’s mysterious allergy, the beach towel now doing government work as chicken bedding. Anna listened to all of it with the expression of a woman recalculating exactly what she had signed up for when she married me, and then she said the sentence that would define the next several weeks of my life.
“If the HOA finds that chicken, Sam, you are handling it. Alone.”
I did not yet know how right she was about to be, or how quickly, or how directly it would involve a woman named Deborah from the HOA board, a clipboard, and an inspection I had, somehow, completely forgotten was scheduled for that exact Saturday.
Chapter 2 coming soon.
