side a, track 5
“so fuck you and your untouchable face”
Day 3
1,567 klicks
800-ish to Ontario
The big green highway sign said MANITOBA 50KM in white letters. My lips were sore from shelling too many salty Spitz sunflower seeds. I was twitching for a cigarette. Licorice wasn’t really cutting it. The road ahead was blurry with heat haze. It looked like we’d soon be driving through a giant vacuum bubble that might transport us up up and away to another dimension. If I could choose, I wouldn’t have minded going back to Jane Austen’s time, when a kiss was a major big deal, when love brewed slowly over singular moments exchanged in ballrooms and on the moors. Good conversations over infinite cups of tea discussing species of flowers in the garden. Wit and decency reigned in Austen stories. And I detected some good lust too, even though she never quite described it explicitly. All those brooding, swaggering horsey men though . . . Maybe I needed to move to England. Henry James said the English were the most romantic of all people. And you can really see that, with guys like Morrissey and D.H. Lawrence and E.M. Forster and Oscar Wilde, or actually wasn’t he Irish, and Morrissey too—maybe it’s the Irish I need. At least there were actual people over there, unlike here in this prairie void.
Finn slapped his thighs. “Okay, that’s it then. Before I head home I think we need to check someone out. And then, poof, I’ll be gone and it’ll be your road trip again.”
I could see by the way she inhaled that Isobel was running out of patience with him. Earlier, I’d heard them having a just-friends discussion when I was pumping gas. She’d told him that it was our road trip and even though he was a great sport it was time for him to go. She squashed his remaining hope by saying she would never date him again, and that he had to move on. She invented a Québécois boyfriend who she said she was going to hook up with in Montreal: François Saucisse.
“Who wants to bring a sandwich to the buffet?” she said to me in the gas station can. We both knew the percentage of hot men in Quebec was astronomical. I was fond of Finn. It was mean to relegate him to the sandwich category after all he’d been through with us.
“If you guys come with me to the Winnipeg festival, there’s this singer we can see. Apparently she’s mind-blowing. Life-changing. Remember, Dan Bern told me she’s the most dynamic live performer since James Brown,” Finn said.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Ani DiFranco.”
“Is she Italian?”
“Maybe, I don’t know, but I’ve been talking to people, and she’s supposed to be unbelievable! Don’t you remember Dan mentioning her during the interview, toward the end?”
Finn knew he could always woo Isobel and me with stories of some musician-god that we just had to see. He had witnessed and even participated in our ritual of getting new music and having listening sessions together. We had strict rules: Lie on the floor. Eyes Closed. No Speaking. Careful Listening to All Lyrics. Discuss and Replay to Catch Nuances. Lots of music was grower music, the kind you had to play over and over until it clicked. Sometimes it was that music you ended up liking the most. The kind you struggled to like at first. Other music was obviously just loin-dazzling, mind-whirling, kneecap-buckling on first listen. What we specialized in, what really got us going though, was pathos. Little notes that struck big portentous moods. Over-the-top Janis Joplin–type scratching voices, screaming with hunger. Yearning and moaning. Lying around listening carefully to music was what we did when we weren’t at the cinema, or the bookstore. We’d been doing it since we were fifteen. Maybe that’s why I fainted; it was such a habit to be lying down, to better hear the music.
Lots of wannabe participants had failed over the years, had been banned from our music-appreciation club over breaking the No Speaking rule. Not a lot of people were as devout as us, or as precious about it, I guess. And many people didn’t like being shushed aggressively during our holy rituals. Part of our weirdness probably came from our parents: my dad was a Dylan fanatic and had every album, every bootleg recording, every interview, article, and book in print, and Isobel’s mom was big into all the crooners, but especially Tony Bennett. We weren’t churchgoing families; we were raised with this version of sacred.
Isobel glanced at me then in the rear-view mirror to ensure we were on the same page about going to the Winnipeg Folk Fest. I cherished our non-verbal way of communicating, but I saw Finn feeling excluded. I wriggled in my seat.
“Oui, on y va!” Isobel said. “We still have four days before Annie needs to be on that mountain.”
“Great, I think it’ll be wild! I should be able to find some Edmontonians to hitch home with there too.” He would’ve sounded almost serene if he wasn’t speaking so rapidly. Maybe he’d given up the idea that Isobel was going to fall in love with him again. He had literally gone the distance, almost sixteen hundred kilometres, to find out what he needed to know—that she had never been in love with him.
