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

on her mind. She had to force herself not to shove him away; his advances felt like an onslaught. “The kids,” she protested, trying to reach the mouse to close the browser.

“They’re occupied.” Teo tipped her head back, kissing her. She couldn’t see the screen.

“Worship commission.”

“Doesn’t start for half an hour. C’mon, we’ve got time. How often does it all work out like this?” He reached the tender spot at the juncture of her neck and shoulder, the one that reduced her to jelly.

Except tonight she was so tense, she just giggled. She hunched her shoulders, and he retreated.

“Well, it was worth a try,” he said, smiling.

Miriam reached for the mouse then, but it was too late. Teo braced one hand on the back of the chair and the other on the desk, regarding the face on the screen. He sighed. “Again, Mira?”

Miriam squeezed her hands between her knees, staring at her feet. “He canceled a tour. Because his mother is sick.” She looked up at her husband. “Breast cancer. It’s got a hereditary link.”

Teo scratched his head and sat on the edge of the bed, his jaw working. It hurt him, the way she kept picking at this part of her past. They’d come closer to fighting over this than anything else. He looked so vulnerable.

“Mira …” He swallowed a few times. “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe there’s a reason you feel so compelled to follow Gus’s life?”

She swiveled toward him. “What do you mean?”

“This summer, watching the kids with their grandparents and their aunts and uncles and great-aunts and -uncles … all their cousins … it was amazing. They understand themselves so much better now.”

“What are you saying?”

“I think it’s time.”

“No.”

“Don’t you think he deserves—”

“Absolutely not.”

Teo fixed her with a piercing gaze. “Don’t you think they deserve to know?”

Miriam bowed her head, clamping her fingers behind her head. “I’m scared, Teo. What if it changes everything?”

He leaned forward, his big brown hands warm on hers as he rested his forehead on the crown of her head. “I know. It scares me too.”

They stayed there for what felt like a long time, the cacophony of cello and piano fading to a distant, indistinct buzz. It felt safe here. If only they could stay in this cocoon forever.

At last, Teo pulled away. “I have to get over to church.” He kissed her temple as he left.

Miriam looked back at the screen, but she no longer felt any desire to know the latest news on Gus von Rickenbach. She hated seeing that look on Teo’s face. It made her insides feel like scrambled eggs. Not just because she knew she’d hurt him.

But because she knew he wasn’t wrong.

 19

Sunday, May 1

Benedictine Monastery

St. Louis, Missouri

AT FOUR AM, MIRIAM woke abruptly to an onslaught of memories:

Teo, looking deeply into her eyes, asking, “Don’t you think they deserve to know?”

“What the hell?” Talia’s voice, shaking with fury in response to a Facebook message Miriam never sent.

And a photo of teenage boys communicating heart-to-heart.

Miriam sat up and leaned her head against the wall. The monastery lay quiet, the dim glow from the street light outside her window making a shadowy outline of the crucifix on the wall.

For years, she’d followed the debates over marriage equality, caught between beliefs she’d accepted without question her entire life and the real suffering of good, faithful men she encountered through her ministerial work. Eventually, she and Teo decided it was up to God to sort it out, anyway, so they opted to treat everyone with dignity and leave the rest alone.

The air in her room smelled vaguely antiseptic. On the other side of the wall, a bed creaked as its occupant shifted. Miriam swung her legs over the side of her twin mattress. She rubbed her feet against the no-frills industrial carpet. Her brain felt fuzzy with exhaustion, but staying in bed was pointless with this vise clamped around her heart. She might as well quit pretending she was going to go back to sleep and embark on the soul searching a place like this invited.

Because if Blaise really had been gay—if he’d lived, if he’d come out—she would have been forced out of her hidey-hole in the neutral zone. She would have had to confront the difficult questions and find a way to reconcile what resisted reconciliation.

She would have had to accept the fact that some people would have looked at her beautiful son as a man in possession of a one-way ticket to hell.

What would people back home say?

Miriam growled. “That is the wrong thing to be worrying about,” she said aloud.

She stood, stretching her neck as she pulled out her clothes to get dressed. The best place to look for the answers she sought was in Blaise’s music.

The hallways were dark and chilly, but with the help of the light on her phone, she found her way to the chapel, a round brick room with a narrow strip of stained glass windows ringing the top. An electric keyboard sat tucked against the organ console; a single sanctuary lamp burned over the tabernacle. She genuflected before it, her palms pressed to the cold tile as she tried and failed to formulate something better than “Help … please?”

But God felt as distant now as he had been the entire past year. He was there, somewhere, and she knew only her own emotional constipation prevented her from finding Him. What she didn’t know was how to fix it.

She flipped on the lamp perched on top of the keyboard. She laid out the notes she’d scribbled yesterday in the car and smoothed open Blaise’s notebook, then set to work transcribing.

Her brain warmed to the intellectual challenge. She just wished she could write something that sounded more innovative than an eighties pop song. Subdominant, secondary dominant, augmented seventh, half-diminished. Jazz chord, lowered seventh—no matter what she did, it all sounded very … instinctive.

She wasn’t writing a sonata, she was writing church music.

Miriam threw the pencil on the music stand