by Lisa Tucker
Rick nods and shakes her hand but he doesn’t say anything. He stands with his arms crossed while Irene smiles and talks and tries to figure him out.
“Well, I guess I better go wake up Harry,” Irene finally says. Harry is her boyfriend, our bass player. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon; as usual, the guys in the band stayed up all night jamming. Irene calls herself a day person and she likes me because I am too—now that I have Willie.
When we get to the door, I thank her for taking care of Willie, but she grabs my arm and pulls me outside. “Wow, Patty,” she says. “He’s really something.”
While she’s telling me how cute Rick is, I’m looking through the door, trying to see what he’s doing with Willie. I don’t feel annoyed with Irene though. She’s a good friend; six nights a week, she sits in my room and watches Willie while the band plays. She tells me she doesn’t want to come to the club anyway, she’s sick of music. She also says she’s tired of being on the road with Harry, that she’s going back to Kansas City soon and get herself a nice place, settle down, find a real job rather than making jewelry for peanuts like she does now. I listen but I know she isn’t serious. Irene adores Harry. She says he’s the only man who can make her laugh even when she’s furious.
“I guess this is a lot for you to deal with, honey.” She’s squinting now, worried. She knows Rick was in jail but she doesn’t know why. At some point, she thinks to ask if I need her to send Harry over to throw him out. Harry is six-three and weighs at least 250 pounds. Irene calls him her gangster boy because he’s black and he’s from New York.
“You know Harry won’t really hit him,” she whispers, “but he can look the part.”
I tell her no, I don’t need that, and she pats my arm. She says to give a yell if I need anything at all.
Before she walks across the parking lot, she turns back and gives me another worried look. I shrug like this is no big deal. I can handle it. I can handle anything.
When I get back into the room, Willie is lying flat on his back, sound asleep. The TV is off and the air conditioner has shut down; it’s so quiet I can hear Willie breathing. Rick is sitting next to him, lightly stroking Willie’s fine blond hair. Blond hair is the only thing Willie got from me, and Mama says it’s bound to darken before he’s much older. Willie’s eyebrows are dark already, like Rick’s.
“He’s so little,” Rick whispers, and smiles. “It’s hard to believe he’s two.”
I tell Rick his birthday was back in February, but I don’t talk about what it was like that day: miserable and raining and nothing like what I’d hoped for him. We had to make five hundred miles by six o’clock in order to have time to set up for the gig; Willie had to eat his birthday cake in the van. I told Willie we’d go to McDonald’s for dinner as soon as we got into town but then there wasn’t a McDonald’s, at least not on the main drag. Harry tried to cheer him up, told him Burger King was better.
“This is no ordinary hamburger shack, Willie,” Harry said. “It’s a palace. We’re in the presence of the Supreme Lord. The Burger Duke? No. The Burger Prince? No. The Burger Master himself. The Burger Emperor. The most holy, Burger King.”
Willie looked confused but he laughed because Harry was grinning and wearing a cardboard Burger King crown. When he opened his toy though, he started crying again. It wasn’t a Hot Wheels like they had at McDonald’s, it wasn’t even a toy to his way of thinking, it was just a coloring book.
Poor guy, I thought, as I pulled him on my lap. The only things he wanted for his birthday were a Happy Meal from McDonald’s and a tricycle. He got the tricycle, but he hadn’t been able to ride it yet; it was packed in the back of the van between Dennis’s drums.
Later that night after the gig, I sat in our hotel room, drinking a beer, making a list of my accomplishments on the back of a napkin. I was desperate to convince myself that I was doing all right. That I was making a life for Willie and me, even if it wasn’t perfect. Even if it wasn’t close to perfect.
One: I hadn’t touched any drugs, not even weed, since the day I found out I was pregnant. Two: I’d worked hard and completed my GED before Willie was born, so he’d never have to feel like his mother wasn’t good enough. Three: I’d been there for him day in, day out for two years. Four: I’d supported the two of us.