But he was acting with a kind of grace and generosity of spirit that made me want to make her love him, force her somehow. I loved that he organized adventures, even hijacking a rock star for us. I don’t know why Isobel couldn’t fall for him. He wasn’t mysterious enough, I guess. He was an open book. A book with lots of great pages, though.
When I tried to psychoanalyze her, I never got very far. She was immune to men on some level I couldn’t begin to relate to. I saw her detachment as the strength and independence that I was lacking rather than emotional incompetence.
She was driving because my foot was asleep and there was a strange nervousness in my stomach. I could feel the end of summer and the season turning in the melancholic winds of late August. When I was little I used to think of the last two weeks of August before school starting as two straight weeks of Sundays with the Monday doom looming over your head.
We mostly bypassed the small towns of southern Manitoba with Isobel reading and relishing the French-named places from our trusty roadmap: Portage la Prairie, St. Boniface, Dauphin. Manitoba was the country’s heartland; even colder than Alberta in the winter and definitely hotter in the summer. I was starting to get sick of the drive, it was feeling like the Wednesday morning of the workweek. Our collective bums were numb and our joints were aching from sitting in the same position for hours.
It was the driest time of year. I was parched, and we were out of water and there was no gas station in sight. The sky was baking blue. I imagined the farmers, in their plaid shirts and GWG overalls, sitting on their verandas thinking about going out into the field to do one big collective rain dance.
We listened to Neil Young because it was Neil Young’s province not just Winnie-the-Pooh’s. We tried to imagine Winnipeg bars back in the day having Joni Mitchell and Neil gigging together. No wonder people made great art here, there was nothing else to do, nothing to clutter their young imaginations, just big sky. I watched the fields passing by. More prairie, endless prairie.
Finn stuck his head out the window like a dog—looking like happiness personified. Finn was the dog that yapped at everyone’s heels, doing tricks, rolling around, playing dead—anything to win affection. From the backseat I could see Isobel look at him sunning himself out the window. She smiled; half amused, half irritated.
Eventually we found the festival, forty kilometres north of Winnipeg. It was in beautiful Bird’s Hill Provincial Park. The whole layout had a great mellow vibe despite there being upwards of sixty thousand attendees. And the usual scene was there. Hippies, dippies, old-timers, Hacky-Sack-playing teenagers, toddlers, earnest folkies, patchouli girls, tie-dyed natty dreads, and hempy people. We roamed the grounds and sat down on the grass in the beer garden. Finn went off to get us beers and mini-doughnuts. I was happy to be lying still with the sun on my face with my best friend at my side. Lying on our backs always led to truth sessions—being horizontal meant being intense.
“Are you sure you couldn’t fall for Finn?” I had to ask.
“Well, honestly, j’ai essayé. And I do wish I could, seriously. I don’t know why I can’t . . . I guess I’m like some kind of self-contained unit.” She looked sad confessing this to me. It occurred to me then for the first time that her inability to love Finn wasn’t just another non-event in her long line of contenders contending. It was a failing. Not unlike my own failings. I went too far; she couldn’t go deep enough.
“But feel free to go for him, Annie. You know you and Finn could make a good pair!” Isobel added with a cheeky smile.
“What? Don’t be ridiculous! No way. But . . . he is great, you know,” I said.
The mainstage show was coming on in ten minutes so we tried to get closer, but the field was filling up quickly. A man in drag was on stage doing a shtick about the discomfort of porta-potties: how when you go into one later in the day and it’s at capacity and you’ve had a few beers, you somehow gotta try to hold your purse, plug your nose, and negotiate taking a whiz—it’s tough to hover in those conditions! And you’re truly screwed if you had the god-forbidden hot sauce with the green onion cakes and your intestines are in a hurry to evacuate.
There was something different about this crowd. It took me a few moments to clue in that it was because it was mostly women and girls making up the whole area. They were mobbing the stage. Dan Bern must have been on to something with this Ani Diwhatever.
Isobel wasn’t comfortable with lots of women around. Was she threatened? God knows why, she was a Queen Bee. But I was pretty much her only female friend. I could see her bristling at other good-looking women. Women were looking one another up and down all right, but in a women-are-beautiful way, and don’t they wear nice things. Like raccoons drawn to sparkly objects. In this crowd I think she was the only one doing accounting; everyone else was smiling. I didn’t care that we were road-trip grubby.
