Where Love Goes by Joyce Maynard Read Free Book Online Page B

anybody else’s children either.
    For years since his divorce Mickey has filled his dance card, as he likes to put it, with women he meets through the personals, the same way he met Claire. Eventually he mailed Claire a copy of the letter he typically sent out to the women whose ads he answered, which he kept on his computer. By the time Claire read Mickey’s personals response letter, she was already in love with him, but if she hadn’t been, she figured the letter would have done it.
Dear Stranger ,
I liked your ad—ethereal yet pithy. Joni Mitchell crossed with Tina Turner maybe? I dunno. Whatever it was I read between the lines you wrote, it got to me .
As for whether the feeling might be mutual, I’ll give you the basic data. I’m poking forty with a short stick, brown hair, brown eyes, no broken bones, don’t smoke or dope, six feet tall on a good day, with one hundred seventy-six pounds of ballast and a boyish plethora of freckles. My friends tell me I’m reasonably attractive, but then who’s going to tell you to your face that you’re reasonably ugly?
I grew up in Alabama, the only state in the union where you can be your own uncle. My sport is baseball, and I guess I’d better tell you right off that I’ll be unavailable during World Series week. I spent my formative years pitching dirt balls against a barn door pretending to be Don Drysdale, but I didn’t fool anybody .
My life’s other consuming passion is music. I appreciate everything from Laurie Anderson to Frank Zappa, but what I love best is jazz: Miles, Monk, Mulligan, and Ella Fitzgerald, my favorite woman of all time .
Given a choice, I would’ve been a pitcher, but the fact is I was a high-school band nerd. Round about age fifteen I started playing in rock ’n’ roll bands—strictly opening act material, mind you, but it kept five guys in motel rooms and pot for a lot of years and more miles .
Round about the time I hit thirty it came to me that I’d rather never see forty at all than find myself, at forty, still playing “Proud Mary” to a roomful of drunks half my age. So I went home to Birmingham, got married, and had a kid. The marriage proved to be a mistake early on but it did produce the one pure joy of my existence, my eight-year-old son, Gabe. Trumpet player, get it? I would’ve named him Louis, but he was a little too pale for that .
Back when my marriage was in its last throes, the little woman and I left Alabama for Massachusetts and I found this great old cape on the North Shore that we could almost afford, with a barn out back that I’ve turned into a sixteen-track recording studio. You wonder how it is an Alabama boy like me would move fifteen hundred miles to a place he didn’t know a soul, I’ll tell you. I love Fenway Park, and I refuse to watch another game of baseball played on AstroTurf. Turns out around these parts there’s enough would-be musicians—and believe me, I use the term loosely—that I can make something that resembles a living recording their demos. Not a single John Lennon in the bunch .
I get Gabe every other weekend, during which time I attempt to educate the boy in the finer things of life, meaning jazz and baseball I bring him to a lot of Red Sox games on the theory that now is as good a time as any for a kid to learn about disappointment. We buy a ridiculous number of baseball cards .
Weekends I pitch for the Salem Hornets. The Sox haven’t drafted me yet, but we are the number-three team in the North Shore league. As far as music goes, my band these days comes to me by way of a synthesizer. Let me tell you, I get a lot less grief out of my Kurtzweil than I used to from my old drummer. I think maybe I’ve finally found the perfect musical relationship. Give me my mixing board and my baseball glove, my boy and a good margarita now and then, and I’m a happy man .
Or would be, if it wasn’t for this damned need I feel for my one true love. I admit it. I’m a hopeless romantic, a guy