A Song for the Road

by Kathleen Basi

  “Just in case?” he finished with her, and they both laughed.

  * * *

  Dicey sounded groggy, but she insisted she hadn’t been asleep. “You got a date?” she said. “Damn, woman, you work fast.”

  “It’s not a date. I don’t think.”

  “It’s a date, Miriam. Anyway, whatever. I’m having a rom-com night. You have fun. But not too much fun.”

  Dinner with Hadley and his bluegrass band turned out to be the most fun she’d had in, well, a year. Though not at first. For the first half hour, she kept scanning the restaurant, fearing that despite his supposed rehearsal at eight in Denver, Gus might pop out at any minute. It took half a margarita to remember that a place where you could throw peanuts on the floor wasn’t really his scene.

  Slowly, she relaxed, resting her chin on the heels of her hands and enjoying the conversation. She’d forgotten how much she enjoyed hanging around musicians, trading esoteric jokes and talking in impenetrable lingo. Unlike Gus, these people already thought she belonged. They didn’t view her as a charity project, but as a colleague.

  At the bottom of her second margarita, Miriam found her abdominal muscles achy from laughter and the world a bit surreal—in the best of ways. This night offered the freedom and lack of responsibility of college without the insecurity of late adolescence.

  Four months from now, she and Teo would have been empty nesters. Less, if she subtracted the weeks the kids would have spent at Interlochen over the summer. Would she and Teo have grown into a social life like this?

  Her phone buzzed; she pulled it out in case Dicey needed her. But of course, it was Gus.

  Please call me. I understand you’re angry, but I can’t concentrate. That music haunts me. I need resolution to this.

  Unbelievable. She slid it back in her pocket without wasting a moment debating a reply. Gus didn’t matter. All she wanted to think about tonight was the admiration in the eyes of the man across the table. Hadley wasn’t even being particularly subtle about it. She could feel herself lighting up. She was still young … ish. Not even forty yet. Maybe Brad was right. Maybe she could be happy again.

  Impulsively, she pulled her phone back out, clicked “Options” beside Gus’s number, and blocked it.

  The others ordered dessert, but Hadley took Miriam back to the Gathering Haus for a square-dance lesson before the event got underway.

  “I’m not so sure about this,” she confessed, standing in the middle of the hardwood floor.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, I just keep seeing Hee Haw. All these old women in creepy tulle skirts, and guys with string ties and belt buckles at their collars.”

  Hadley laughed. “They weren’t old, actually.”

  “Well, they seemed old.”

  “To a kid, sure. Anyway, those ties are called bolos, and I can’t promise you won’t see any, but as for the rest, you can relax. This is very casual. Just local people who do it for fun.”

  The Gathering Haus lay quiet. The bartenders sat outside the back door on camp stools, smoking. They waved as Hadley and Miriam entered, but didn’t leave their cigarettes.

  Hadley led her to the center of the floor. “You look really nice,” he said. “You’ve got this kind of bohemian Kate Winslet thing going on, with that scarf in your hair.” He fingered it, brushing her hairline in the process. Miriam spent a moment savoring the thrill of being touched.

  But apparently her hesitation gave the wrong impression. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I mean, I shouldn’t … I know you’re not supposed to compare—”

  Miriam, charmed, took him by the hand. “Relax,” she said. “You’re destroying your whole suave act.”

  Hadley’s eyes widened; then he chuckled. “All right,” he said. “Do-si-do.”

  By nine, the building was full. She’d never dreamed square dancing could be so much fun. Probably didn’t hurt to have a couple margaritas in her. Hadley brought her onstage to join them for a honky-tonk set.

  At the end of the set, the woman on the fiddle leaned down to murmur something in the caller’s ear. “Virginia Reel!” he said. Hadley set his guitar down and held a hand out to Miriam. “Care to dance?”

  If she’d met this man two weeks ago, she would have worn her widowhood like a shroud. Or maybe a martyr’s crown. Either way, she would have refused.

  But not tonight. Tonight, she was alive.

