A Song for the Road

by Kathleen Basi

  Miriam looked behind her. “I’m just grateful it still runs.” At this point, it was hard to get too worked up about a car. Becky would feel the same. She hoped.

  Her mother bustled ahead of her, deeper into the condo. “Are you hungry? Do you need a shower?”

  “Right now I just want to sleep. I’ve got to try to find Dicey, and I can’t even think, I’m so tired.”

  Her mother pursed her lips. “All right. Sleep first, then eat.”

  But the smell of pierogi and sausage—Grandma Novak’s super-secret recipe that Miriam knew how to make but had never mastered to her satisfaction—grew stronger every step closer to the kitchen, and Miriam discovered she did have an appetite after all. While she ate, Sallie called Jo. “Yes, she’s here. No, we haven’t talked about it yet. Yes, I’ll make sure we do.”

  Even before Miriam popped the last pastry in her mouth, the starchy food had rerouted all the blood from her brain to her stomach. “Nap,” she said, pointing. “Down the hall?”

  Her mother, still on the phone, nodded. “On the left,” she mouthed.

  Miriam padded down the hallway and turned into the open doorway of the guest room to find herself facing a shrine to her siblings’ achievements. She could barely see the color of the walls. There were team photos, framed newspaper clippings, and academic awards; Jo’s chess trophies, Brad’s academic bowl medals, and countless mementos of victories in track, basketball, and softball.

  As if she’d needed any more proof of her second-class status in her own family.

  Miriam mummified herself under the covers. The room pressed in on her, her heart and throat pushing back, swelling until they ached. How could she feel so hurt when she was the one who had withdrawn from her family?

  Her brain was slowing down, sleep washing toward her, heavy and irresistible. On the cusp of dropping off, her subconscious served up a memory she wished mightily she didn’t have: the slam of the frying pan and her mother screaming the word divorce.

  41

  Twenty-one years earlier

  Detroit, Michigan

  BY THE TIME MIRIAM looked at the clock that May morning, she was already running late. She’d awakened hours too early, but, wound up with anticipation of meeting with a bride and groom—the first ever to consider hiring her—she couldn’t get back to sleep. She pulled out Jane Austen to settle her nerves, and the call of Lizzy and Mr. Darcy proved too strong. By the time the two were safely united, Miriam’s parents were moving around in the kitchen, as they always did on Saturday mornings, the floor creaking as Dad read the paper and Mom made pancakes and bacon.

  Did Darcy and Elizabeth do such boring, companionable things in the mornings? No way. They were probably all over each other.

  Did Mom and Dad have sex anymore?

  Now there was an image to give a girl the heebie-jeebies.

  Miriam focused on choosing the right outfit. It felt like her entire life was riding on this wedding meeting. Mostly because her parents would take failure as further proof that classical music constituted a one-way trip to the poorhouse.

  Outside the window, the maple tree nodded in the breeze, its miniature leaves bright green. The roar of the Fisher Freeway bounced along the treetops. After one last glance in the mirror, Miriam ran downstairs toward the clank of dishes and the smell of coffee and bacon. Her parents appeared in their usual positions: Dad at the end of the table, Mom at the stove, as dependable as the sun rising in the morning or the Pistons choking when it mattered most. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen.

  Dad didn’t even look up from his paper, but Mom turned her cheek toward Miriam’s kiss. “Did you sleep well? Where are you off to so early?”

  “I’m meeting with a bride and groom. Remember? If they like me, they’ll hire me to play their wedding. Remember?” She hated herself for saying it twice, for the angsty note in her voice, but they’d just talked about this two nights ago.

  Dad gave her a sour look and ruffled the paper. “Don’t be gone too long. You need to be studying for the SAT, not dinking around on the piano all day.”

  Miriam grabbed a toaster pastry. Her mother looked up. “Don’t you want some eggs?”

  “No.” She dashed out the door and ran for the bus stop, seething.

