In 1983, eleven-year-old Jennifer "Jay" Aubuchon is sent to live with her grandmother after her drug addicted mother is sent to rehab. In 2002, Jay, now working as a firefighter, is injured on the job and moves from Arizona to Missouri to help her sister-in-law Lena take care of her fourteen-year-old autistic nephew, Brandon.
Cemetery Bird contains examples of:
- 20 Minutes into the Past: The "present day" chapters are set in the early 2000s, while the flashback chapters are mostly set in The '80s and The '90s.
- Auto Erotica: Shortly after Jay starts working as a firefighter, she and her coworkers go on a day trip to Roosevelt Lake. On the way back, Peters and Robin have drunken sex in the backseat while Jay tries to ignore the noises and the smell.
- Character Tics: Brandon rocks and flicks his fingers against his cheek.
- Childhood Brain Damage: Brandon's classmate Boots was shoved down the stairs by his father when he was six. His heart stopped for five minutes, during which he had a Near-Death Experience in which Jesus and the angels brought him back to life. Ever since then, he's suffered from severe seizures, for which he is heavily medicated.
- A Dog Named "Dog": Jay's grandma has a cat named Kitty.
- How Dad Met Mom: While Jay's dad Sam and her brother Kenny are driving her from Oklahoma back to Grandma's house in Illinois, Jay pretends to be asleep in the back seat while Sam tells Kenny how he met their mom, Emily. She was in the Young Adult Conservation Corps, and they were both working on a government project in Arizona. One night Sam and his friends got together with Emily and some other girls, and Emily got blackout drunk. Sam's roommate Duane wanted to take her back to their motel room, but Sam, realizing that she was a lot younger than her stated age of 21 and possibly didn't know what Duane's intentions were, talked Duane into leaving her alone, and instead cleaned up her vomit and let her sleep in his bed.
- Missing Mom: Jay's mother runs away from rehab. Jay never hears from her again, and never finds out what happened to her.
- Never Learned to Read: Boots didn't have time to learn to read before his injury, and was unable to learn afterwards, aside from a few words.
- Only Friend: Brandon is this to Boots, who is so angry and unpleasant that most of the other special ed kids won't go near him. Jay isn't entirely comfortable with their friendship, since Brandon doesn't understand the seriousness of Boots' problems and thinks his convulsions and religious rants are funny, but he's still the only person who genuinely enjoys his company. The boys often visit each other's houses and go to the movies together.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: Boots' real name is Latigo, but hardly anyone uses it.
- The Runaway: Jay runs away from her grandmother's house to hitchhike to San Carlos Reservation, where her Apache mother grew up. She gets as far as Oklahoma before a woman calls the police and gets her sent back.
