All the Roads That Lead From Home by Anne Leigh Parrish Read Free Book Online Page B

didn’t, though. He didn’t have a will,
either.
    “Because
he wasn’t planning to die,” said Fran, when Angie asked why not. “Don’t you
think he’d have put his affairs in order, otherwise?”
    Angie
sipped her drink. Her father was only sixty-two. He’d been a piano teacher.
Angie’s mother had been one of his students. Their marriage was four months
older than Angie, a last-minute arrangement, she was always told. Angie was
five when her mother ran off with another man, and she remembered nothing of
it, though her father said she’d been right there, watching the car drive away.
What Angie did remember was her mother’s absence, the sudden silence in the
house, and then a postcard from Montana saying, I made a mistake. Her
mother didn’t write again, she didn’t come home, and went on living with her
mistake, Angie hoped, until word came of her death from pneumonia in an Arizona hospital three years later.
    “There are
a few photo albums you can have, and some costume jewelry of your mother’s,
although I don’t know why he kept it, under the circumstances. Oh, and you can
take the ashtrays. You know how he loved those,” said Fran.
    And the
bars he lifted them from, with Angie on the lookout, those many nights when
staying home was no comfort at all.
    In the
beginning they were turned away. What are you thinking, trying to bring a
child in here? In time they were allowed to stay. And stay they did,
through the lunch crowd, the after-lunch crowd, the happy-hour crowd, smoke and
laughter taking them towards night. Everything I ever learned, I learned in
a bar , Angie had told Kevin more than once.
    What she
learned was how to use silence and wide eyes to get pretzels and soda,
sometimes a sandwich, sometimes a sweater or a pair of shoes that no longer fit
the bartender’s son or daughter. People gave you what they thought you needed
easily enough. The trick was getting what you wanted.
    “What
about that old piano?” Angie asked Fran.
    “The one
in storage? Goodness, I’d forgotten all about it.”
    Angie’s
father discovered it in the basement of a church where he’d woken up after
walking the streets and screaming at the violet sky. Angie had spent the same
night alone in their drafty house, with only the television’s gray-blue face
for company. Later at the church she held her father’s sweaty hand, thought of
how hungry she was, and looked at the piano. Tiny painted roses decorated the
closed keyboard lid. The finish was dull and scratched, something her father
pointed out while he haggled with the Father.
    You’ve
a keen eye , the Father said. I can see
you’re a man of taste. If I weren’t a good Christian I’d drive a harder
bargain, but the truth is that this room’s to be converted, and we’ve no more
need of it.
    Then the
Father asking her, Can you see yourself here, playing those fine, round
notes all up to Heaven? His hand in her hair, on her neck, then under her
shirt because her father was gone then, off to the bank for the money, and the
Father said he’d give her breakfast because it looked like she could use it,
but all he did was tug her forward why don’t you and I just sit here a bit,
on this nice, fine bench? What a shame it is to let it go.
    “Well,
it’s yours for the taking. I suppose you’ll want to sell it,” said Fran.
    Angie
didn’t know what the piano was worth. Maybe a thousand dollars. That would be a
lovely windfall. She could get that leather coat she’d had her eye on, and that
silver-and-turquoise bracelet she and Kevin saw at the mall. The rest she could
bank for that rainy day that always came along so fast. Kevin, though, would
want to put it up his nose. His cocaine habit used up all the money his father
gave him. There was more money to be had, but his father had become difficult
and cut off his allowance.
    “Good
plan. Better to sell it here, though, don’t you think?” Angie told Fran. That
way Kevin wouldn’t have to know a thing.