  The dancers formed parallel lines; Miriam and Hadley took their place in the middle of the pack, and by the time they made their way up to the head position, Miriam had the knack of it: swinging partners and do-si-dos and all. Arms spread wide and hands enclosed in Hadley’s, she slid down the center and back, giggling from the sheer joy of it all—music and bodies moving in concert, the warmth of a man’s skin. That last part was at least as intoxicating as the alcohol.

  “That’s it for us, folks!” called the fiddler when the dance ended. A roar of applause, and the crowd began to wander toward purses and jackets.

  The night air held a chill. As the musicians’ van rumbled away, Miriam felt strangely let down. She hadn’t had this much fun in years, but now what? Who could she share this moment with? The alcohol suppressed her defenses; grief surged forward, with the longing to see Talia skip down that reel, to watch Blaise watch people and analyze the music.

  And Teo? What about Teo?

  She cupped her palms over opposite elbows, trying to hold back the grief, and looked up into the clear sky, the stars mostly washed out by the downtown lights.

  “What are you thinking about?” Hadley leaned on the wall with one boot propped on the brick.

  “My family,” Miriam said, too engulfed in an alcohol haze to dissemble. “It feels wrong to enjoy this so much, when …”

  “They’re the reason you’re here, and they’re gone,” he finished.

  She nodded.

  “How did it happen?”

  She rested her head against the brick. “Just a drunk driver. The oldest story in the world.” She passed a hand over her eyes. “They were on the way to a beach. They’d taken a selfie in the car and sent it to me. That was the last communication I had from them.” She shook her head, feeling the bricks pull strands of her hair. “It all happened so fast. So many things I never got to say.”

  Hadley must be wishing he’d never let Becky and John bully him into tracking her down. Another few seconds and he’d have a crying drunk on his hands, but she couldn’t stop talking.

  “I’m a church musician,” she said. “Life, death, resurrection—my whole professional life is built on those things. But since it happened, I keep thinking, what’s the point? You can spend your whole life working toward something, and in one second, it can all be gone. Am I going to spend the rest of my life waiting to be hit by a comet, wondering if I really believe everything I sing about on Sunday mornings? Wondering if they thought of me when … when it happened?” Her voice broke.

  A car full of whooping college students passed by, followed at a more sedate pace by a sedan. In the distance, a police siren double-blipped a warning.

  Hadley pushed off the wall and put an arm on her shoulder. “You know, I remember hearing something on a field trip once. A lot of Native Americans—not all, but many of them—figured it was a waste of time to think too much about death. They kind of thought there was something after death, but since they weren’t gonna know exactly what until they got there, why waste time worrying?”

  Miriam clenched her jaw, folding her arms to lock him out. “Easy for you to say.”

  “I lost my brother last year.”

  Miriam stared at him, her sluggish brain struggling to catch up. If he’d lost a brother, that meant John, her choir member, had lost a brother too. How had she not known? “When?” she asked.

  “June.”

  Last June, she’d still been almost completely nonfunctional. John must have kept his grief to himself, trying to make her life easier. How horrible.

  “I think about
it all the time,” Hadley said. “It’s hard not to question, you know? People are always saying it’s for the best, God has his plans.”

  “You have your own angel in heaven. Theological bullshit. People don’t become angels. They become saints. Angels are different.”

  “Um, okay.” Hadley’s mouth quirked. “I’ll take your word on all that.”

  “Oh, and ‘At least you had them for a long time before they died’!”

  His eyes widened. “No way. Did someone really say that to you?”

  “They sure did.”

  He shook his head. “People get so creeped out. You know they’re all just praying the shit storm that hit you doesn’t hit them next. And they feel guilty as hell about it, but that’s the facts, ma’am.”

  She nodded emphatically.

  He stepped forward, putting both hands on her cheeks. “We can’t live in the past, Miriam. We have to live for today. For this moment, and this moment alone.”

