Street Symphony by Rachel Wyatt Page B

down at the table. “Coffee?”
    “In the pot.”
    “Oh, yes. I’ll clean up.”
    Erin almost said, That’s a good boy. Instead she smiled at the grey-haired, grey-eyed, six-foot-tall, forty-two-year-old kid and kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”
    She longed for a moment to return to her own childhood: the tones of her dad’s double bass groaning up through the floor from the basement as if they kept a wounded animal down there, Mom in the kitchen baking with her notes for next day’s lessons propped up against the cookie jar. In her teens, Erin was never sure which of her parents aggravated her the most. Then Dad took himself out of the running when he left with the symphony oboe player and went to join a Vancouver sextet. A sophomore at Western then, believing in filial duty, she’d gone home to console her mother but found her mother in a carefree space, drinking Riesling and rereading Jane Austen.
    “What are you doing next Sunday?” Mel asked as she was leaving the office.
    “Sunday?”
    “Day after Saturday. Day before Thanksgiving.”
    “Cleaning house most likely.”
    “I’m making brunch for the sisters and their kids. If you’d like to come, you and Dan, you’ll be very welcome.”
    “Thanks, Mel. Mom will be cooking something. She’s decided against a turkey. She’ll do something unusual.”
    “You’ve done something different with your hair.”
    “Are you saying ‘unusual’? My stylist decided I needed a change.”
    “You do!” He stood there looking at her, a handsome, younger, undamaged man, hero of many a novel, and held his arms wide. It wasn’t fair to him that she allowed the embrace and called it a hug to make it innocent.
    “Have a great weekend.”
    “You too.”
    Her mother worried about Dan being alone. But he wasn’t going to set fire to the house, he had simply become – well – simple. He spent mornings in his workshop, watched endless game shows in the afternoons and slept like a child in the spare room on a nest he’d made from blankets and pillows. Erin had become his mother, as her own mother pointed out. Setting aside morals and possible unintended consequences for her daughter’s sake, Mom also pointed out that unless she, Erin, had a sex life, she would become bitter and cruel.
    Erin had pondered long on the cruel and knew she was not that – yet. Bitterness , though, was an occasional guest that hung around the house and left wet towels on the bathroom floor. Thoughts of if-only and why-me prolonged that visitor’s stay. But I am not cut out for adultery, she said. Who was? Would she take the shears one day, clip away all her defenses, and fall into temptation’s arms? As she so nearly had with Mel last week, in the elevator, for heaven’s sake! What fun that would have been for the people in the office, not to mention the guards who scanned the Argos-eyed CCTV screens. Long gone were the days when only an invisible god watched the world, and elevators and closets were likely out of his range.
    Charlie Chaplin hadn’t appeared in her dreams of late and that was a good sign. His cockeyed walk and hat and stick and those sad eyes were too close to home to be funny. At times she felt that she was living in black and white to a background of portentous piano music with words written like signals across her days: The Friday before Halloween, on her way home…
    Erin walked away tired from meeting an author whose manuscript, “in its current form”, was not working and had managed to leave him feeling upbeat and convinced of possibility. Outside, the noise of traffic hit her in the face. The city she knew and loved was trailing its garments in the dust. Drab, overused, dirt and litter on the street, she wanted to sweep a huge vacuum cleaner over it and suck up all the muck. A man shouting about Jesus tried to put a leaflet into her hand. Across the road a group of women in headscarves were holding up placards: Egypt! Free my father. They took a child’s