I use a fork to break apart an English muffin and throw one half of the muffin into the toaster. Mom is on her cell phone and she’s walking around the kitchen, holding a little pad.
The house phone rings and I lift it out of the holder, but Mom pulls it out of my hand. She looks at the number and makes the ringer go quiet.
I sit at the table and wait for the toaster to ding or for Mom to tell me why she’s so excited. Mom makes the first sound.
“Okay,” she says, ending her call. She plops her pad on the table and her butt on the seat. “That was my friend Melissa. She’s been everywhere. She thinks we should look into Costa Rica. It’s a short flight and they’ve got rain forests and beaches and zip-lining and a volcano. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
“I can’t go to Costa Rica. I have to write my song.”
“No, cuckoo. This is for next spring. It’s perfect. You and I have the same week off in March and the wet season doesn’t start until April. I’ll start looking at flights right away. Maybe we can get a deal since we’re still far out.”
The toaster dings and Mom grabs my muffin for me. She takes out the butter and a knife and she spreads the butter on the muffin and brings it to me on a plate. Mom always tells me that she’s not my waitress but this morning it seems like she’s changed her mind.
“So this is really happening? Dad is closing the studio?”
“I know you’re upset. It’s upsetting for all of us.”
I’ve never seen Mom look so happy.
Actually, that’s not true. She looked this happy when she was trying to plan our vacation last year, and when our vacation didn’t happen she looked extremely unhappy. But it’s very true that this whole thing is upsetting me and Dad.
“He loves his studio,” I say. “Why would he close it?”
She opens her mouth to answer but the words don’t come out for a few seconds. “Because we can’t afford it anymore.”
Mom likes to make graphs on the computer and she likes to keep every receipt. She’ll get rid of the TV channels we don’t watch and she’ll tell the person on the phone that she’s going to cancel our service unless she gets a lower price. She always knows which toilet paper is the better deal, the package of eighteen regular rolls for $11.69 or the package of twelve double rolls at $9.39. So if Mom says we can’t afford the studio, I guess I have to believe her. But I don’t understand how we can’t afford the studio but we can afford a trip to Costa Rica, wherever that is.
“You make all that extra money tutoring,” I say. “Why can’t you just pay for the studio?”
“Because I don’t want to anymore.”
“What?”
“Forget it.”
“I can’t.”
“If you want to pay for the studio,” Mom says, “be my guest.” She points the butter knife at me but not in a mean way, in a teacher way, which is what she is. Even though it’s the summer she still teaches kids almost every day because she says her normal paycheck amounts to pennies and there are only so many books she can read on the couch before she starts to get antsy.
I’m pretty sure Mom would keep herself busy even if she were rich because she hates to sit around. She calls Dad a homebody, which I guess makes her an out-of-homebody, which is probably why she’s so excited to buy us all plane tickets.
“Try not to make a mess today,” Mom says. “We have company coming.”
“Our friend Gavin will be staying with us for a little while.”
“The same Gavin who was on the news the other night?”
“Yes. That Gavin.”
After we saw Gavin Winters on the TV, Mom told me to go to my bedroom and put my pajamas on, which meant that she and Dad needed to talk. When Mom came to my room later it looked like she had been crying. It was probably because she was thinking about her friend Sydney. She cried a lot right after he died, but she’s been pretty good lately, unless something reminds her.
“Why is Gavin coming here?”
“Because I invited him.”
“But why?”
“He’s going through a really rough time right now,” Mom says. “I thought it might be good for him to take a little trip.”
“You’re obsessed with trips.”
She drops the knife into the dishwasher. “Dad’s picking him up from the airport tonight after work.”
When Mom says work, I’m imagining Dad recording music downstairs, but by work, she means “doing construction with Grandpa.” I’m not ready to start changing what words mean in our house because the studio isn’t closed yet and it can’t close until I finish my song. Actually, maybe it’s not such a bad thing that Dad is doing his new kind of work because that means the studio for once is all mine.
I hurry up and eat my muffin because I want to write as much as I can before our guest arrives. Now it makes sense why the house smells like lemon and the kitchen tiles are shiny and all the things on the coffee table are lined up straight.
As I’m leaving my dirty plate on the table, I suddenly have a very important thought. “Is Gavin famous?”
Dad is always talking about the difference between being famous and being remembered, how the first is easy but it lasts only fifteen minutes and the second is hard but it lasts much longer. But before you get the second, you have to get the first, which means people have to know my name before they can remember it. If I can win the Next Great Songwriter Contest, people will finally know my name (the famous part) and then my song will keep reminding them never to forget it (the remembering part).
