The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [136]
There was a silence and he waited, hardly daring to breathe, wanting to know what his mother would say, and wanting her never to answer.
“What about me?” he asked, startling himself. “What about what I want?”
“Paul?” His mother’s voice.
“Right here,” he said, picking up his guitar. “On the porch. Me and Rosemary.”
“Oh, good grief,” his father said. Seconds later, he came around to the steps. Since last night he’d showered and shaved and put on a clean suit. He was thin, and he looked tired. So did his mother, coming to stand beside him.
Paul stood and faced him. “I’m going to Juilliard, Dad. They called last week: I got in. And I’m going.”
He waited, then, for his father to start in as usual: how a musical career wasn’t reliable, not even a classical one. How Paul had so many options open to him; he could always play, and always take joy in playing, even if he made his living another way. He waited for his father to be firm and reasonable and resistant, so that Paul could give vent to his anger. He was tense, ready, but to his surprise his father only nodded.
“Good for you,” his father said, and then his face softened for a moment with pleasure, the frown of worry easing from his forehead. When he spoke his voice was quiet and sure. “Paul, if it’s what you want, then go. Go and work hard and be happy.”
Paul stood uneasily on the porch. All these years, each time he and his father talked, he’d felt he was running into a wall. And now the wall was mysteriously gone but he was still running, giddy and uncertain, in open space.
“Paul?” his father said. “I’m proud of you, son.”
Everyone was looking at him now, and he had tears in his eyes. He didn’t know what to say, so he started walking, at first just to get out of sight, so he wouldn’t embarrass himself, and then he was truly running, the guitar still in his hand.
“Paul!” his mother called after him, and when he turned, running backward for a few steps, he saw how pale she was, her arms folded tensely across her chest, her newly streaked hair lifting in the breeze. He thought of Bree, what his mother had said, how much they’d come to be like each other, his mother and his aunt, and he was afraid. He remembered his father in the foyer, his clothes filthy, dark stubble taking the rough shape of a beard, his hair wild. And now, this morning, clean and calm, but still changed. His father—impeccable, precise, sure of everything—had turned into someone else. Behind, half screened by the clematis, Rosemary stood listening, her arms folded, her hair, set free, falling over her shoulders now, and he imagined her in that house set into the hill, talking with his father, riding the bus with him for so many long hours, somehow a part of this change in his father, and again he was afraid of what was happening to them all.
So he ran.
It was a sunny day, already warm. Mr. Ferry, Mrs. Pool, waved from their porches. Paul lifted the guitar in salute and kept running. He was three blocks away from home, five, ten. Across the street, in front of one low bungalow, an empty car stood running. The owner had forgotten something probably, had run inside to grab a briefcase or a jacket. Paul paused. It was a tan Gremlin, the ugliest car in the universe, edged with rust. He crossed the street, opened the driver’s door, and slipped inside. No one shouted; no one came running from the house. He yanked the door shut and adjusted the seat, giving himself leg room. He put the guitar on the seat beside him. The car was an automatic, scattered with candy wrappers and empty cigarette packs. A total loser owned this car, he thought, one of those ladies who wore too much makeup and worked as a secretary somewhere dead and plastic spastic, like the dry cleaners, maybe, or the bank. He put the car in gear and backed up.
Still nothing: no shouts, no sirens. He geared into DRIVE and pulled away.
He hadn’t driven much, but it seemed to be a lot like sex: if you pretended