Outside the window, the maple tree nodded in the breeze, its miniature leaves bright green. The roar of the Fisher Freeway bounced along the treetops. After one last glance in the mirror, Miriam ran downstairs toward the clank of dishes and the smell of coffee and bacon. Her parents appeared in their usual positions: Dad at the end of the table, Mom at the stove, as dependable as the sun rising in the morning or the Pistons choking when it mattered most. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen.
Dad didn’t even look up from his paper, but Mom turned her cheek toward Miriam’s kiss. “Did you sleep well? Where are you off to so early?”
“I’m meeting with a bride and groom. Remember? If they like me, they’ll hire me to play their wedding. Remember?” She hated herself for saying it twice, for the angsty note in her voice, but they’d just talked about this two nights ago.
Dad gave her a sour look and ruffled the paper. “Don’t be gone too long. You need to be studying for the SAT, not dinking around on the piano all day.”
Miriam grabbed a toaster pastry. Her mother looked up. “Don’t you want some eggs?”
“No.” She dashed out the door and ran for the bus stop, seething.
They’d all taken piano when they were little, but where her older siblings had fought tooth and nail to quit, Miriam had to fight for the right to continue. It was one thing to pay for half-hour lessons, but when she graduated to an hour and a more expensive teacher, her parents balked. She’d spent the last four years mowing lawns and babysitting to help cover the expense. Doing weddings would be a huge step up. The pressure from Mom and Dad had ratcheted upward lately. Josephine and Brad had already stamped their passports out of the world of time cards and union dues; every week at church, Mom bragged about Brad acing his premed courses and Josephine’s steady rise up the floors of a New York skyscraper.
Miriam wanted them to brag on her for earning a hundred bucks an hour as a high school pianist.
She ran over her mental list again: Pachelbel, Schubert, Purcell: the holy trinity of wedding music, her piano teacher had called them. Far from the hardest pieces Miriam had learned. She’d also spent an hour last night, cramming a handful of top forty songs. Just in case.
Wait a minute. She’d left those pieces on the piano.
She sprinted home. The screen door squealed, but her parents, engrossed in conversation, didn’t acknowledge her entrance. She grabbed the sheet music off the piano and shoved it in her bag with shaking fingers, barely noticing the measured voices in the kitchen until Mom said, “ … talked to a lawyer.”
Miriam stopped halfway back to the door. What did her parents need a lawyer for?
Then Dad answered. “I assume he told you the same thing mine told me. Stick it out until Mira graduates.”
Miriam’s feet felt glued to the floor. All her life, her parents had gone to work, gone to church, gone to ball games and school events. Never once did they look at each other the way she imagined Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet would have done. But they’d always been there. Never a major fight, every problem approached with level-headed reason.
The words coming out of her parents’ mouths now made Miriam feel like she was looking into a carnival mirror: the shape of everything familiar distorted, reversed. All those words, about separate rent payments and child support, could only add up to one thing, and that thing just wasn’t possible. Not in her family.
And they were talking about it practically right in front of her! They must not have heard her come back in, over the noise of the bacon frying.
“Well, I’ve been making your meals and doing your laundry this long.” Mom’s voice was tight. “I suppose I can put up with it for one more year. But the minute she moves out, I’m done. You understand?”
Paper crinkled as Dad folded the newspaper and set it on the table. “If it’s bothering you that much, draw up a list of household duties. I’ll do whatever you want.” He sounded weary. “Just hang it in the closet, somewhere Mira won’t see it.”
The frying pan slammed. “Don’t you dare play the victim, Phil! You’re like a block of ice. How am I supposed to live with that? Why do you think I want a divorce?”
The impossible word cracked the air between the kitchen and the living room. Three months ago her parents had celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary with silver bells in the middle of every table and a blessing at Mass. The choir had sung a song. Everybody had oohed and aahed over them.
Yet she could also hear Brad whispering in her ear in the middle of Mass. “They’re holding hands,” he’d said. “Does that seem weird to you?”
It had seemed weird, because Mom and Dad never touched. Ever.
They rarely fought. But they never kissed either. Not in the morning, not at the Sign of Peace at Mass, not even before bed. Miriam had never questioned it, but now, as she fled the house for a world that made sense, understanding settled in a dull ache on her collarbone, repeating over and over:
I should have known.
42
Sunday, May 8
Albuquerque, New Mexico
MIRIAM WOKE TO THE rumble of a hot dryer and the smell of Vicks.
She lay with the pillow over her eyes, getting her bearings. It had been a long time since she’d dreamed about the divorce fight. Thankfully, it had been brief—just a flash of the emotion she’d felt in that moment when the iron skillet slammed down on the stove and her mother shouted.
Plenty of her classmates’ parents had gotten divorced. Why had that moment felt so monumental to her? Maybe because it happened without warning. As far as she’d known, her parents’ relationship was just fine.
She’d
