Page 61 of Sounds Like Love
“Oh, look, here’s one of your dad onstage when we used to do the poetry nights! I loved the ascot,” she added as she handed me another one of my dad, his hand wrapped around the microphone, fist raised in the air, his face beet red as if he was yelling.
I squinted. “He’s … quoting ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade,’ isn’t he?”
Mom’s smile turned adoring. “Of course he is.”
Shaking my head, I handed the photo back. Some things really never did change. “Do you have any of you onstage?” I asked.
She gave it a thought. “Probably not—oh, no, actually …” And she reached for a different pile, one over to the side, that wasn’t separated out like the others. She shuffled through it and took out an old photo. “Here.”
It was grainy and faded, like most of the ones on the lobby’s walls, except this one had Mom in it, frozen mid-song, in dirty light acid-washed jeans and a leopard-print top, her hair teased to heaven. Her arm was around another woman with pixie-cut red hair in a bright pink spandex leotard and a baggy red jacket with wickedly large shoulder pads.They sang into a microphone on a stand, clearly backup singers in a blurry band. They looked like night and day, Mom’s muted clothes against the woman’s bright neons.
Mom said, “Your dad took that one the first night we met.”
“You look soyoung,” I marveled. I’d seen photos of when Mom was young before, but they were mostly ones with Dad or the pixelated one from Google. None of them were as sharp or real as this one—it was like she was made of star stuff when the spotlight shone on her. If this was the night they met, then she was still singing with the Boulevard. “Who is the woman?”
“She was a friend of mine,” Mom replied, absently moving on to another photo, one of my grandparents—my dad’s parents—in the box office. “Look at what else I found!”
But I didn’t want to change the subject quite yet. This was the closest I’d ever gotten to Mom talking about her past. “Do you miss it?”
She shrugged. “The Boulevard? No.”
“Singing?”
“I still do that, you know.”
“I know, but not upthere.” I nudged my head toward the stage. “Do you miss that part of it? Performing?”
She gave a half-hearted shrug, pulling out a crumpled flyer for a karaoke night in the early aughts. “Sometimes, but you know the story. It’s not that interesting.”
“I think it is,” I insisted, though this was where she always shut down. Always said the same thing—she came to Vienna Shores, fell in love, and never left. That music led her here to her happily ever after. But … there was more to it. The photo she showed me proved that. “Sometimes I feel like you had this whole life before the Revelry that you keep secret,and I’m just … I’m scared that I’ll never know it. I’m scared if I don’t keep asking, then soon …” My voice cracked when it came to that possibility. My vision grew hazy, but I blinked back the wetness. “I just want to learn everything about you before I can’t.”
Mom silently organized a few more pieces of junk from the box—another ticket stub and two more photos of Dad at another poetry reading. It was worth a shot, at least, but I wasn’t going to push her any more if she didn’t want to talk. I just wished—I wished she wanted to. I wished I could be her secret keeper as much as she was one for me.
Just as I began to think maybe I should leave her to her organizing, she said, “It’s complicated, heart. I think by the time I got here, I was so tired of … all of it. Performing. Traveling. The road in general. At that point, I’d met my share of washed-up musicians waiting tables. I didn’t want to be one.”
“Was the Rev special, then? Or was it just somewhere to be?” I asked as she abandoned the box and fetched a beer for me and a root beer for her from the refrigerator behind the bar.
She went to open the top on the bottle opener like she had a thousand times before, as fluid as second nature. She put the cap under the lip. Then took it out again. Confusion flickered across her brow. For a moment, she stood there quietly.
“Mom?” I asked, sliding off the barstool. “Everything okay?”
“Fine,” she replied, but it was clear things weren’t fine as she stared at the bottles in her hands. Like she couldn’t remember how to open them.
“Like this.” I grabbed one of the bottles, stuck it under the lip of the opener, and pushed down. The cap bent off.
Mom’s face crumpled. “Duh, Wynona. I knew that.” She shook her head, repeated my action, and tossed our bottle caps in the recycling. “What would I do without you?”
I clinked my bottle against hers. “I love you.”
“I love you more.”
We both took a drink and returned to our seats. I tried not to linger on what happened. Tried not to tally it with all the other small things coming together, painting a picture I already knew about, but had never seen in person. I rubbed my thumb on the cold condensation on the bottle.
“Why does the beer always taste better here?” I asked.
Mom laughed. “Because the Rev feels like home.” She leaned against the bar, fiddling with the label on her bottle, looking up into the steel-beam rafters, at the crumbling cement walls, the red mahogany countertop scratched with names of patrons of decades past. “I was just some girl from nowhere Nebraska when I joined the Boulevard. I can’t tell you how many nights we slept in vans and made ends meet by busking on sidewalks and taking wedding gigs and birthday parties. My parents disowned me. My friends said I was crazy. Maybe I was, but I’d never trade those years for anything. I met your dad while playing a two-night gig here, and something just felt right. We spent the night walking the beach, and the next morning …”
“The wild horses came through the town,” I finished for her. This part Ididknow. Dad liked telling this part best.