  Barely a foot separated them now. Hazel eyes dizzied her, too close to focus on. She closed her eyes and raised herself on tiptoe, arcing into his body. She didn’t need to see his face; she could feel his mouth from the surface of her lips to the deep place below her womb where desire was born. And then she fell back against the brick, exploring and being explored with a complete lack of concern for who might be watching.

  Hadley drew a shuddering breath. “My apartment’s upstairs,” he said. “Just let me make sure my people have everything under control.”

  Miriam slipped inside the door and leaned on the frame, watching the easy way he interacted with his employees. He glanced back at her with a little smile, and her nerve ends lit up in response.

  She smiled, her fingers playing with her waterdrop chain, looping it around her fingers, savoring the anticipation. She hadn’t felt like this since that morning, how many years ago, when Teo had whispered in her ear …

  Teo.

  The locket burned her skin. She let go, but in all her worrying the chain, it had gotten tangled around her fingers. She had to shake it to get free. What was she doing? She was supposed to be out here to honor Teo, not to hook up with the first available guy who showed some hint that he understood what she was going through.

  Inside the building, Hadley murmured to one of his employees. A low reply, a raucous laugh. Was he gloating about his conquest already?

  Don’t freak out. Not everyone was like Gus von Rickenbach. But suddenly, she felt cheap.

  Miriam pulled Talia’s sweater tight around her and slipped out the front door. She stumbled down the sidewalk, Teo’s words chasing her back to the hotel, a whisper on repeat in her brain: “You saved me. You saved me.

  “You saved me.”

  34

  Twelve years earlier

  Atlanta, Georgia

  THE DAY BLAISE AND Talia headed off to kindergarten, Miriam and Teo walked them to school and waved until the door closed behind them. Then they returned slowly back home. Miriam stopped at the base of the porch steps. The street felt empty, and so did her body, like a burden had just been lifted, one she hadn’t even been aware she was carrying. She tried to remember the feel of tandem nursing them, to recreate the visceral terror, the certainty that those floppy necks would break, that they’d be dead or brain damaged, and it would be her fault. But the sensation was gone as surely as the babies they’d been. All the sacrifices she’d made for such a brief blip on the radar. Plenty of years of parenting remained, but she hadn’t expected this milestone to feel so … monumental.

  Not until Teo’s arms encircled her from behind did she feel her body shuddering, the tears sliding down her cheeks. He turned her around and cupped her face, kissed her cheeks, stroked her lips with his thumbs. He’d never touched her like this—with a trembling in his limbs and a sense of power barely restrained. “Mira,” he whispered into the juncture of her neck and shoulder, and her body responded without waiting for permission from her mind. She was drowning in his kisses, her limbs wrapped around him, as she floated up the porch steps with her head flung back, blind and deaf from the glory of the newborn sun and the blood pounding in her ears.

  The whisper of the air conditioner caused the seashell wind chimes hanging in the corner to shiver. The sunlight slanting through the window hit the water glass on the nightstand and shattered into a thousand points of light that bounced around the room with the vibration of their lovemaking.

  Only when it was over, when Teo, flung back against the sheets like a man utterly spent, tried and failed to speak, did Miriam process what had just happened. That was not the intimacy she’d known, these past five-and-something years. What she’d once expected to be painfully awkward turned out to be quite natural—even, at times, enjoyable. But this was like nothing she’d ever experienced. She felt naked—vulnerable—her very soul exposed. It terrified her.

  “Mira?” Teo pushed himself up on one shoulder, curling a lock of her hair around his finger. “I don’t think I ever told you, but that day you walked into my cubicle, you saved me.”

  She turned her face toward him, frowning, her skin still hypersensitive to the warmth of the sunlight falling across her bare breast. She’d saved him?

  “That morning, they’d offered me a place in the management training program. I didn’t want it. You know how I hated working there, but it was so much money. More than my parents could ever have imagined. Everything they wanted for me, the reason they left me in America. I felt like I had to take it. I was begging God for another option. And then … there you were. You’d come to me. It felt like the answer to my prayer.”

  He caught her hand and pressed his lips to the back of it. “I know this wasn’t how you envisioned your life,” he said, “but I’ve loved you since the first summer I met you. I will spend the rest of my life loving you, every moment, if you’ll only let me.”