  They’d all taken piano when they were little, but where her older siblings had fought tooth and nail to quit, Miriam had to fight for the right to continue. It was one thing to pay for half-hour lessons, but when she graduated to an hour and a more expensive teacher, her parents balked. She’d spent the last four years mowing lawns and babysitting to help cover the expense. Doing weddings would be a huge step up. The pressure from Mom and Dad had ratcheted upward lately. Josephine and Brad had already stamped their passports out of the world of time cards and union dues; every week at church, Mom bragged about Brad acing his premed courses and Josephine’s steady rise up the floors of a New York skyscraper.

  Miriam wanted them to brag on her for earning a hundred bucks an hour as a high school pianist.

  She ran over her mental list again: Pachelbel, Schubert, Purcell: the holy trinity of wedding music, her piano teacher had called them. Far from the hardest pieces Miriam had learned. She’d also spent an hour last night, cramming a handful of top forty songs. Just in case.

  Wait a minute. She’d left those pieces on the piano.

  She sprinted home. The screen door squealed, but her parents, engrossed in conversation, didn’t acknowledge her entrance. She grabbed the sheet music off the piano and shoved it in her bag with shaking fingers, barely noticing the measured voices in the kitchen until Mom said, “ … talked to a lawyer.”

  Miriam stopped halfway back to the door. What did her parents need a lawyer for?

  Then Dad answered. “I assume he told you the same thing mine told me. Stick it out until Mira graduates.”

  Miriam’s feet felt glued to the floor. All her life, her parents had gone to work, gone to church, gone to ball games and school events. Never once did they look at each other the way she imagined Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet would have done. But they’d always been there. Never a major fight, every problem approached with level-headed reason.

  The words coming out of her parents’ mouths now made Miriam feel like she was looking into a carnival mirror: the shape of everything familiar distorted, reversed. All those words, about separate rent payments and child support, could only add up to one thing, and that thing just wasn’t possible. Not in her family.

  And they were talking about it practically right in front of her! They must not have heard her come back in, over the noise of the bacon frying.

  “Well, I’ve been making your meals and doing your laundry this long.” Mom’s voice was tight. “I suppose I can put up with it for one more year. But the minute she moves out, I’m done. You understand?”

  Paper crinkled as Dad folded the newspaper and set it on the table. “If it’s bothering you that much, draw up a list of household duties. I’ll do whatever you want.” He sounded weary. “Just hang it in the closet, somewhere Mira won’t see it.”

  The frying pan slammed. “Don’t you dare play the victim, Phil! You’re like a block of ice. How am I supposed to live with that? Why do you think I want a divorce?”

  The impossible word cracked the air between the kitchen and the living room. Three months ago her parents had celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary with silver bells in the middle of every table and a blessing at Mass. The choir had sung a song. Everybody had oohed and aahed over them.

  Yet she could also hear Brad whispering in her ear in the middle of Mass. “They’re holding hands,” he’d said. “Does that seem weird to you?”

  It had seemed weird, because Mom and Dad never touched. Ever.

  They rarely fought. But they never kissed either. Not in the morning, not at the Sign of Peace at Mass, not even before bed. Miriam had never questioned it, but now, as she fled the house for a world that made sense, understanding se
ttled in a dull ache on her collarbone, repeating over and over:

  I should have known.

  42

  Sunday, May 8

  Albuquerque, New Mexico

  MIRIAM WOKE TO THE rumble of a hot dryer and the smell of Vicks.

  She lay with the pillow over her eyes, getting her bearings. It had been a long time since she’d dreamed about the divorce fight. Thankfully, it had been brief—just a flash of the emotion she’d felt in that moment when the iron skillet slammed down on the stove and her mother shouted.

  Plenty of her classmates’ parents had gotten divorced. Why had that moment felt so monumental to her? Maybe because it happened without warning. As far as she’d known, her parents’ relationship was just fine.

  She’d spent her adolescence sucking up classic romances—Austen and Brontë, du Maurier and Orczy. Maybe, deep down, she’d sensed there had to be more to love than her parents’ well-oiled partnership, dependable but relentlessly and ploddingly indifferent, disguising bitter resentment that sooner or later had to come boiling to the surface.

