A Song for the Road

by Kathleen Basi

  A Song for the Road

  ♦ A NOVEL ♦

  KATHLEEN BASI

  To my husband Christian, who has walked every step of this journey with me, and who has helped me understand the beauty and complexity of love.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AUTHORS ARE OFTEN TOLD “write what you know,” but the reality is that if we didn’t step outside our normal lanes, we could only write about ourselves. So this page is for publicly acknowledging those who helped me reach this long-dreamed-of milestone. I couldn’t have done it without you!

  First shout-out goes to my husband and kids, who have experienced every up and down of this long journey with me.

  To Dolores Caron, Emily Brett, and Dr. Melissa Kouba—my thanks for answering medical questions. Jennifer Sutton, you are my long-suffering hero. Thanks for endless Messenger chats about ICU procedures and for reading that critical medical scene again … and again … and again!

  To the Our Lady of Lourdes contemporary group and the St. Thomas More Newman Center 11:00 choir: you taught me what a church “choir” can be. Also to my friends of the Liturgical Composers Forum, who expanded that lesson to the national level.

  To Laura St. Clair: your willingness to share the experience of widowhood helped me enter Miriam’s world.

  My thanks to my Women Fiction Writers Association writing partners—Janet Rundquist, Cerrissa Kim, and Chris Adler; and especially to my top-notch local critique partners—Brian Katcher, Heidi Stallman, Kelsey Simon, Ida Fogle, and Amy Whitley. I thank God for you every day. Special shout-out to Amy for introducing me to travel writing, which undoubtedly inspired the dream that sparked this novel.

  Thanks to Uncle Greg, for giving me working-class suburbs near Stanford; to Andrew Collins and Hadley Williams, for helping me get Miriam arrested; to Will McWilliams, for answering financial questions and asking for novel updates at every financial planning meeting since; to John, for telling me about police procedures, even if I didn’t end up using them; and to Mike Holstein at the Green Bank Observatory for making time for a debut novelist. Someday I’ll get there to visit for real!

  To my cousins, Hamilton, Martha, and Avery: thanks for helping me remember what it’s like to be a teenager. At forty-something, you think you remember, but you don’t—not really.

  Thanks to WFWA friends who beta read and/or gave sensitivity readings—Denny Bryce, Micki Morency, and Nancy Johnson. I am so thankful to be part of this community!

  Finally, to my agents, Sonali Chanchani and Claudia Cross, my advocates and cheerleaders, and to Jenny Chen, Melissa Rechter, Madeline Rathle, and the entire team at Alcove Press: thanks for giving Miriam wings!

  Part 1

  Atlanta, Georgia

  If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?

  —Khalil Gibran

  1

  Wednesday, April 27

  ON HER THIRTY-EIGHTH BIRTHDAY, Miriam Tedesco received flowers from a ghost.

  She didn’t need the blatant reminder that the universe hated her. She’d known for a year. And if she’d had any doubts, they vanished the moment she got called to lead music for a funeral on a day she should have been at home, nursing her own loss.

  “Miriam!” the hospitality director greeted her at the door of St. Gregory the Great Church. “Thank God you’re here. I need the key for the janitor’s closet. A kid threw up in the cry room.”

  “I—”

  A second volunteer touched her shoulder, not quite meeting her eyes. “Miriam, the reserved signs are missing. Do you know where they are?”

  “Hey, guys!” said one of her choir members. “Somebody’s gotta talk to those readers. They both have the same Scripture. It’s getting ugly up there.”

  Miriam tried to point out that a Catholic funeral included two readings, and it shouldn’t be that hard to satisfy everyone, but her voice wouldn’t work. Heart pounding, roaring ears—was she having a panic attack? And why didn’t anyone seem to notice?

  Usually, she relished the way people at St. Greg’s counted on her institutional knowledge, her competence, for things beyond her musical expertise. She’d worked here long enough to know a music director in a Catholic parish did much more than play music.

  But it sure seemed like the good Lord could’ve cut her a break on the first anniversary of the day her husband and kids had died.