It was hot. Hotter than Alberta and more humid. Mosquito count was not too high. They must have sprayed. Bumblebees whizzed over the crowd of femaleness. I glanced over at Finn; he looked pretty happy. Lovelies of all descriptions surrounded him. It was a short-haired, long-haired, curly-haired, Sinead O’Connor shaved-headed, bead-wearing crowd of women smiling in anticipation. Only a handful of men joined the throng. Most of the other guys stood back, watching from afar.
I had never been around this many women before in one place. It was a different energy than at a male performer’s gig: Isobel elbowed me to get my attention and nodded toward two women arm in arm, shaved heads, and only wearing black PVC bras underneath their denim overalls. They had big black stompy boots and a kind of girl warrior chic I had never seen before.
“Psst, Finn . . . psst . . . is this some kind of lesbian event?” Isobel asked.
“Lesbian event, what do you mean?” Finn repeated.
“Shh,” came from someone behind. I turned to look and it was a ten-year-old girl with braids and an orange T-shirt with the words QUESTION AUTHORITY written on it. She was standing beside an older girl who looked like her sister whose T-shirt said READ CHOMSKY.
A roar surged through the crowd. There was no one on stage yet but thunderous clapping, ground-stomping, and cat-calling came bursting from the audience. Whooping went on for minutes, building a tidal wave of suspense. The excitement was contagious. I was filled with anticipation for I didn’t know what.
And then—a small woman walked on stage.
She was five-foot two-ish, like me. She was wearing a motorcyclist’s black leather vest, low, hip-riding jeans, and clunky workman’s boots. She had muscular arms and a tattooed collarbone. Ani DiFranco was wearing an Alvarez Yairi WY1, Finn told us. It looked like it might overpower her, but she had a good grip on it, curled in the curve of her breast. She had big, full lips, super-white teeth, a shaved head, wide sparkling blue eyes, a nose ring, and hairy armpits. She was gorgeous!
She started to tune her Alvarez guitar, and the crowd quieted down, anxious to hear her. She spoke up: “You know, people say I’m an angry girl, but uh . . .” She giggled. “I just got a few things on my mind is all.” Her laugh was charming. I could see that she had black electrical tape on her fingers and I wondered what for. Then she hit the guitar with this crazy Spaghetti Western fury, crackling through her galloping chords. It wasn’t a matter of her warming up or the crowd warming up to her. Everyone was hooked straight up and straight in. I could understand the tape now, it was so she wouldn’t get raw, bloody fingers from playing so crazily hard; like she was trying to break the speed of sound. She played like thunder to her adoring crowd of shaved-headed young followers, hippie girls, suburban preppies, mothers, sisters, and grandmas. Girls, girls, and more girls danced in the front rows, danced so hard the sun-baked ground rose in a dust cloud among us all.
She sang anthems. I looked around; all the girls knew all the words and were singing their hearts out:
I am not a pretty girl
that is not what I do
I ain’t no damsel in distress
and I don’t need to be rescued
so put me down punk
wouldn’t you prefer a maiden fair
isn’t there a kitten
stuck up a tree somewhere
There was no leather-trousered male in sight on stage, but I was falling in big-time heart-throbbing love. A new kind of hero worship had hit me.
She had breakup songs. She had revolution songs. She had fuck-you songs and fuck-me songs. She had the gift of the gab. I had never seen anything like it before. She was no earnest folkie. She was no ridiculous Madonna serving up her sex on a platter, pretending it was original. She was fresh and raw and playful and flirtatious with her shit-disturbing politics, her vulnerable love songs, and her way of playing guitar that sounded like she was twanging all our collective nerves and veins and ligaments. It was visceral and incandescent. I could see fire and mountains and lashing rain and gyrating bodies and tranquil seas, trembling desires, lusty encounters, and brave acts. It was all there, coming out of her little body and mighty fingers.
Ever since she started playing, I’d had a tingling feeling at the base of my skull. A creeping feeling of well-being. It was new, tingling instead of twitching. I was connecting, part of something, and proud. I wasn’t even conscious that I had lost Isobel and Finn. Mouth agape, I just let it all pour inside me through every orifice and pore. It felt like watching a natural disaster, from a safe distance.
Between rocking songs, she played some jazzy improv music and just started talking while jamming, like Van Morrison does sometimes: “You know, there’s a lot of bullshit out there in the world for girls to wade through . . . I was in a clothes store the other day and I was shocked to discover the latest fashion crime: size zero. Have you heard of this? I’m serious . . . it’s for real. I mean, what the crap is that? No really, what the hell is that? I was just trying to buy like a gaunch or something . . .”