  And yet they’d stayed together, right to the bitter end. It was time to find out why.

  Miriam flung the pillow off her head, taking in the shrine to her siblings once more, and swung her legs over the side of the bed.

  She found herself looking at her own face.

  She hadn’t seen this wall from the doorway. The black and white head shot she’d submitted for the competition where she’d met Gus hung among a collage of others: snapshots of her at the piano and the state honor choir; the group photo from her liturgical music camp. A picture of her with Teo at St. Greg’s, and one with the kids playing on Christmas Eve. A shelf containing her festival cups lined up in a row in increasing order of size, and a shadowbox filled with high school blue ribbons. Recital programs.

  It was a collection that spoke of love.

  Footsteps padded on the tile; her mother entered the room. “Oh, Mira, you’re up. Good. Are you feeling better?”

  Miriam couldn’t drag her eyes away from that wall. Her wall. “Um … yeah.” The Vicks smell centered around her mother, entwining with a whiff of cotton warmed in the oven. The smell of safety. Mom used to lather her with Vicks and pin warm cloth diapers inside her pajamas when she had a sore throat.

  “You must have been really tired. It’s been hours,” Mom said.

  “Haven’t been sleeping very well lately.”

  “Well, I’m not surprised. I never sleep well away from my own bed.” Mom picked up the shoes Miriam had kicked off before collapsing in bed, and arranged them beside the door. “By the way, I cleaned out the car while you were sleeping. I stacked all the receipts on the kitchen table, so you can decide what you need to keep. You left your phone in the car too.”

  “No, I didn’t, I …” She stared at the pink spangled phone case in her mother’s hand. Dicey’s phone. Dicey must have kicked it under the seat during a coughing fit.

  Miriam snatched the phone from her mother’s hand. It was dead. She lunged for her charger and plugged it in.

  “I have to get cooking,” Mom said. “Funeral dinner. You want to come out and talk?”

  Obediently, Miriam unplugged Dicey’s phone and followed her mother out to the kitchen, where she reconnected the charger and laid the phone on the granite counter. She watched the deft motion of the knife in her mother’s hand, slicing through onions with great precision. The carrots on the counter sparked her memory. She knew this recipe.

  She pulled out another cutting board and knife and started chopping alongside her mother. The silence grew heavier every second. Miriam cleared her throat. “I’m sorry I haven’t called. It’s been kind of …”

  “Busy?”

  “Emotional.”

  “Yes, it must be very fulfilling to share your personal experience with the entire world.”

  Miriam winced. “I didn’t share my personal experience with the entire world.”

  “Well, you shared a lot more than you’ve shared with me.”

  The words stung. Miriam scooped up a handful of carrots and dumped them in the pot. “I’m only just discovering a lot of things, Mom.”

  “Like?”

  “Like I love that girl.” Her voice caught. “I didn’t think I was capable of love anymore.”

  Sallie stopped cutting. “Why on earth would you think that?”

  “Because I’ve …” Miriam rested her hands on the board. She wished the phone would hurry up and power up. She longed for distraction. “For the past year, I’ve been trying to pretend I was this poster child for the perfect Catholic widow. But I’m not. I’m angry. When I was nineteen, I had all this energy, all this drive. I had goals, I had a future. And then the kids came along, and I had to divert all that into them instead.”

  “That’s what happens when you become a mother.”

  “You think I don’t know that? That’s what I told myself for years. I gave the best years of my life, Mom. All that energy, all that time. For what? Nothing. They’re dead. What was the point?” She slammed the butt of the knife on the granite. “A person who loved her family wouldn’t think things like that.”

  Sallie’s eyes glistened. “Mira. Of course you loved your family.”

  Miriam shook her head and sat down hard on a bar stool.

  Her mother sat beside her and took both her hands. “Talk to me.”

