A Song for the Road by Kathleen Basi (classic literature books txt) 📕

rather than saw Dicey’s disapproval. “I mean, we talk occasionally. And Mom came and stayed with me a while after … last year.”

Dicey remained silent. Miriam squirmed. “Teo always said my parents weren’t so different from his. They just wanted the best for us. But Mom is hard to please. She’s like a whirlwind. She never wears down. She comes in with a long list of things to do, and all the while she’s crossing things off it and coming up with new ones.”

“Use the left two lanes to take the Interstate 55 south Interstate 70 exit toward St. Louis,” Siri interrupted.

Miriam flipped her turn signal on. “They’re not bad people,” she added quickly. “We’re just different, that’s all. The things I thought were important, my parents never did. When I was little, we’d go to all Jo’s basketball games. Even the away games. But when I had my last middle school choir concert, somebody gave them Pistons tickets. So they went to the game instead. I know it sounds petty, but we only had two performances a year, you know?”

“That is pretty sucky.”

“Yeah.” Come to think of it, even after her parents’ relationship soured, they still went to sporting events together. That, and church activities.

“Did you ever say anything?” Dicey asked.

Miriam shrugged. “I did what every middle schooler does when their parents hurt their feelings. I was a butthead.”

Dicey smiled, but two miles of flat fields, dotted with oil wells turning lazily, passed by before she spoke again. “My mom’s a rock star,” she said. “I always knew that, but I wonder if I appreciated it. I remember this one day—it had been rough for a while, and when we got past it, Mom let me skip school to celebrate. She never let me skip school. She said I missed too much as it was, ’cause I was always sick. I got every virus that hit a classroom.”

Miriam glanced sharply at her, thinking of the cough, but Dicey carried on.

“Anyway, we went down to the waterfront to celebrate. Did all the tourist things. Rode the street cars. Drove down Lombard Street.” She laughed. “She even let me have ice cream at Ghirardelli’s—for lunch. You have no idea how big a deal that was. She always gave me the healthiest, most tasteless lunches you can imagine.”

“Is that why you put salt on everything now?” Miriam couldn’t resist the little dig.

“Ha ha. Anyway, family is a pain, but they’re also, like … everything. I just hate to see you with no one at all.”

Miriam braced, expecting the pit to appear in front of her, but the siren call of despair sounded muffled. It took a moment to think why that might be. She squeezed Dicey’s hand. “I’m not alone, am I?”

Dicey smiled and squeezed back. “So tell me about your siblings.”

“Brad’s a plastic surgeon in California and Jo has a corner office in Manhattan. That’s what my parents wanted for us. It’s what they worked for all those years on an assembly line. They hated that Teo and I lived this life where we were tied to the church community at holidays and not making a whole lot of money.”

“You said she came to stay after …?”

“After the funeral.” She made herself say it. “She decided I needed distraction, so she made a to-do list for me. She’s the one who called Ella Evil. Thought it would help me to talk it out.”

“That sucks,” Dicey said again. She turned her phone end over end. “Grief must be hard enough without a spotlight on you.”

Grief. Miriam supposed what she’d been suffering through for the past year was grief. Mostly she’d felt buffeted: by regret, self-recrimination, unwanted notoriety, and by the echoes of her husband and daughter—though not her son. Never her son. That was a pain all its own.

If Mom hadn’t driven her so hard, would she have allowed herself to dip into the well of anguish and deal with it properly? Instead, she’d buried it all, distracting herself with tributes and busy work until she’d almost convinced herself Mom was right, that this whole grief thing could be contained and controlled.

She knew better now. Grief was messy. It didn’t make sense.

Beside her, Dicey was humming. Miriam would have loved to have that silky, dusky voice in her choir. But once again, the melody seemed familiar, and yet Miriam couldn’t place it. What was up with her inner ear?

Then, just like that, it clicked. “How do you know that tune?”

The humming stopped. “Huh?”

“The one you were just humming. My son wrote it. How do you know it?”

Dicey hesitated, frowning. “It’s that thing you played back in West Virginia.”

Miriam opened her mouth to argue and then closed it again as she heard it. Of course. That was why she couldn’t put a name to her ghost melody. It didn’t have one.

But it wasn’t quite right, somehow. “Sing it again,” she said.

Dicey looked a little self-conscious, but she complied. There. That’s where she’d gone wrong: the third note was a step lower than what Blaise had written. A subtle difference, but—

Without warning, the whole next strain opened up in Miriam’s head. It was like merging onto a freeway—melody, chords, registration, all charging in the same direction.

She pulled off on the shoulder and punched the hazards. Blaise’s notebook was in her suitcase, in the trunk, but she couldn’t take the time to get it. She could sense the freight train of inspiration rushing by. “Paper,” she said. “Quick. Paper and a pencil.”

Dicey looked at her like she’d suddenly sprouted a third eye. “I don’t have any paper.”

Miriam made a disgusted sound as she grabbed a pen and the hotel receipt from Cincinnati. She smoothed it over the steering wheel, slung ten lines across the back, and started scribbling.

“Um, Miriam?”

“Shush.” She ran out of room on the first set of lines. Had to draw another one. It angled down the page like a melting ice cream cone. A third set. Her fingers itched to feel keys