“Whooooooooooo,” roared the crowd, egging her on. She stopped talking and lost herself and put all of us in a trance with the wacked acid-jazz medley she played on electric guitar.
“Since when are women built to be a size zero? And is that the point, that as women we should strive to do nothing but spend our time starving ourselves just so we can be a zero? You wouldn’t see a guy buying a pair of size zero pants, now wouldya? I mean, God . . . But anyways . . . we got way more important shit to do . . . like world domination! Ha! . . . I’m no zero, are you guys zeroes?”
“Noooooooooooo . . . woo . . . woo . . . woo . . . rrrrrrrrrrrr,” whistled the crowd.
“I don’t want to preach at y’all, that stuff just pisses me off and I gotta get it off my chest!” She laughed again and snorted in an endearing donkeylike way, hamming it up. She must have been the class clown. She finished tuning, and a few chords into her next song, the crowd went nuts. “Blood in the Boardroom,” it was called. The audience was euphoric.
Sitting in the boardroom,
the I’m-so-bored-room,
listening to the suits talk about their world
. . . I wonder can these boys smell me bleeding thru my underwear.
They can make straight lines out of almost anything . . .
I can make life. I can make breath!
I was in the throes of the crowd, celebrating bloody underwear! Lifted by the group’s oozing exuberance, I was transfixed. I had been moved; just like all these women beside me had been at some point or another when they first heard this woman. My body was a fusilli noodle, at one with the crowd and tunes, swaying and bending, contorting and springing. Ani DiFranco sang in the sun for an hour, driving us crazy with her percussive finger-plucking. People threw roses and incense, T-shirts and books and lipstick and food and panties on the stage. We danced through her twenty-song set. The music went straight to my hips. I was deep in the heart of this crazed crowd. We danced so hard, we were dirty and dusty and smiling big. Her final rock encore was so intense, the dancing so enormous, the sky clapped and a sun-shower came down on us and washed the dust off our faces and made some mud for our feet to play with and splash up our legs.
The crowd wouldn’t let her leave the stage, so she took a swig of water, sat down, and put a tam-tam between her legs. She sang Prince’s “When Doves Cry” a cappella. Just her ragged voice and the brooding drum. It was hair-raising and beautiful like a swim at dawn. I was listening so acutely, almost gulping in all those lovely sounds she made. I saw her biceps beating the tam-tam and I understood how important it was to be fully alive, fully engaged with life. It was like sunlight, after years of candlelight. I’d been too much of a night owl, spent too much time indoors with the curtains drawn.
I had been rapturously inspired before, many times, but I’d never had a female hero before. I made a run for the record store tent. I had to restrain myself from pushing people out of my way to get to her stack of CDs and tapes. She had several albums, but I could only afford two of them. I chose her first one and her most recent release on cassette because then we could play them in the car. I read some of her liner notes while I waited to pay. She was only in her twenties. She had her own record label: Righteous Babe Records. Behind me there were dozens of young girls trying to get their hands on her music.
I made my way back through the crowds, heading to where we had been sitting before the show, figuring Isobel and Finn would know to go there. I was buzzing with excitement, dying to share the experience with them. So excited, I could barely breathe. What a rush to see a woman do it like that—get up there and kick serious musical ass.
Plowing my way through the crowds I wasn’t really concentrating on where I was going and I walked smack into a girl. I actually head-butted her by accident. We both rubbed our foreheads and looked at each other.
“Sorry, wow, I’m really sorry about that,” I said.
She had long romantic red hair and peaches-and-cream skin with freckles. I felt a cloud of foreboding when I looked at her one hazel eye and the other green one. I scrutinized her face, wondering what the likelihood was that this could be the same girl, the same buck-toothed free spirit Sullivan had written about.
She laughed and rubbed her forehead again. “You’re sure in a hurry for a person at a folk fest, is there someone you gotta see?” Her laugh was scratchy and sexy.
Was this really her? I hope she’s not an Ani fan too.
Cowboy hat, a mini-skirt. She’s just like I dreamt her to be. Except in my nightmares she was larger than life and I was a Lilliputian.
I must have fainted. Again.
Am I sleeping? It’s warm and I’m tired. Oh, oh . . . what is that? Am I being kissed? Jesus, what’s going on? That feels weird. My nose is itchy . . . I tried to shake my head back into consciousness, my eyes were heavy and I felt a mouth on me again. A dry, unfamiliar mouth, smothering me. It was breathing into me. Then it pulled away.
