My name's Carol Whitfield, and I've been the super for a building on Maple Terrace, in Rochester, New York, for twenty-three years. In this job, you think you've seen everything — the third-floor pipe that bursts every spring, couples fighting through the walls, Mrs. Petrosky's cat getting its head stuck in the trash chute twice a month. But the story of Denise Okafor's parrot, second floor, courtyard side, is one I still tell new tenants when they move in.
Denise lived alone with Baxter, an African grey she'd taken in after her divorce, five years back. She worked night shifts as a nurse at Strong Memorial, so the bird spent long stretches by himself in the apartment, with nothing but a smart speaker on the kitchen counter for company. A gift from her sister, meant to "help her keep track of grocery lists" — the irony of that would come out later.
I handle the mail and packages for the building, so I noticed something was off pretty quick. Denise usually got a package or two a week, mostly pharmacy stuff or paperbacks. Then, starting one Tuesday in March, deliveries started piling up outside her door like never before. One day it was a case of twenty rolls of paper towels. The next, three watermelons — in the dead of winter, which struck me as odd. Then a kite. A single light bulb, rattling around in a box way too big for it. Raisins by the pound, over and over.
I brought it up one morning, handing her a package that smelled like cheddar right through the cardboard.
"You order some cheese, Ms. Okafor?"
She checked the label, confused. "I didn't order anything."
"This is the third weird thing you've gotten this week."
She shrugged it off, figured it was a mix-up, maybe a neighbor with the wrong address. But the packages kept coming, always under her name, always charged to her card — she told me all this later, one evening when I was doing my rounds with the trash cans and she was out front having a cigarette, still in her scrubs.
"I went through my order history, Carol. Half this stuff I never typed in. A neck pillow. A pint of coffee ice cream. Three heads of broccoli."
"You think somebody hacked your account?"
"That's what I figured at first. I even changed my password twice."
It was a Friday night, coming home early because a shift got canceled, that she finally understood. She told me about it the next day, still rattled, over coffee in my little office by the mailboxes.
She opened the door and heard the speaker's voice coming from the kitchen, that flat, slightly robotic tone we all know.
"I've added cantaloupe to your list."
And there was Baxter, perched on the back of a kitchen chair, repeating it back with an inflection that sounded almost exactly like her own voice: "Alexa, add cantaloupe to the list."
Denise stood frozen in the doorway, purse still on her shoulder. The bird tried again, a different line this time, asking for blueberries to be added. The speaker gave its little confirmation chime. Baxter bobbed his head to one side, pleased with himself, like he knew exactly what he'd just pulled off.
She told me it took her almost a full minute to react, it was so ridiculous seeing it happen live. Then she started laughing right there in the hallway, alone, the nervous kind of laugh you get when you realize you'd been half-convinced you were losing your mind for nothing.
What stuck with me, in her telling, was one detail she repeated twice: Baxter wasn't just mimicking random noise. He'd learned which phrases actually worked, which ones got a response out of the speaker, and he'd trot them out whenever he was bored — usually around five o'clock, right when Denise would normally get home from the store and hand him a slice of apple.
She ended up muting the speaker's mic every morning before her shift, and spent an entire evening going through two months of orders with an Amazon customer service rep on the phone, sitting in my mailroom because the signal was better down there than up on two. They refunded her a hundred and ninety dollars in orders she'd never wanted — neck pillow included, which she eventually gave to the baker's kid across the street.
Since then, the speaker stays unplugged all day. Baxter's found something new to keep himself entertained: he does a dead-on impression of the buzzer, and a couple times a week I trek up there for nothing because Denise thinks someone's at the door. We still laugh about it, the two of us, standing by the entrance — her with her cigarette, me with my key ring that feels like it weighs ten pounds by the end of the day.