Mom is busy on the computer in the living room, probably trying to find the best deal on hotels in Costa Rica. “I don’t know if I’d call him famous,” she says. “He’s on TV. I guess he’s a little famous.”
A little famous is still a pretty good amount of famous. “What time will he be here?”
When the door to the studio opens and Dad and Gavin walk in, I’m sitting with my legs crossed and my boots on and my hair falling over my eyes. Even though my leg is asleep from sitting this way and my feet are sweaty from the heavy boots and I can’t see a thing through my hair, I don’t mind because I’ll bet you any amount of money I look amazing.
“Oh, hey, honey,” Dad says. “I didn’t see you there.”
I stand up and brush my hair to the side because I’ve already made a good impression and now I want to be able to see.
“Joan,” Dad says, getting me ready, “this is Gavin.” The reason Dad says it like that, stretching out this like it’s a longer word than it really is, is that Dad knows that it’s a little strange that I’m only meeting Gavin now for the first time when I’ve heard about him for so many years and I’ve already seen his face in pictures and on television.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008: Mom and I are watching American Idol and the commercials are starting, so I go to the kitchen for more veggie straws. Mom screams and I’m worried that there’s a spider, but then she says, “It’s Gavin!” I look at the TV and I see Gavin wearing a suit and driving around in a nice car in some commercial.
Dad is giving me a look with his eyebrows raised like those bridges that let the boats through. He knows that I’m always in two places at once: where my mind is and where my body is.
The real Gavin, the one in front of my body right now and not the one who was just in my mind, is wearing skinny pants, pointy shoes, a striped T-shirt, and a navy suit jacket. His hair is curled over like a big wave and he looks tired. He has a big pack on his back and he’s tall enough to reach the ceiling and his eyes are blue and bright. He looks like he could do something special.
He stares at me like he’s a camera. I never know what face to make when someone takes my picture so I just stand there and look dumb.
And then he bows like I’m a princess or something and he says, “Hello, Joan.”
He knows my name.
He looks around at the rack of guitars and the control desk and the upright piano and Dad’s drum set. He checks out all the colorful things on the walls and peeks through the square window into another small room where people can sing into a silver microphone (Dad says it’s an isolation booth, but I call it the Quiet Room).
“Beautiful,” Gavin says. “I guess this is the Coke side of life.” Gavin winks at Dad, but Dad gives him only a small smile back. The line that Gavin just said is from a Coca-Cola commercial that used Dad’s music, but I don’t want to think about all the cool commercials that used Dad’s music right now because it only reminds me about what’s going to happen to his studio.
Gavin is looking down at me from his great height. “I hear you’re quite a musician yourself.”
I’m wondering if I’m already known around the world and I just didn’t realize it.
Dad leads Gavin down the hall. “Towels are in here,” Dad says, pointing to the narrow closet. “Bathroom is over here.” And now we’re at the end of the hall and Dad switches on the light in the guest bedroom.
Gavin walks over to the framed poster on the wall that says Awake Asleep. It’s the name of Dad and Gavin’s college band. Dad was the drummer and Gavin was the singer.
Dad and I are waiting for Gavin to say something or do something but he isn’t moving an inch. He’d be great at freeze tag.
“Is this where Sydney used to stay?” Gavin says.
“Four times,” I say, because why say a few when four is the right answer? “I can tell you the exact dates.”
Dad tries to push me out of the room. “I’ll meet you upstairs, honey.”
“You remember all the days he stayed here?” Gavin says.
“Yes,” I say.
Dad lets go of my shoulder. Gavin looks down at the floor and then at me. “What else do you remember?”
“Everything.”
Gavin makes a face like he doesn’t believe me. Dad tries to push me out of the room again but I make my body stiff. I don’t like the idea of Gavin thinking I’m a liar. “On September tenth, 2012, which was a Monday,” I say, “Sydney was wearing a gray suit with no tie and the suit had light gray stripes on it.”
Dad loses his patience and says, “Okay, Joan.”
As I’m walking out the door I hear Gavin say, “From Ted Baker.”
“What?”
“That was his Ted Baker suit,” Gavin says.
“Oh.”
I’m frozen. We all are.
Then Gavin smiles and says, “Good night, Joan.”
And I smile and say, “Good night, Gavin.”