The Language of Sparrows by Rachel Phifer

doesn’t it?”
    He shot her a sardonic smile. “I wouldn’t want him to ruin your day. He can be tough to deal with.”
    “But you care enough to buy his groceries?” And pay his property taxes? But she wasn’t about to admit to snooping.
    He shifted some bags back to his other hand, inspecting her for a moment. “Sure, he’s my father.” He stared off at the dim November sky. “It’s complicated. It’s just better if I do it.”
    Complicated? Luca Prodan was elderly; maybe he needed the help. But what had caused the rift between the two men? The gentleman she’d spent the afternoon with was pleasant and courteous, and she couldn’t imagine his offending anyone. Well, their family complications weren’t her business.
    “Look,” he said. “I don’t own my old man. If you want to visit him, you’re more than welcome. Just take care.”
    “Okay, I will,” she said. “Have a good afternoon, Nick.”
    He still stood in the yard looking after her when she turned the street corner.

Chapter Twelve
    Sierra didn’t go straight home after school. It’s only a walk, she told herself. She needed to see the green lawns and oak trees. That was all. She wouldn’t go to his house. But somehow, she found herself on the corner, a few houses away.
    Mr. Prodan stood on his porch, sweeping the dead leaves. The heaviness drained from her. It wasn’t a walk she needed after all. Not lawns and trees. She needed him.
    He stopped sweeping and looked straight at her. How could people tell her she couldn’t talk to him? They didn’t know him like she did.
    She started walking again, her feet as unsure as the first day she’d met him. She walked into his yard, but he didn’t move. He stayed on the porch.
    “Hi, Mr. Prodan,” she said softly.
    “Your mother does not know you are here?”
    She shook her head.
    He nodded at her, but then he looked off. “Because of your visits, the police came to my house. They asked me questions. They accused me of things I did not do.”
    She sucked in a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
    “ You do not need to be sorry!” His voice rose suddenly, and a boy riding his scooter slowed to look. “Do not be sorry, Sierra, for what you have no need to be sorry for. But you cannot know what it is like to be questioned by the police. For me! For a man like me!”
    He leaned the broom against the house and shuffled to the door. “Go, Sierra. You must go. Do not come here again.”
    He waved her away, as if he could make her disappear with a flick of his hand, and then he went inside, closing the door behind him.
    Sierra began walking back to the bayou, her steps quick now. Mr. Prodan didn’t want to see her. She’d brought him only pain. Head down, she quickened her steps until she was practically running.
     
    Sierra pulled her headphones from her drawer at home. She sat on her bed with her laptop and, within minutes, found the site she needed on the library page. It was exactly what she wanted. The tutorial said it was best to take it one lesson at a time, but Sierra couldn’t help herself. She gulped a week’s worth of lessons in one evening.
    Her heart sped up when Mom peeked in and gave a worried glance toward the computer, but then she left. It was midnight when Sierra finally put the headphones away. In her sleep, Romanian phrases murmured through her dreams, along with the spiraling script she was only just learning. When she woke, a Romanian greeting hovered on her tongue.
    At school, she doodled in Biology as the teacher went over the human genome, and she’d soon filled a page with bits of the Romanian alphabet. It wasn’t so different from English. Only a few letters came with added loops and tails. But she wrote some sideways, some right side up, some in boxes, all in her heaviest, neatest handwriting, and she liked the look of the page.
    As they crowded out the door after class, Carlos lifted the notebook from her hands. “Is that some kind of