As if a light clicked on behind her eyes, she brightened. “There’s so much I want to do. Help those in need. See the world. Fall in love.”
The boyfriend came looking for her, the screen door slapping the frame behind him. Grinning at having found her, he had an uncanny effect upon me, as if I had met him somewhere long ago, but I could not place his face. I could not shake the feeling that we knew each other, but he was from the opposite side of town. His appearance spooked me, as if I were seeing a ghost or a stranger drawn from another century. Tess scrambled to her feet and nestled into his side. He stuck out a paw and waited a beat for my handshake.
“Brian Ungerland,” he said. “Sorry for your loss.”
I muttered my thanks and resumed my observation of the unchanging lawn. Only Tess’s voice brought me back to the world. “Good luck with your compositions, Henry,” she said. “I’ll look in the record store for you.” She steered Brian toward the door. “Sorry we had to renew our friendship under these circumstances.”
As they left, I called out, “I hope you get what you want, Tess, and don’t get what you don’t.” She smiled at me over her shoulder.
After all the visitors had departed, my mother joined me on the porch. In the kitchen, Mary and Elizabeth fussed over the covered dishes and the empty glasses in the sink. The final moments of the funeral day, we watched crows gather in the treetops before evening fell. They flew in from miles away, strutted like cassocked priests on the lawn before leaping into the branches to become invisible.
“I don’t know how I’ll manage, Henry.” She sat in the rocker, not looking at me.
I sipped another rum and Coke. A dirge played in the background of my imagination.
She sighed when I did not reply. “We’ve enough to get by. The house is nearly ours, and your father’s savings will last awhile. I’ll have to find work, though the Lord knows how.”
“The twins could help.”
“The girls? If I had to count on those two to help with so much as a glass of water, I would be dead of thirst. They are nothing but trouble now, Henry.” As if the notion had just occurred to her, she quickened her rocking. “It will be enough to keep them out of ruining their reputations. Those two.”
I drained the glass and fished a wrinkled cigarette from my pocket.
She looked away. “You might have to stay home for a while. Just until I can get on my feet. Do you think you could stay?”
“I guess I could miss another week.”
She walked over to me and grabbed my arms. “Henry, I need you here. Stay for a few months, and we’ll save up the money. Then you can go back and finish up. You’re young. It will seem long, but it won’t be.”
“Mom, it’s the middle of the semester.”
“I know, I know. But you’ll stay with your mother?” She stared till I nodded. “That’s a good boy.”
I ended up staying much longer than a few months. My return home lasted for a few years, and the interruption of my studies changed my life. My father hadn’t left enough money for me to finish college, and my mother floundered with the girls, who were still in high school. So I got a job. My friend Oscar Love, back from a tour of duty with the navy, bought an abandoned store off Linnean Street with his savings and a loan from the Farmers & Merchants. With help from his father and brother, he converted the place into a bar with a stage barely big enough for a four-piece combo, and we moved the piano from my mother’s house. A couple of guys from the area were good enough to round out a band. Jimmy Cummings played the drums, with George Knoll on bass or guitar. We called ourselves The Coverboys, because that’s all we played, and when I wasn’t pretending to be Gene Pitney or Frankie Valli, I would tend bar a few other nights of the week. The gig at Oscar’s Bar got me out of the house; plus, the few extra dollars enabled me to help out the family. My old friends would drop in, applaud my return to playing piano, but I loathed performing. That first year back, Tess showed up with Brian or a girlfriend a couple of times. Seeing her there reminded me of the dreams I had deferred.
“You were a mystery man,” Tess told me one night between sets. “Or mystery boy, I should say, back in grade school. As if you were somewhere totally different from the rest of us.”
I shrugged my shoulders and played the first measures from “Strangers in the Night.” She laughed and rolled her eyes. “Seriously, though, Henry, you were a stranger. Aloof. Above it all.”
“Is that right? I certainly should have been nicer to you.”
“Oh, go on.” She was tipsy and grinning. “You were always in another world.”