The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [177]
“I’m leaving,” he said.
A silence. Then she called back. “You’ll be back tomorrow night?”
“Your concert’s at six, right?”
“Right.” She opened the bathroom door and stood, wrapped in a plush white towel, rubbing lotion into her face.
“Okay, then,” he said, and kissed her, taking in her scent, the smoothness of her skin. “I love you,” he said, as he stepped back.
She looked at him for a moment. “I know,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I know. He brooded on her words all the way to Lexington. The drive took two hours: across the Ohio River, through the dense traffic near the airport, and finally into the beautiful rolling hills. Then he was traveling through the quiet downtown streets, past empty buildings, remembering how it had been when Main Street still was the center of life, the place where people went to shop and eat and mingle. He remembered going into the drugstore, sitting at the ice cream fountain in the back. Scoops of chocolate in a metal cup frosted with ice, the whir of the blender; mingled scents of grilled meat and antiseptic. His parents had met downtown. His mother had ridden on an escalator and risen above the crowd like the sun, and his father had followed her.
He drove past the new bank building and the old courthouse, the empty place where the theater once stood. A thin woman was walking down the sidewalk, her head bent, her arms folded, her dark hair moving in the wind. For the first time in years Paul thought of Lauren Lobeglio, the silent determined way she had walked across the empty garage to him week after week. He had reached for her, again and then again; he had woken in the middle of so many dark nights, fearing with Lauren all he now so desired with Michelle: marriage, children, an interweaving of lives.
He drove, humming his newest song to himself. “A Tree in the Heart” it was called—maybe he would play this one tonight, at Lynagh’s pub. Michelle would be shocked by that, but Paul didn’t care. Lately, since his father died, he had been playing more at informal venues as well as concert halls: he’d pick up a guitar and play in bars or restaurants, classical pieces but also more popular works that he had always, in the past, disdained. He couldn’t explain his change of heart, but it had something to do with the intimacy in those places, the connection he felt to the audience, close enough to reach out and touch. Michelle didn’t approve; she believed it was a consequence of grief, and she wanted him to get over it. But Paul couldn’t give it up. All the years of his adolescence, he had played out of anger and longing for connection, as if through music he could bring some order, some invisible beauty, into his family. Now his father was gone, and there was no one to play against. So he had this new freedom.
He drove to the old neighborhood, past the stately houses and deep front yards, the sidewalks and eternal quiet. The front door of his mother’s house was closed. He turned off the engine and sat for a moment, listening to the birds and the distant sound of lawn mowers.
A tree in the heart. His father had been dead for a year and his mother was marrying Frederic and moving to France for a while, and he was here not as a child or as a visitor but as caretaker of the past. His to choose, what to keep and what to discard. He’d tried to talk with Michelle about this, his deep sense of responsibility, how what he kept from this house of his childhood would become, in turn, what he passed down to his own children someday—all they would ever know, in a tangible way, of what had shaped him. He’d been thinking of his father, whose past was still a mystery, but Michelle misunderstood; she stiffened at this casual mention of children. That’s not what I meant,