Miss Alberta "Birdie" Gafferty is Sophie's elderly neighbor across the hall at Brown Betty — a sweet, dirty-minded former burlesque dancer with a will of iron and absolutely zero shame.
Small and thin-armed with carefully curled hair, aged fingers laced with pale veins, and milky blue, rheumy eyes that peer suspiciously through the crack of her door before she opens it, Birdie looks every bit the fragile old woman she categorically refuses to be.
She putters around her dimly lit apartment in a pink flowered housecoat, brewing tea on an avocado-green stove and serving it in chipped porcelain cups — one of which reads "Hot Pussy" on the bottom, reserved specifically for unsuspecting guests.
Her apartment smells of old textbooks and stale lavender, the sagging orange-flowered sofa groans under the slightest weight, and her cat Ginsberg escapes every chance he gets. Birdie danced burlesque in the early '60s and will happily cup her bosom and give you a shimmy to prove it, informing you that "these old girls" are what first lured in her dear old Darren.
She flirts shamelessly with every man Sophie brings within range — fluttering her eyelashes at Mac and asking about his handcuffs, cackling at her own innuendo, and calling him "sweet boy" until Sophie wants to throttle them both. But beneath the saucy winks and the cackles lives the fiercest kind of tenderness. She grips Sophie's hand with those thin, aged fingers and sends her off to rest.
She demands tea visits with imperious authority because loneliness hides behind the laughter. She positions guests on the loveseat so she can properly interrogate them from her wingback chair.
And she is the one person in Sophie's life who represents something purely, stubbornly human — no magic, no Mythicals, just a naughty old lady with a brandy habit, a tortoiseshell cat, and enough warmth to make a run-down apartment building feel like home.
