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By Root 341 0

good singer, his range and control bespeaking years of training, not that I would know, and his guitar competent and understated in a way that showed he was an experienced performer, not competing with himself. He was careful not to raise his voice, or to let it raise itself a little on its own, and he had a delicate lilt, his phrasing wavering between speech and song, mundanity and sorrow, the melody reasserting itself only to dissolve. The lyrics were composed almost entirely of vowels and it took me a while to realize the song was Portuguese, not Spanish; I experienced the slow shading of one language into another, a powerful effect only my ignorance of both enabled. As I listened the day rewound, but not just my day: the drive, the bar, the roof of my apartment, seeing myself on the roof from a plane, boarding that plane in New York, leaving Providence, arriving in Providence when I was eighteen, etc., all the way back to Bright Circle Montessori, my dad gentle but insistent that I had to leave the car. Then Teresa was playing with my hair, as she’d been playing with Arturo’s, and I looked at her and felt an agitation I could not name. I stood quickly but quietly and left the group, walking farther away from the house and party and into the dark until I reached a wooden fence, the end of the property and the beginning of a downward slope, a few lights far below.

I no longer felt much of anything as I smoked and looked back toward the group and saw that someone, probably Teresa, was approaching, the ember of her cigarette describing little circles as she walked, the ice audible in her glass as she drew nearer, and I realized with some anxiety that she would expect me to be upset, very moved, that I needed to be so in order to justify my abrupt departure from the others. I turned back toward the fence, licked the tips of my fingers, and rubbed the spit under my eyes to make it look like I’d been crying, repeating this until I felt there would be enough moisture to catch a little light or at least make my face damp to the touch. It was Teresa, humming the song as she approached. When she reached me she asked gently if I were O.K., what was bothering me. Fine, nothing, I said, but in a way I hoped confirmed incommunicable depths had opened up inside me. We stood side by side looking down the slope and because I felt she was waiting for me to say something, I said: This is a difficult time for me. It was a stupid thing to say, but it was the only sentence I could form sufficiently freighted with mystery. Why, she asked, which surprised me, and I tried to calibrate my silence to convey less that I wasn’t comfortable telling her than that the circumstance wasn’t tellable, save maybe by guitar, certainly exceeding my Spanish, if not language in general. Tell me, she said and started to do the thing with my hair again and I thought she could see the wetness on my cheeks and I said, I was shocked to hear myself say: My mother died.

Poor boy, poor boy, Teresa said, embracing me, and I let my head rest on her shoulder, careful to touch her skin where my face was wet; her skin was warm, almost hot. At first I felt something like accomplishment at my performance and excitement at the contact with her body but this quickly gave way to a sinking feeling as I began to imagine my mom, how she would feel if she knew what I had done, my self-disgust giving way in turn to the fear that somehow this lie would have material effects, would kill her, or at least that, when something did in fact happen to my mother, as happen it must, I would always feel and be at least in part responsible, that whatever she suffered would be traceable in some important sense to this exact moment when I traded her life for the sympathy of an attractive stranger. I began to cry, both arms around Teresa now, real tears falling down her back as she hummed to comfort me, maybe believing me only then. When my tears subsided, we both sat down and looked out over the slope in silence. She lit a cigarette and passed it to me and began to speak.

She described the death