Sway by Kat Spears Page A

built at the same time as the university. It was an easy walk to the historic downtown and the collection of restaurants and bars that stayed open long after the shops had closed.
    Dad was playing with a trio that evening—one of several bands that he practiced with on a regular basis—at a small club. The doorman recognized me and let me in though it was a twenty-one-and-older crowd after the dinner rush. I sat in the back, hidden in a dark corner, and watched my father as a stranger would. Tonight he played the piano, one of several instruments he could play before he ever learned to read music.
    By the time I was thirteen, I had accompanied him at small, intimate shows like this one, and large concert venues where ours was one of many bands. At first I had played only rhythm guitar, backing up his group, but after a while he would give me lead on some pieces, stepping back to hand over the spotlight, though careful always to announce to everyone I was his son. He couldn’t stand the thought of letting me take an accomplishment for myself, wanted everyone to know my God-given talent had come from his genes.
    It had never been clear if I was a true prodigy, born with some gene that gave me a gift for playing guitar, or if my father had simply made it so through uncompromising expectation and exposure to the broad possibilities of all music. Like my dad, usually if I heard a song once, I could play it back without ever seeing a sheet of music.
    Listening to my father play, if my eyes were shut, I could focus on the feeling of the music, the swell of it rolling through my seat like a wave and traveling up my spine, filling my core. I sat in the worn, vinyl booth, the ghost of my mother occupying the seat beside me. I felt her presence the way you can sense another person in your house, even if you can’t see or hear them—the groan of a floorboard, the movement of air, the vibration of breath on a heartbeat.
    When I was a kid, I had spent many nights like this, watching my dad perform with my mom beside me. I used to resent the gazes of the men around us as their eyes stole my mother’s quiet beauty, her willowy figure and thick black curls, for their own fantasies. She was my mother, they saw me with her, but it didn’t stop their minds from wandering from her slender wrists to her full lips and mentally undressing her.
    And even though he was a dickhead, my dad had always deeply loved my mom. I could see it in his eyes when he looked at her, his complete and total disbelief that this beautiful, soulful woman had chosen him above thousands of other options. I’m sure it had come as a major shock and disappointment when he realized that behind those brown eyes flecked with gold was a broken brain. Yet still he loved her, even after she had made it impossible to live with her.
    When Dad stood to take his bow, I was already gone, my hands and face burning with the cold. At home I smoked a joint, then lay on my bed, naked and flat on my back with Weezer playing loudly enough that I wouldn’t hear Dad arrive home.

 
    FOURTEEN
    Mr. Dunkelman and I were playing a hand of rummy in the rec room of the old folks’ home late one afternoon. I studied the discard pile and made up my mind to lift the entire pile for a forty-five-point play. He was holding only four cards, so it was a risky move on my part, but I liked watching him get pissed about me making a risky play more than I liked winning.
    â€œIt’s crazy to me,” Mr. D was saying. “They can draft you and send you off to fight in a foreign war when you’re eighteen, but they won’t let you buy a beer or a bottle of whiskey.”
    His outrage was not inspired by sympathy for the plight of youth, but by his desire to have beer and whiskey delivered to him in Hell’s Waiting Room—his nickname for the place he called home.
    â€œThey haven’t drafted anyone since Vietnam,” I said as I sat back and