The next time I opened my eyes just in time to see her mouth coming toward me. She was plugging my nose too. There was a tent of red hair cascading around my face. She tasted like something tart, something . . . iced tea.
I jerked up when I understood finally what was happening. The she-devil was giving me mouth-to-mouth artificial respiration.
“Hey, are you okay? You just fainted. You passed right out. And I didn’t think you were breathing . . . I think we gotta take you to the medi-tent.”
“No, no, I’m fine, I’m sure it’s just the sun, the beer, the dope, the music, you know . . .”
“Well . . . shit. Are you breathing fine?”
“Ya, thanks for that, Alicia,” I said, still confused.
Her eyes opened wide. “That’s not my—”
I took off running, through the crowds, hoping she wouldn’t follow me. I rubbed my mouth with the back of my hand, trying to rub off her bizarre kiss. I felt stung, and slapped. After I was sure I was lost in the crowd again, I stopped for a rest breath and went to hide behind a Moroccan food tent. Gasping. An old man came back to get some more supplies for his kiosk. He looked at me and said, “You shouldn’t take drugs, you know, it’s very bad for young girls.” Then he wagged his finger at me, like an elementary school principal. He grabbed a water bottle from his cooler and gave it to me. I drank it all in one long gulp, grateful once again for the sweetness of strangers.
I shifted my canvas arm bag from one shoulder to the other. I remembered the Ani DiFranco tapes and pulled them out. I sat down in the shade of a tree. I looked at the crowds around me, making sure I was anonymous again, with no demons in sight. I pulled out Ani’s song lyrics. My eyes were bubbling over with tears.
Untouchable Face
tell you the truth I prefer
the worst of you
too bad you had to have a better half
she’s not really my type
but I think you two are forever
and I hate to say it but
you’re perfect together
so fuck you
and your untouchable face
and fuck you
for existing in the first place
and who am I
that I should be vying for your touch
and who am I
I bet you can’t even tell me that much
. . . y’know, I don’t look forward
to seeing you again
you’ll look like a photograph of yourself
taken from far far away
and I won’t know what to do
and I won’t know what to say
except fuck you
The words weren’t 100 per cent relevant, but they were pretty damn close. I remembered her singing them. I badly needed to hear her singing them again. Once we were back in the car, I could play them over and over. I would put the she-devil out of my mind, forever, she was just some hippie girl like thousands of others, a girl just like me. And maybe it wasn’t even her. It didn’t matter anymore anyway, his infidelity. I was a woman who was moving on. I had new music to lead the way.
I found Finn and Isobel sharing a beer. “Holy shit! That was incredible! I mean, wow. She rocked so hard I can’t believe . . . she’s made of fireandwaterandsmoke and passion, hallelujah . . . !!!”
“Calm down, ma bichette,” Isobel said.
“Isn’t she awesome!” Finn agreed.
“Pas mal,” Isobel said.
“Not bad? She’s a revolutionary, a radical. A hero!” I gulped.
“I don’t know . . .” Isobel said.
“What’s not to know? She rocked!” I was ending our conversation right there. I didn’t want to sully my high with irritation. Isobel’s blaséness disturbed me. She had to have been affected. Surely. What was the problem? Finn took his last sip of beer, then stood up.
“Well, see you, girls. Thanks for the ride. Thanks for the laughs. I saw Joe over there, and he said I can camp here for the weekend and go home with him.”
I looked over at Isobel pleadingly. Now that the time had come, I was sad to see Finn go. I felt it in my stomach. He had become part of our unit. He brought us to Ani. But she was unflinching. I hugged him for what felt like a long time. “See you soon, Finn. Thanks for everything.”
“No worries, Annie. I hope Hawksley gets a chance to experience you and fall passionately in love like he should.” He looked at Isobel and she said, “Salut. Arrivederci, Adios, hombre.” She was trying to be breezy but was falling flat. Finn reached out and tucked her hair behind her ear. He nodded at me and walked away.
“Well, I guess we should go to the can and then get back on the highway. We can listen to the Ani tapes! Unless, you feel like sticking around?” I asked, trying to detect any signs of doubt about Finn in her eyes.
“No, let’s go quickly. I don’t want to keep bumping into him after this.”
