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

beneath them, to bring the sound out of her head, off the page, and into the open.

And then the superhighway made a left turn into a swamp. She could sense the way forward—almost hear it—but it was chaotic, jumbled. A characteristic interval here, a well-placed inversion there. But it wouldn’t come out of her head. She needed a piano.

Her hands were trembling, her blood blazing, and her heart overflowed. With love, with loss. With life. She felt Blaise’s presence, as if he stood just on the other side of a thin veil—and if she could only get the sun at the right angle, she’d be able to see right through it.

This was what it meant to be a mother: the sense that not even death could separate them. And for the first time, it occurred to her to wonder how Mom felt about the distance between them. Miriam must have hurt her a thousand times with the wall she’d put between them.

Much as she felt the bewildered pain of what Blaise had failed to communicate.

If there’d been anything to communicate.

Again, she was back to that. Miriam scoured her memory of her last conversation with Blaise—the phone call after he won the competition. If there were clues to his sexual orientation, they were buried deep. All she remembered was Dr. von Rickenbach this and Dr. von Rickenbach that. Thank God, Blaise had been too pumped up to notice the dead silence with which she’d reacted to hearing that name out of her son’s mouth.

He adored Gus. Had she been wrong all these years? What if she’d chosen differently?

“‘If’ again. You know better than that, Sassafras.”

Teo’s voice hit her like a wave: a freezing slap, running away to a limitless ocean. How she wished she could talk through all of this with him. She missed having someone in her corner, someone she could count on to care, to take her side, even if that sometimes meant telling her she was wrong.

She’d just made music out of her own head, built on the bones of Blaise’s inspiration. How wonderful—and horrible, and beautiful, and sad. And Teo wasn’t here to share it. Every good thing that had happened in her life for the past twenty years, he’d been the first to know. The only time they’d been apart was when he’d taken the kids to Argentina to meet his family. She slept badly the whole time they were gone. When she met them outside Security at the airport, Teo grabbed her around the waist and kissed her in front of God and everyone, and she’d felt complete again. And that night, she’d slept like a log.

Who could she share this moment with now? Who in her life would understand? Gus, perhaps. But given their history, entertaining the thought felt like the worst sort of betrayal.

“Miriam?” A warm hand brushed her forearm. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.” Carefully, she hooked the pen over the page and leaned back against the seat, not even noticing the uncomfortable headrest. She was tired. So tired. And something else she hadn’t felt since before Teo and the kids got on the plane to go to California.

Starving.

That felt like a betrayal too.

 18

Two years earlier

Atlanta, Georgia

August von Rickenbach

MIRIAM’S FINGER HOVERED OVER the “Enter” key. Every time she typed his name into the search bar, guilt grew another root in her soul. Yet Gus was an itch she couldn’t stop scratching. It was a slow torment, seeing his list of accomplishments grow, but as long as his star kept rising—as long as he continued to look happy and healthy—she could reassure herself that she’d made the right choice all those years ago.

She hit the key and watched the circle on the screen spin. In the living room, Blaise banged out a Mozart concerto while Teo strummed his guitar out on the deck. Momentarily, Talia joined from her bedroom, offering up Bach to the din.

Miriam had given up everything for this life. The hours she’d spent at the piano instead of making friends, learning wedding music to pay for her lessons. Running scales and arpeggios while the rest of her family yelled insults and encouragement at the helmeted guys crashing into each other on the TV in the basement. It had given her the skills set to be very good at her parish work, but on nights like this, the distance between what was and what could have been loomed large.

Her parents had tried to get her to focus on something other than music—something that would offer a way out, a ticket to more than a shabby house and a daily struggle for solvency in the Detroit suburbs. They’d never understood: music was her out.

At least, it was supposed to be. The irony was not lost on Miriam, because both her siblings had made it out. These days, Jo walked around her corner office in Manhattan wearing designer suits and merging international deals. And Brad, with his liposuctions and face-lifts, made more money than God.

Meanwhile, here she sat, in another cramped bungalow in another fading neighborhood, scrunched between her bed and the corner of the room in the six square feet allotted for an “office,” while beyond the crooked door frame, the cello, guitar, and piano tried to drown each other out.

Miriam mashed her hands against her ears. One moment, for the love of all things holy. Was one moment of quiet so much to ask?

The web results finally loaded.

It was always tricky finding the information she wanted. She was drawn to news of Gus’s accomplishments like a moth to a flame. But what she needed to know required deeper searching. She couldn’t just skim headlines; she had to infer the connections from color details included in unrelated articles.

The door closed, muffling the noise of her children’s practicing. “Hey, Beautiful,” Teo said. He crossed the tiny room in three steps to engulf her from behind, his lips on her jaw, desire in the feel of his hands running over her breasts.

Sex was the last thing