I wrote down the number five but I was stuck; no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t think of anything else. I was near tears; I’d planned on a list of at least ten accomplishments. As I drank another beer, I stared at number four—supporting the two of us—wondering if it was the reason I was drawing a blank, if it was messing up my list the same way it had messed up Willie’s birthday.
Rick is still running his fingers through Willie’s hair. “You like all this traveling?” he says, looking around the room and then at me. “You always said you wanted to stay in one place. A home.”
I did say that, Rick is right. I didn’t even want to leave our first apartment, run-down though it was. He made me move to the new complex outside of Lewisville, so we could have a dishwasher and air-conditioning. I cried when his friends came to load up the furniture.
Of course he remembers that, but now I tell him the traveling isn’t that bad. Then I shrug. “I don’t have a choice.”
It feels true. No question, it was worse the first year of Willie’s life. Even though Mama had stayed sober and turned into a surprisingly good granny, it was still hard. I worked nights as a dishwasher while Mama stayed with Willie. My feet ached all the time, my breasts leaked milk, and my take-home pay wasn’t even a hundred and twenty a week. But then I saw Fred’s ad in the Kansas City Star, and I got up my nerve and went to the audition. By the time I told him about Willie, we’d been rehearsing for two months and were ready to hit the road. He frowned and shook his head but he didn’t complain. I decided not to tell him that I wouldn’t turn twenty-one for another month. According to the press release he sends out to the clubs, I’ve been singing professionally for five years, I studied vocals at the University of Missouri, and I won a singing contest in Kansas City while I was still a teenager.
Only the last thing is true. I did win that contest. Rick drove me to the auditorium and he sat in the front row. I’d been nervous all morning, but as soon as the piano started, I forgot everything but the music they’d given me to sing. It was a wonderful Gershwin song, “I Loves You Porgy”; I just wanted to do it justice, get it right. And I did get it right, I knew that when I hit the last note perfectly and the applause started, loud and furious, like a thunderstorm waking me from a dream. I was smiling, bowing. I felt alive.
All the contestants were supposed to wait in the hall while the committee decided the winner. I was standing down a little bit from everybody else when Rick came up. He hugged me and said how proud he was, but then he took my hand and pulled me around the corner and down another hall.
“I have to go back.” There was no one around but still I whispered. “Rick—”
“Watching you… I can’t wait.” He pushed my hand on the crotch of his jeans. “Feel that?”
Before I could object, he pulled me inside a janitor’s closet and shut the door. I was still sweating but I shivered when I felt the cold steel bucket with the dirty mop against my leg.
I could hear the loud laughter of one of the other contestants, an older girl named Elizabeth. They all seemed to know each other—most of them were friends, taking music classes at the college. When one of the guys had asked where I studied, I told him the name of my old high school. Then he asked me the name of the music teacher, and I found myself stammering like an idiot. I’d dropped out in the middle of freshman year, before I could try out for chorus.
“I don’t belong here anyway,” I said softly, more to myself than to Rick. He was kissing my neck. His response was a groan.
By the time I heard them announce my name over the loudspeaker, I’d forgotten that I cared. Rick heard it too and put his hand over my mouth. “Keep it down,” he said, and laughed. “What
will they think if they hear their little contest winner doing this?”
Afterwards, Rick went with me to pick up the certificate and the five hundred dollars I won. I was leaning against him when one of the judges asked what I was going to do with the money, if I would use it to further my singing career.
“She’ll probably buy crap for the apartment,” Rick said. He was smiling. “That’s what she does with the money I give her.”
I didn’t say anything. I felt ridiculous, but it was true. Whenever I got any money, I ended up spending it on our place. It seemed like there was always something else we needed: spaghetti strainer, soap dish, laundry basket, welcome mat. Always one more thing and then our place would be a regular home.
It was less than a week after the concert when Rick and his friends were arrested during a heroin deal. And then, at the end of the month, my period didn’t come. For a long time, I winced whenever I thought about the possibility that Willie had been conceived in a janitor’s closet. Later I felt like maybe that Gershwin tune had something to do with it. Like one of my eggs came down, ready and happy, because it heard that gorgeous music.