  Too many colors—flowers burying the altar, and more arriving every minute. Too many people—the hushed conversations like a mosquito she could hear, but not see well enough to swat. The walls wouldn’t stand still. If she didn’t know better, she’d swear the stained-glass saints ringing the church were laughing at her.

  A firm hand gripped her elbow from behind, and a crisp voice addressed the volunteers. “Gentlemen!”

  The men snapped to attention. For twenty-five years, that voice had tolerated no nonsense in St. Gregory parish.

  “Becky,” Miriam gasped, clutching her best friend’s arm.

  Becky Lindon, parish secretary and at sixty, a silver-haired force of nature, tightened her grip. “Gentlemen,” she repeated. “A little space, for heaven’s sake!” She fixed her fierce gaze on each of them in turn. “I realize everyone’s freaked out about hosting a funeral for a congressman, but it’s still just a funeral. You’ve all done this a hundred times. The reserved signs are in the front pew. I can see them from here. Here are my keys. Go clean up the puke yourself. And as for the readers, ask Father Simeon. Miriam doesn’t need to be dealing with that. Go on—scoot!”

  The volunteers scattered. Becky turned to Miriam. Her embrace made the walls stop undulating and the stained glass stand still. “I’m so sorry you got called in today,” she murmured. “I won’t wish you a happy birthday, but I’m praying hard it doesn’t completely suck.”

  Miriam snorted. “Too late.”

  Becky’s grip tightened briefly. “Come on. You don’t have to sing. You don’t have to say a word. You just have to play the piano. It’s just another Mass, okay? Let’s get this thing done. The choir’s already warmed up.” Murmuring about a last-minute change the widow had made to the music list, she marched Miriam past two more floral delivery guys and a funeral home employee. In the music area, the ad hoc group of volunteers who sang for funerals awaited her leadership. Miriam gathered her scattered wits and started bookmarking her accompaniment books. Like Becky said, it was just another Mass. She could do this. She’d been doing it since high school. She could do it in her sleep. She’d be fine.

  Naturally, that was the moment the flowers arrived.

  “Excuse me, I’m looking for—”

  “Just find a place on the stairs,” Miriam told the delivery guy, waving toward the bower around the altar.

  “Um, actually, they’re not for the funeral.” He looked embarrassed. “I’m looking for Miriam … Teddy … skoo?”

  The choir went abruptly silent.

  And Miriam knew. She didn’t need to look; she could smell them. Mock orange and larkspur. The same arrangement Teo had presented her with nineteen years ago on the way into the courthouse—and every anniversary and birthday since.

  How could she have forgotten? Talia had set up the auto-delivery on her father’s behalf, right in front of Miriam, at the dinner table two years ago last night. They’d all gotten such a laugh out of it.

  Becky, trim in her polyester suit, set her hymnal aside and went over to the delivery man. “I’ll take those, thank you.” She turned to Miriam, who stared at the clumps of rounded white blossoms pierced by pink and blue and purple spears.

  “They’re so pretty,” said an alto who’d joined the choir only a few weeks ago. “Who are they from?”

  A moment of dead silence. Miriam didn’t have the energy to
explain the nuances. “Teo,” she said. “They’re from Teo.”

  At the sound of her dead husband’s name, silence fell. “But—” the alto said.

  “Yes. Teo’s dead. My whole family is dead. I know.” Miriam shoved her freak-out into a deep, dark corner of her mind she never visited during daylight hours. Or at night, if she could help it. But the niggling thought stuck its foot in the door, preventing her from slamming it shut: If she’d forgotten this, what else might be lurking on the calendar, waiting to ambush her?

  It’s been a year, she told herself. If there was anything else, it should have happened by now.

  Still. It wouldn’t hurt to get into Talia’s computer and poke around. Just to be safe.

  Having a plan eased the tightness in her chest, but she wasn’t going anywhere near those flowers. “Just put them on the organ, would you, Bec?”