Back on the gravel parking lot, I took the wheel. Isobel dozed off almost as soon as I started the engine. I was amazed she could be sleepy after that gig made me so high. I put in one of Ani’s tapes with the volume on low. Whenever my mind drifted toward that girl, I steered it back to Ani. I drove away singing along to the little bits I’d picked up and tried to imagine what it would be like to be her. To be a travelling minstrel. Taking the Greyhound bus from city to city. Sleeping in late, staying up late, having adventures, living on the road, having big diner breakfasts, loving and leaving. Writing beautiful poetry in cafés. Wowing crowds across the continent. I wanted that lifestyle so badly it made my mouth go dry.
I replayed the concert in my mind, relishing again the high. All the girls there at the show seemed to be veterans, singing along, knowing all the words. They were part of a world I knew little about. The kind of people I saw at health food stores who read Ms. magazine and boycotted Nike. I had been missing out. It felt like someone had taken my perspective with her bare hands and adjusted it with a major screeching crank so I could see better. It felt big. Isobel was snoring.
At the next gas station, while Isobel snoozed in the car I went to the payphone and collect-called my dad.
“Hi, Pops.”
“Hi, sweetheart, how are you? Where are you, by the way?”
“Isobel and I are on a road trip. Sorry I didn’t let you know before.”
“Where are you headed?”
“To a gig in Montreal.”
“That’s a long way for a gig! Did they give you time off work?”
“No problem, Pops. Listen, did I ever faint as a child?”
“Are you okay, Annie? Have you been passing out?”
“Just a few times lately. No big deal, I just wanted to know if you remember me doing this.”
“Actually, when you were really little, I mean quite small, up to my knees, I’m not sure what age that was, you used to hold your breath until you passed out. It used to scare the hell out of us. It was either a matter of will, being stubborn over something, like Brussels sprouts, or it was a nervous thing, like during scary movies.”
“I totally forgot about that.”
“Well, you were pretty young. Are you okay? You’re not taking drugs, are you?”
“Dad!”
“So when am I going to see you? We could go to the movies, or book hunting—you could come stay for the weekend.”
“Okay, Dad, when I get back from Quebec. See ya.”
“Take care.”
I felt a little melancholy after that call. I loved my parents, I don’t know why I didn’t make the effort more to see them. Since they’d split up, only a few years ago, everything was so strained.
But the holding-breath thing resonated. A memory came back of my older brother making fun, counting down as my four-year-old self puffed out my cheeks, ready to hold my breath for Canada over I don’t know what tantrum. “You’re going blue, no PURPLE! TEN, TWELVE . . .” He missed a number and I opened my mouth to tell him so. He won.
Isobel often commented on my sighs. I forgot to breathe sometimes, so I had to catch up with huge big gasps.
I vowed to breathe better.
“Holy shit!”
“What’s going on?” said Isobel, waking up.
“There’s rocks and hills, trees and bumps and water. It’s not flat. Not flat! Are we dreaming?”
“Incroyable!”
“It’s weird though, isn’t it . . . You can’t see for miles anymore. I kinda miss the horizon.”
Isobel looked at the map. “This must be the Canadian Shield!”
“I’ve heard of that.” We drove on, mouths open, taking it all in. All the variations of landscape we’d been deprived of having grown up as prairie girls. I liked it, despite having the sensation of being under a smaller sky than I was used to, I liked the hills, the valleys, the rock, the views of higgledy-piggledy bogs and lakes. It seemed more alive, more engaged than the big empty.
By nighttime, we’d forgotten all about the flatness that had been with us for days on end and in fact for our whole lives. We were in a whole new province, a big one: Ontario. We found a beautiful campground near Kenora along the shores of the Lakes of the Woods and unpacked the car. It was so great to be near water and trees with the dusty prairies long behind us. Under the Mexican blanket in the backseat was Finn’s guitar. I was amazed he’d left it. Around the campfire later that evening, Isobel admitted that it was kind of sad without him and his floppy eagerness. She said he was like a golden retriever. I went to the car barefoot, crunching on pine needles, sap, and dirt. I got his guitar, thinking it would somehow invoke him. We could prop it up on the picnic bench and pretend he was there. Isobel unzipped it from its case. It had a big black mark on its blond wood.
It was a scribble. To Annie—Hey Nice Name! kisses, Ani DiFranco. Finn had gotten his guitar signed to give to me. I was beyond touched. It was undoubtedly the biggest gift I had ever received. My own guitar! It had never occurred to me that it was something I could have.
I’m not sure how Isobel felt though.
She just sort of looked at it and looked at me. I couldn’t read her face in the dark with the slim light from the crescent moon above and the fire crackling on its last red embers.