  It was like a moment from Austen or Brontë. Miriam should have been melting into his arms, but all she felt was dread. Love in real life wasn’t like it was in books. Gus and her parents had taught her that. Those “loves” had turned out to be a sham. Why should this one be any different?

  And yet she knew Teo deserved better than such jaded thinking. What she saw in his eyes right now was a kind of love she’d never experienced and didn’t know how to reciprocate. Why he’d chosen her, she’d never understand. He’d stepped into the mess and redeemed a situation she’d thought unredeemable. He saw the best in her and managed to bring it out simply by being himself.

  She wanted to do right by him. She wanted to be capable of looking at him the way he was looking at her right now.

  Could she learn? Maybe. Maybe if she worked at it long enough, diligently enough, someday she’d accidentally slip into the kind of unconditional love being offered to her right now.

  Teo was still hovering above her, his expression eager. She couldn’t give her husband what he wanted. What he so richly deserved. But she couldn’t crush him by telling him the truth either.

  She reached up and kissed him, praying forgiveness for all that the gesture implied. Praying she’d be able to live up to it … and almost certain she would not.

  35

  Saturday, May 7

  Pikes Peak, Colorado

  IN HER DREAMS, MIRIAM was being kissed, a kiss that transported her to the edge of ecstasy. But when she peeked over the edge, she found herself looking instead at an abyss of eternal damnation. It smelled less like sulfur than hot machinery. She heard a noise behind her, like someone blowing up an air mattress, only louder. She turned to see Dicey wearing a black contraption around her chest. Plastic tubes protruded from it.

  Miriam tottered on the edge. The hot wind gusting up from the chasm scorched her back, but she focused on the pregnant woman. “What’s going on with you, Dicey? Are you sick?”

  “It’s not your problem,” Dicey answered. Her voice was fractured, as if she were speaking through a fan.

  Miriam reached out. “Let me help you.”

 
; Dicey’s visage shifted, becoming brighter and more terrible, like a vision out of Lord of the Rings. “Why would I want your help? You almost cheated on your husband!” She grew in height until she towered over Miriam. “Gu-i-i-i-i-lty-y-y-y!” she rumbled. Lightning shot from a slim finger. Miriam scrambled back and fell into the pit with a scream.

  A gentle touch roused her. “Hey, Miriam. It’s okay.”

  She pried her eyes open to find herself looking at Dicey, who retreated to the other bed and sat with her hands folded.

  Miriam had to blink a few times to bring the image into focus: stretchy maternity jeans, sparkly sandals, the pretty, feminine flare of her maternity top. Miriam had never looked half so stylish when she was pregnant.

  “Had this weird dream,” she said. Her voice sounded like it had been dragged over gravel. She cleared her throat. “You were wearing this black thing that looked like a suicide vest, with hoses coming out of it. It made your voice all funny.”

  Dicey’s eyes widened; she gave a strange little laugh. “Suicide vest,” she said. “That’s funny. And kinda twisted.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You were calling out for Teo.”

  Miriam groaned and rolled onto her back. The best thing about hotels was the sheets: beautifully tucked in, neat and tidy and untangled. Teo had always pulled the covers untucked. It used to make her crazy. Now, the memory made her smile.

  Or would have, if she didn’t feel so lousy.

  Miriam pushed herself upright. The world swam. Her nose wrinkled. She could smell alcohol. And something else—something mechanical. Like hot machinery. She frowned, but her brain was moving too slowly to put together whatever pieces it wanted to connect. “It was a dream, wasn’t it?”

  “Wasn’t what a dream?” Dicey grabbed a bottle of orange juice and two red-coated tablets. “Here,” she said, handing them to Miriam. “You must’ve had some night.”

  “Some night,” Miriam mumbled. As her slow-moving brain began to replace dream images with memories, she deeply regretted putting anything down her throat. Gus. Dinner with the band. Drinking … a lot. Dancing with Hadley.