“I can’t believe he’s real,” Rick is saying, touching Willie’s pink, dimpled knee. “Our kid.”
Rick leans down and lightly kisses his forehead. After a minute, he sits up straighter, reaches for my hand, brings it to his lips. Whispers that he loves me. That he has to have me with him again. Me and Willie too.
I stand up and motion for him to follow me into the bathroom. When I shut the door behind us, I tell him it’s time to leave now. He starts to reach for me but I back up against the wall. As he comes closer, I tell him I can’t be with him anymore. I’ve changed. And when he grabs me anyway, pressing his body against mine, licking my ear, I pull away and tell him a lie. I say there’s somebody else now, I’m sorry. Then I whisper that if he doesn’t leave, I’ll have to call the cops.
He drops his arms; the anger passes across his face so quickly that most people wouldn’t see it. Then he slumps down on the toilet and puts his face in his hands. He stays there for a while, and I’m trying not to look at him, trying not to notice the slight movement of his shoulders that means he’s crying.
Finally, he stands up and leaves without saying a word. I lock the door and collapse in the chair by the window, barely able to breathe. It isn’t until later that I realize he took it with him. The picture of me and Willie.
THE SONG READER
Can the lyrics to a song reveal the secrets of the heart? Find out in this sparkling bestseller by Lisa Tucker.
Leeann lives with her beautiful older sister—the world’s first and only “song reader.” Everyone in their small town thinks Mary Beth is special, and Leeann does, too. Mary Beth helps people figure out how they really feel by using the songs they can’t get out of their minds. And her advice is always right. But when Mary Beth makes a terrible mistake and half the town—including the family of the one boy Leeann cares about—turns against Mary Beth, Leeann will have to rethink everything she knows about her own family, and herself.
Read on for a look at Lisa Tucker’s
The Song Reader
Currently available from Pocket Books
Chapter One
My sister Mary Beth was a song reader. Song reading was her term for it and she invented the art as far as I know. It was kind of like palm reading, she said, but instead of using hands, she used music to read people’s lives. Their music. The songs that were important to them from as far back as they could remember. The ones they turned up loud on their car radios and found themselves driving a little faster to. The ones they sang in the shower and loved the sound of their own voice singing. And of course, the songs that always made them cry on that one line nobody else even thought was sad.
Her customers adored her. They took her advice—to marry, to break it off with the low-life jerk, to take the new job, to confront their supervisor with how unfair he was—and raved about how much better off they were. They said she was gifted. They swore she could see right into their hearts.
From the beginning, my sister took it so seriously. She’d been doing readings less than a month when she had those cards printed up. Each one said in bold black letters:
Mary Beth Norris
Song Reader/Life Healer
Let me help you make sense of the music in your head.
[Family problems a specialty.]
Leave a message at 372-1891. Payment negotiable.
She had to work double shifts at the restaurant to pay for the cards and the answering machine, but she said it was just part of her responsibilities now. “I have a calling in life,” she told me, “and I’ve got to act like it.”
I wish I’d saved one of those cards, but I wasn’t there the night she buried them at the bottom of the garbage can. It was after Ben left, and after I discovered she’d lied to me about my father. It was when the trouble with Holly Kramer was just beginning, and I still thought—like most of the town—that her talent was undeniable.
Some people even claimed she had to be psychic. After all, no one else knew that Rose was in trouble except Mary Beth; no one even suspected that Rose would take Clyde’s car on that sun-blind Saturday morning and drive it right over the sidewalk and through the glass wall of his News and Tobacco Mart except my sister, who told Rose two months before that she’d better stop seeing Clyde. From the song chart, Mary Beth knew Clyde had to be bad news. She shook her head when Rose got stuck on “Lucille” for five weeks and warned her a life can’t hold this much sadness for long. When Rose started humming “Hungry Heart,” Mary Beth knew the lid was about to blow off Rose and Clyde’s relationship. But she didn’t tell Rose I told you so when we went with Rose’s mother to bail her out of jail. She wasn’t that way with her advice, not at all.
