“Can I?”
“Get some fruit,” Julian said. “Kitchen.”
Micah ran out, and we stayed. He sat with his hands resting on the keys he hadn’t covered yet. I leaned against the side of the piano. He didn’t look at me for a moment, and then he did.
“Julian, you are amazing. I mean, the way you play, it’s… and then your voice… I mean you are so talented. It’s incredible.”
“Just fooling around,” he said, his voice returning to its usual controlled tone, as he closed the piano lid.
“Fooling around? No, Julian, you play like a truemusician. Sing like a talentedartist. That was professional quality. Why don’t you–”
“I don’t have time for that anymore.” He cut me off, reaching for the cloth to cover the piano again. “I’m in music every day. The business side. That’s what matters.”
“But you loved it. I could see it in your face?—”
“Alyssa. The real answer? My parents taught me how to sing. My pops taught me how to play.” He looked down at his hands. “Then my mother died, and my father left, and it just became a thing I didn’t do.”
“That’s what grief does,” I said. “It puts pieces of you in a room andcloses the door.” I hadn’t meant to say it like that; it came up out of the same place my singing had.
“Mm.” He didn’t look at me. “We should think about dinner. Getting late.”
He finished drawing the sheet over the piano, and the most alive thing in the house went back to being furniture under a sheet.
He held the door for me as I walked out, and closed it behind us.
julian
Late that night,my house was too quiet. I usually liked the quiet, but that night it pressed.
Alyssa’s voice was still in the room with me. The sound of it, laid over the notes my hands had made on a piano I had not touched in eighteen years. I could not pull the two of them apart.
I poured a glass of bourbon I didn’t really want and sat down on the couch. The piano was covered again, and the door was closed. But it did not feel closed.
She sang. She knew the song.
I had prepared myself, when Micah asked me to play, for my hands to have forgotten, reaching for a thing I had not let them feel in nearly two decades. I had not been prepared for her to open her mouth and find what I was playing.
I didn’t choose what I was playing. My hands did. They went where they used to go on Sunday evenings, after the cooking was done and the kitchen was clean, and my mother would sit in the chair by the window with her eyes shut and her hand keeping time on the armrest.Play me the freedom one, Jules.
Donny Hathaway. She loved his music so much you would think she was related. She used to say he sang about being free like a man who knew he was never going to be.
Alyssa sang one of my mother’s favorite songs and had no idea what she was holding. Her voice had stitched itself through my hands tonight, and then she leaned against my father’s piano and told me the truest thing anyone had said to me in eighteen years.That’s what grief does. It puts pieces of you in a room and closes the door.
The grief came up, and I let it for just a moment. What choice did I have? It was already up. I reached for the thing I’d told myself for years:there’s no use for this, you don’t have time. The thoughts came out worn, like a key that had stopped fitting its lock. I said them to myself anyway, finished the bourbon I didn’t want, and went up to bed.
But the door at the end of the hall did not feel closed. And I lay in the dark for a long time, hearing Alyssa’s voice laid over my mother’s song, and the grief I’d kept behind that door for years would not go all the way back behind it.
33/
cemeteries & birthdays
alyssa
I knewit was their mother’s birthday before anyone said a word. Julian moved through his morning routine like he was bracing for something.
I’d offered to stay at his house with the kids while he drove with his siblings to the cemetery. It made the most sense. Zion would have Taryn there to lean on, Simone would have Raschad, Tre would be there and Julian would have all of them. I was the only adult in the rotation who wasn’t somebody’s spouse, which made me the logical one to keep Zaria and the boys. Whatever Julian and I were didn’t earn me a place at the edge of his mother’s grave, and I didn’t pretend it did. They didn’t treat me like an outsider, though.
Simone handed me Zaria as Zhaire came through the door at a dead sprint looking for Micah. Julian waited by the door with his keys already in his hand. Zion, Tre and Simone drifted toward him like he was the thing that held the shape of the day.