  She hadn’t confided in her mother in decades. The words came slowly, then faster and faster. “Teo loved me so much better than I could ever love him. He was my best friend. I liked living with him. But he deserved so much more, and I could never give it to him. He was this amazing romantic. He could make a gift out of—of wildflowers, for crying out loud.” The locket burned against her skin. “And all I did was run around and prepare meals and clean up after everyone and make sure they got to do whatever made them feel fulfilled.”

  Her mother was smiling. “That sounds like love to me.”

  And here was the heart of the matter. What pale shadow of love had her parents settled for all these years? Miriam wove her fingers into her hair and pulled, the physical pain dulling the deeper emotional one.

  Sallie frowned. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Miriam swallowed. “I don’t … know how to ask this.”

  Sallie folded her arms. “Maybe you should just try spitting it out.”

  The refrigerator cycled off. The house held its breath. “Okay,” Miriam said. “Why didn’t you and Dad ever get divorced?”

  A split-second pause—just long enough to give the lie to the response. “What are you talking about?”

  “Come on, Mom. You and Dad, talking about how miserable you were, but you’d put up with each other until I left home.”

  Sallie blanched.

  “I think the exact words were, ‘The minute she moves out, I’m done.’”

  Her mother’s eyes were wide. “Oh, Mira,” she whispered. “I didn’t know you heard that.”

  “I know you didn’t!” Miriam clenched her fists on the counter. “Do you understand what that did to me? I thought love meant cooking dinner and fixing drains and gutters and planting flowers, and if you two hardly ever touched each other, so what? But that was all a lie. And you made it about me. I spent my senior year trying to decide whether to flunk all my classes so I could keep living at home and keep my parents together a little while longer. Even though I was miserable there, because you’d made it perfectly clear you thought everything that was important to me was worthless! How could I ever love Teo? When that was all I had to go on?”

  Her mother pressed her fingertips to her lips. They were trembling. “So this is why,” she said softly. “Why everything changed.” She shook her head. Suddenly she looked old.

  “I never wanted to divorce your father, Mira. He just … he couldn’t hear me. No matter what I said. He wouldn’t talk to a counselor. I thought if I brought up divorce, it would shake him out of it. He’d recognize the stakes.” Salli
e brushed at her eyes. “But he just went and found a lawyer. So I did too. We might have drifted into a divorce by accident, except you stopped talking to us.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When you went to Curtis, you never called. Not once.”

  “I talked to you all the time.”

  “We called you. You never called us. We had to make all the effort ourselves.”

  Miriam sat silently, replaying that pivotal year in her mind. She didn’t remember. Could Mom be right?

  “That was what broke your father,” Sallie said, brushing her eyes. “We went on a Marriage Encounter. We figured if the marriage was all we had left …” She shrugged. “That weekend changed everything for us. Except you.”

  Miriam stared at her. If things had changed, she’d never seen it. They’d still never been romantic. Not demonstrative, like Teo.

  Had she been right in the first place? Did none of that really matter?

  And if so, what did that say about her and Teo?

  Her mother’s hands were clasped so tightly on the edge of the counter, her fingernails turned white and red. “I tried so hard not to be hurt. I told myself you were just growing up. But it does hurt. Being pushed away by a child you’ve carried in your womb and given your entire life to.”

  The words cut deep. Losing a child was a raw wound, a steam burn that just kept sinking deeper and deeper into the soul. How must it feel when loss came not from death, but from a child’s own rejection?

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “I’m sorry too.” Her mother’s voice was a thread. “Sorry you felt like we didn’t value your gifts. We knew you’d spend your life struggling, just like we did. But we tried to support you.”

  “How?”

  At the derision in Miriam’s voice, Sallie looked up. “We moved the TV downstairs, for goodness sake. So you and Brad wouldn’t fight over the front room every time he came home for the weekend.”

  Miriam stared at her, blank. Mostly what she remembered about that move was how hateful he’d been. That, and the fact that ever after, her family had spent most of their time in the basement, as far away from her as they could without actually leaving the premises.