فصل 10 - بخش 04

10

By ten on that Friday morning, Sarah and Grace had reached the Hard Day’s Night album, and Marcy thought she might actually lose her mind.

The girls had found Terry’s record player – a steal on eBay, he had assured Marcy – in his garage workshop, along with his carefully assembled collection of Beatles albums. They had taken the player and the albums up to Grace’s room and had begun with Meet the Beatles! ‘We’re going to play all of them,’ Sarah told her mother. ‘To remember Daddy. If it’s okay.’

Marcy told them it was fine. What else could she say when looking at their pale, solemn faces and red-rimmed eyes? Only she hadn’t realized how hard those songs would hit her. The girls knew them all, of course; when Terry was in the garage, the record player’s turntable was always spinning, filling his workshop with the British invasion groups he’d been born a little too late to have heard firsthand, but which he loved just the same: the Searchers, the Zombies, the Dave Clark Five, the Kinks, T. Rex, and – of course – the Beatles. Mostly them.

The girls loved those groups and those songs because their father did, but there was a whole emotional spectrum of which they were unaware. They hadn’t heard ‘I Call Your Name’ while making out in the back of Terry’s father’s car, Terry’s lips on her neck, Terry’s hand under her sweater. They hadn’t heard ‘Can’t Buy Me Love,’ the current track coming down from upstairs, while sitting on the couch in the first apartment where they’d lived together, holding hands, watching A Hard Day’s Night on the battered VHS they’d picked up at a rummage sale for twenty dollars, the Fab Four young and running amok in black-and-white, Marcy knowing she was going to marry the young man sitting next to her even if he didn’t know it yet. Had John Lennon already been dead when they watched that old tape? Shot down in the street just as her husband had been?

She didn’t know, couldn’t remember. All she knew was she, Sarah, and Grace had gotten through the funeral with their dignity intact, but now the funeral was over, her life as a single mom (oh, that horrible phrase) stretched ahead of her, and the cheerful music was driving her mad with sorrow. Every harmonized vocal, each clever George Harrison riff, was a fresh wound. Twice she had gotten up from where she sat at the kitchen table with a cooling cup of coffee in front of her. Twice she had gone to the foot of the stairs and drawn in breath to shout, ‘No more! Shut it off!’ And twice she had gone back to the kitchen. They were grieving, too.

This time when she got up, Marcy went to the utensil drawer and pulled it all the way out. She thought there would be nothing there, but her hand found a pack of Winston cigarettes. There were three left inside. No, make that four – one was hiding all the way in back. She hadn’t smoked since her younger daughter’s fifth birthday, when she’d had a coughing fit while mixing the batter for Gracie’s cake, and had vowed there and then to quit forever. Yet instead of throwing these last soldiers of cancer out, she had tossed them in back of the utensil drawer, as if some dark and prescient part of her had known she would eventually need them again.

They’re five years old. They’ll be stale as hell. You’ll probably cough until you pass out.

Good. So much the better.

She took one from the pack, greedy for it already. Smokers never stop, they only pause, she thought. She went to the stairs and cocked her head. ‘And I Love Her’ had given way to ‘Tell Me Why’ (that eternal question). She could imagine the girls sitting on Grace’s bed, not talking, just listening. Holding hands, maybe. Taking the sacrament of Daddy. Daddy’s albums, some bought at Turn Back the Hands of Time, the record store in Cap City, some bought online, all held in the hands that had once held his daughters.

She crossed the living room to the little potbellied stove they lit only on really cold winter nights, and reached blindly for the box of Diamond matches on the nearby shelf, blindly because on that shelf also stood a row of pictures she could not currently bear to look at. Maybe in a month she could. Maybe in a year. How long did it take to recover from the first, rawest stage of grief? She could probably find a fairly definitive answer on WebMD, but was afraid to look.

At least the reporters had gone away after the funeral, rushing back to Cap City to cover some fresh political scandal, and she wouldn’t have to risk the back porch, where one of the girls might look out the window and see her renewing her old vice. Or in the garage, where they might smell the smoke if they came out for a fresh bundle of LPs.

She opened the front door, and there stood Ralph Anderson, with his fist raised to knock.