  Becky complied briskly, as if there were nothing freakish about a floral delivery from a dead man, and returned to her seat in the alto section.

  Time to redirect. For all their sakes. “So,” she said. “I hear we have a change in the opening song.”

  Several people exchanged glances. She could see them asking each other: “Are we really going to just pretend that didn’t happen?”

  Miriam made eye contact with John Merrick, a bass who’d been singing with them since the day she and Teo arrived at St. Greg’s. Like Becky, he got things done. She gave him her best beseeching eyes.

  John sat forward. “Y’know,” he drawled, “I don’t know why we bother havin’ a music list if we’re just gonna change it anyway.”

  Anemic laughter rippled through the choir as the joke spread. “Oh, come on, you know the list is more like—”

  “Guidelines than actual rules!”

  The laughter fizzled. That had been Teo’s joke. Usually delivered in a hilariously lousy Captain Barbosa imitation. In John’s mouth, it just underscored how everything had changed.

  The smell of mock orange teased her nostrils. Miriam gripped the music stand as the choir eyed her nervously. What would they do if she stood up and screamed, “Do this without me. I hate this damn job, and I hate all of you!”

  Keep it together. That’s not true and you know it.

  It felt true, though. Eighteen years ago, she and Teo had come here with twin babies in tow. The parish hadn’t been expecting to hire a young married couple to fill a single staff position, but they’d risen to the occasion. They’d offered the family a shabby but solid house two doors down from the church, recently bequeathed by a parishioner, as part of their compensation. Miriam and Teo had been more than codirectors of music here. This parish had been their home, a place where she could shake off the scorn with which her family had always viewed her passion for music. A place where she’d blossomed.

  If she couldn’t handle this work anymore, where would she go? What would she do?

  The sound of footsteps in the back of church signaled the arrival of the dead congressman’s family. It was time to work. Miriam sat on the piano bench and nodded to Becky to announce the opening song.

  Don’t think, just play.

  She put her fingers to the keys and began. After so many years in ministry, playing “Amazing Grace” was nearly automatic. Which was great, except it left more space to think.

  Teo had been so conflicted about that floral delivery. He almost canceled it—he only left it in place because he didn’t want to hurt Talia’s feelings. But it had felt wrong to him because he loved giving gifts. He wanted to do it himself.

  He was good at it too. Every year she thought she was impervious to surprise, and every year he’d managed it anyway—often with the help of the twins. Three years ago, he’d planned a scavenger hunt that covered half the metro area. Miriam ended up at the nicest restaurant in Atlanta, the one that was supposed to be impossible to get a reservation for and that they couldn’t possibly afford. He’d met her there, holding a duplicate of the bouquet now perched on the organ.

  It had never occurred to her he might be able to surprise her from beyond the grave.

  He’d always loved her better than she’d loved him.

  The funeral went on: music, prayers, Scriptures, more music. So many people. So unlike the average funeral, where the mourners barely occupied a quarter of the church. St. Gregory seated a thousand, and today every pew was crammed elbow to elbow. People standing in the back, as if it were Christmas Eve. Three news cameras panned the church.

  All this for a bigoted, ethically challenged, old-fashioned bully of a congressman who’d cheated on his wife repeatedly before landing with that young thing perched in the front pew?

  Miriam took a deep breath to discourage her rising blood pressure. The locket around her neck chilled her skin. She could almost hear Teo whisper, “Be nice, Sassafras.”

  Hard on its heels came another voice: her daughter’s, calculated to wound. “No heart,” Talia had said in their last fight. “You can’t fight with someone who has no heart.”

  Miriam clenched her fists, but the shaking had spread to her whole body now.

  “Miriam.” Becky’s hiss brought her back to reality. Miriam glanced up at the altar, where Father Simeon, her boss, stood looking at her with his eyebrows raised. She’d missed a cue. She launched into an acclamation, keenly aware that not only was she failing at her job, she didn’t even want to do it.

  She had to get herself together. Before people realized the only good thing about Miriam Tedesco had been her husband and kids.