My sister kept file cards on her customers, “song charts” neatly alphabetized in a large green Rubbermaid box in the corner of our kitchen. On Saturdays she would meet with new customers in the little room downstairs our landlady Agnes had donated to the cause—as long as Mary Beth kept the room clean and didn’t disturb Agnes’s husband’s sketches and charcoal pencils still sitting on the desk exactly as he left them when he died eighteen years before. Sometimes she gave advice at these first meetings, but usually she waited until she’d kept the chart for at least a few weeks before she gave them a reading.
They were instructed to call twice each week, on Sunday and Wednesday, and leave a short message telling her the songs and the particularly important lines they had hummed for the last few days. She had to rewind the cassette on the Phonemate back to the beginning to fit all the messages that would come in. I helped her update the charts. (It was a lot of work, especially when they reported country and western songs, which I hated.) I wrote down the titles and lines exactly as they said, even if they got it wrong, for what’s important, Mary Beth said, is how they hear the words. But if they were off on the lines, we would make a little star on their chart since Mary Beth said they might be hearing them wrong for a reason. We also made an “S” if they’d sung the lines on the machine, and a “C” if they’d sounded like they were crying or struggling not to.
Mary Beth was proud of this organized system. It allowed her to just glance at an entry and know quite a bit. For example, one of the entries on Dorothea Lanigan’s chart was the last two lines of “Yesterday.” Dorothea had changed only a word and a tense, but Mary Beth had nodded when she looked at the chart later that night and said, “Well, that’s that.”
Even I thought this one was obvious. After all, the song was about lost love, wasn’t it? “It’s too bad Dorothea and Wayne are splitting,” I said. “She must be miserable.”
Mary Beth looked up at me from the floor where she was sitting surrounded by charts and burst out in a laugh. “Leeann, they are going to be engaged by the end of the month. You mark my words.” And of course, it turned out to be true. They had their wedding the next summer. Mary Beth was the maid of honor
, since Dorothea said it was all thanks to her.
It was a gift, everybody said so. Sometimes I wished I had the gift, too, but I knew I didn’t; I’d tried and failed too many times with my friends to believe otherwise. I asked them about their music and I gave them my theories, but I was always way off, and Mary Beth finally told me I was dangerous. “You can’t mess around with something like this. What if somebody believes you?”
I knew, though, there was little chance of that. Mary Beth was the kind of person you take seriously; I had never been. Only my sister saw me as the thoughtful, intense person I felt I really was; my friends and acquaintances looked at me as a sweet, happy-go-lucky, go-along-with-anything kind of person. And I knew that was a side of me, too, but I was more comfortable at home, always had been, even though I didn’t have parents.
Sure, we were a small family after Mom died, but it wasn’t lonely. We had the endless stream of my sister’s customers and of course the music. Every day, all day, our stereo would play and Mary Beth would talk about the lyrics, what they really meant. Even when we got Tommy, she kept it up, because she said babies could adjust to noise just fine, as long as you gave them the chance.
When Tommy first came to us, Mary Beth wasn’t even all that surprised. She was only twenty-three, but she’d wanted a child as long as she could remember, and she was a big believer in things working out, no matter how improbable the odds. “It was meant to be,” she concluded. “It’s a sign that I’ve waited long enough.”
At first, I didn’t see it that way. I was eleven then; I knew you couldn’t just hand over a living, breathing baby as payment for services rendered. Of course Mary Beth insisted Tommy wasn’t payment, but I didn’t see the distinction. After all, a customer had given him to my sister after the song reading was over, the same way they gave her cakes and stews and afghans and even cash occasionally.
Her name was Linda, but she called herself Chamomile, like the tea. She had a garden of red and purple flowers tattooed on her back, a string of boyfriends back in Los Angeles, and a fourteen-month-old son with big black eyes and curly black hair that she hadn’t even bothered to name.