Ava's rooftop felt like the secret pocket of the whole neighborhood. Planks and coils of cord lay in friendly chaos beside jars of paint and handfuls of odd buttons that Pa insisted on keeping even though he could not remember why each one had arrived. In the morning the roof wore the smell of rope and tea: Pa's teapot sent up a boiled-sweet steam scented with candied lemon rind that the Market Corner woman sold in tiny tins on Tuesdays. The scent had nothing to do with flying, and everything to do with home.
Ava moved among her tools with quick, sure hands. She looped and braided, snipped and spliced; when she worked the cords sang on her fingers like sleeping insects. Her fingers knew knots the way other children knew songs. "Round and under, then tuck the tail twice," Pa hummed, his voice making the kettle rattle. He tapped a stout spool with the tenderness of someone who had mended more than ropes.
On a bench near the chimney sat the best of her kites: a wide, friendly face painted on linen, cheeks dimpled with a smudge of blue paint and a crooked smile so earnest that sometimes Ava laughed at it before she even launched it. She called him Mr. Beak, because the kite's nose poked a little like a beak and because names made things braver. Today Mr. Beak had a new tail braided of three colors — sky, coal, and the odd mustard yellow that Pa swore matched nothing in particular.
Marmalade the cat slithered between Ava's ankles as if the yarn were a river and he were an eel. He loved the tail. He loved being where the tails went. He liked to sit on the low ridge and pretend he could fly by flicking his tail, which was an absurd sort of ambition for a cat. Marmalade bumped his head against Ava's wrist and mewed, which in rooftop language meant "hurry up."
Pa smiled and reached for a knot. "You braid that in the old way and it'll hold even if the wind decides to take it to the moon."
"I'll keep it from mooning," Ava said, and they both laughed. The joke wasn't about the moon at all; it was about doing things properly so that kites came back when they should, not so that hands held on in panic. Pa loved that detail more than any glory. He taught her how to coilingly cinch a bight, how to make a hitch that begged to be trusted, how to listen to the grain of the rope.
Below, the lane smelled of roasting chestnuts and frying dough; a vendor with a bell sold spiral buns studded with cloves and tiny curls of orange peel. The lanes and the roofs had their own sounds: the lanes kept the slow, domestic hum of morning — pots, soft argument about where to hang the laundry flags, the slap of a baker folding pastry — while the roofs kept the wind's impatience and the gulls' gossip. The two halves had belonged to different rituals for as long as anyone could remember, and Ava could feel that in the way people glanced up or down when they passed each other.