  Communion took forever. The choir finished singing and joined the procession; Miriam kept playing, her butt cheeks going numb as her rage grew, fed by the never-ending crowd that proved power and fame meant more than integrity. Today of all days, with the loss of her family so close at hand, that reality burned.

  Burning … now there was an intriguing thought.

  She ought to give this congressman a tribute of her own. A little Johnny Cash, perhaps. If she did it right—played around with the rhythms, stretched out the melody—no one else even had to know she was celebrating a funeral with a song about a man descending into a burning ring of fire.

  Miriam snickered as she made the transition. Becky, returning from Communion, frowned at her, but Miriam pretended not to notice. Her body relaxed as she flexed her improv muscles. Burning. Genius. It was perfect on so many levels. She didn’t mean it … exactly. It was more a little joke, to get her through this day. Surely the good Lord would forgive her a private joke.

  At least, she thought it was private until, a chorus or two down the line, a hand slammed down on the grand piano. “What the hell do you think you are doing?”

  Startled, Miriam lifted her hands from the keys. She looked up to find the congressman’s young widow standing beside her, quivering with rage.

  Silence fell in the church. She’d been so absorbed by her musical exercise, she’d failed to notice that the Communion line had finally cleared. A glance around the building revealed a thousand faces turned toward her. A few hid smiles. Most looked confused; some, angry.

  But none as angry as the widow—a woman who, Miriam remembered too late, had been up-and-coming in Nashville before she left it all behind to marry Atlanta’s longest-serving congressman.

  Of course she would recognize “Ring of Fire,” no matter how Miriam dressed it up.

  Well … Okay, she hadn’t dressed it up that much.

  Ordinarily, Miriam tried to follow the third commandment. But at this moment, only one word properly expressed the depths of trouble she’d just landed herself in.

  Shit.

  2

  6:40 PM

  NO MATTER HOW MANY times Miriam pulled into the driveway, the sight of the little blue bungalow sitting cold and silent was always a shock. It had always been overrun with noise: piano in the front room and cello in the first bedroom, Teo’s Argentine jam sessions on the porch, with June bugs flinging themselves against every glass surface. Music spilling through leaky windows, sparking
impromptu dance parties among the little girls next door. And always Blaise and Talia, working together, shouting at each other, fighting and making up, their tempers no match for the bond of the womb.

  Miriam slung the white shopping bag—the only thing she had to show for this whole day—over her shoulder and slammed the car door.

  A figure separated from the porch swing and said, “There you are!”

  Becky was the only person in the universe who could wear jeans and a pink flowered “Grandma” sweatshirt without looking like a slob. Maybe she starched her clothes to get them to maintain that shape. “What are you doing here?”

  Her friend held up a bottle and a flat box. “Birthday treats?” She shrugged. “After today, I figured wine and chocolate were more appropriate than cake.”

  Despite herself, Miriam’s lips twisted to one side. “Not gonna argue with you there.” She started up the walkway, inhaling the scent of Teo’s herb garden, which she hadn’t managed to kill yet.

  “You disappeared after the funeral. I was worried.”

  Miriam stopped at the top of the porch stairs. She looked down at the gray-blue boards and kneaded her forehead. “I, well, Father Simeon called me in for a come-to-Jesus meeting.”

  “And?”

  “And what? Are you asking if I got fired?”

  Becky looked sheepish.

  Miriam leaned one shoulder on a support. “Well, no. But I think it’s safe to say I’m on probation. He made it clear I’d better not ever pull a stunt like that again.”

  “Were you intending to?”

  Miriam gave that smart-ass comment the eye roll it deserved. “Anyway, I knew I wasn’t going to be of use to anyone today. Better to clear out and …”

  “Soul search.”

  Wallow was the word she’d been thinking of. Becky’s take sounded better. She shrugged. “Simeon … suggested … I go out to the grave site,” she said.

  “Oh, Miriam.” The sympathy in Becky’s voice nearly undid her. “You should have called me. I would have gone with you.”