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

“How do you suggest I have that conversation? Call him up and say, ‘Hey man, let’s Zoom? You know how you think I look familiar? That’s because you slept with me back at the Curtis Institute. And guess what? I got pregnant with twins. Remember me now?’”

Dicey waited out her sarcasm, then said calmly, “I think you have to go see him in person. Take him for coffee. Someplace public, where he can’t kill you for keeping this from him for twenty years.”

Miriam gaped at her. “Are you serious?”

“You’re headed for San Francisco, right? Because that’s where they died?”

Miriam tipped her head back and forth. “More or less. It was near a beach south of the city.”

“So yes, in other words. You know you’ll never have another opportunity like this.”

Miriam focused on the roar of vehicles surrounding her, filled with moms and carpools and delivery guys. People with purpose. People with places to go.

“What if I screwed up his life too?” she said softly.

Dicey’s voice sounded slightly strained. “We screw up our own lives, Miriam. We don’t need any help.”

Then she doubled over with a gasp, her teeth gritted, her face pale, her breathing shallow and labored. “Oh, crap. Crap, crap, crap.”

“What?”

“Literally, crap. Bathroom. Need a bathroom. Now.”

Miriam crossed two lanes of traffic in order to make the next exit, eliciting a honk and the bird from the driver of an SUV going too fast. She careened into the parking lot of a Wendy’s. Dicey had the door open before the car came to a complete stop.

 25

MIRIAM GOT OUT OF the car. The sweetness of crabapple hung heavy on the warming air. She breathed deep, stretched, and settled into the moment. She’d forgotten how it felt to be idle. For so long, her life had been a hamster wheel, kids’ activities chasing church responsibilities in an ever-accelerating circle. Planning weddings, funerals, choir rehearsals—although, truth be told, she’d spent more time winging choir rehearsals than planning them.

She walked slowly along the sidewalk. It felt good to stretch her legs. To drink in the feel and smell of spring, the way it mixed with the aroma of fried food coming from Wendy’s. It was like … being alive.

Dicey wanted her to tell Gus. The idea was terrifying. What good would it do now? And how much harm?

And yet, to have this weight off her chest … it was what Teo had wanted from her. For her.

For twenty years, she’d picked at the jagged wound of her unfinished history with Gus von Rickenbach, her emotions numbing as it scabbed over but never healed. As a teenager and young adult, he’d had such a hold on her. He’d been like an addiction, his face behind her eyes every time she practiced, rendering her blind to all others.

If she hadn’t been so starry-eyed over Gus, maybe she would have realized Teo had been in love with her from the beginning.

Mom and Jo had seen it. Teo had been living with his uncle for years by then, his parents having returned to Argentina to care for their aging elders. She invited him to Detroit for Thanksgiving the year she was at Curtis. Mom and Dad raised their eyebrows, but Miriam insisted they were just friends.

“Don’t you see how he looks at you?” Mom asked the night before Thanksgiving, as she, Jo, and Miriam peeled potatoes.

“He looks at me like he’s paying attention to me. He looks at everyone like that. He looks at you like that. Because he’s a really good human being.”

Jo looked up in the act of mutilating a potato while attempting to cut out a bad spot. “I think you’re fooling yourself,” she said as a potato chunk flew across the room and Mom loudly protested the mess.

Thankfully, the men came in then, in pursuit of a snack, and Mom and Jo dropped the subject. But the whole rest of the weekend had been kind of awkward. And with Mom and Dad tiptoeing around each other, overly polite and falsely bright for Jo’s and Brad’s benefit, Miriam couldn’t help thinking about the guy who’d asked her to prom her senior year. She liked him as a person, but she’d been too nice to him. He’d been crushed when he realized she wasn’t interested in being his girlfriend.

She thought too highly of Teo to let that happen again.

So Miriam paid closer attention the next couple of months, and every once in a while, just often enough to make her nervous, she thought Mom and Jo might be right. The night before she left for Boston—the fateful trip where Gus had noticed her at last—Teo had walked her to her car after choir practice. “You’ve been working so hard,” he told her. “Go knock ’em dead. When you come back, I’ll take you out to celebrate. I …” He hesitated, then forged ahead. “I have something I’d like to talk to you about.”

It could have been anything—a recording project, a personnel problem he needed advice on—but something in the way he was fiddling with the loose string on his music bag signaled nerves. Miriam felt a hot flush—half thrill, half dread—which she resolutely shoved down. “Sure,” she said casually.

Two days later, Gus noticed her, and the heavens opened. When she came back to the church ensemble, everyone could tell. They were happy for her—even Teo tried to be. But their rapport was all off. They’d always been perfectly in sync, finding each other’s styles with ease, bouncing ideas off each other for how to highlight a verse or a nugget of text.

No one really enjoyed rehearsal that night. They all teased her for being on cloud nine. Except Teo. All his usual banter was absent.

She and Teo could talk about anything except Gus, it turned out. She’d never mentioned his name to Teo—not until after. And she never talked to Gus about Teo either. They represented conflicting worlds she couldn’t reconcile. And then Gus ripped her heart out, and Teo picked