Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

“Yeah? How so?”

“Well, for one thing, those might be the best three songs you’ve ever written. They blow everything else away, even the hit.”

“I never liked ‘It Feels like a Lie,’ ” I admitted. “The song itself felt like a lie. It wasn’t me at all. I would’ve flat-out refused to play it, but I had a band to feed.”

He pointed at the dashboard radio. “If you’d written songs like this ten years ago, I wouldn’t be teaching music to the tone-deaf way the hell and gone in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. It wouldn’t have mattered that you told the Junction to go fuck themselves, that you sent us out on tour on our own, headlining with about a quarter hour’s worth of decent material. But hey, that’s the smoke of a distant fire.”

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

“But . . .” He breathed deeply. “But I’m thirty-five now and . . . Look, it just doesn’t matter how good the songs are. You have to know that. We weren’t an act that absolutely demanded to be heard. We were just a good little rock band that rode the wave of one irritating four-minute jangle that you just know they’re gonna play at your funeral. Come on, man, look at us. We’re well beyond our sell-by date. The industry won’t take us seriously.”

“Why are you so obsessed with age? There’s plenty of music being made by people who look like absolute shit. You tell me when Ric Ocasek was ever cute. Sonic Youth—everybody in that band looks like a Microsoft employee. Nobody really cares about the ages of these people.”

Warren shifted in his seat. “I’m not obsessed with age. If anybody’s obsessed with anything, it’s you—about the past. You know, man, you talk like there’s this place you’ve got to climb back up to. But it isn’t so. Shame on you if you’ve got a chip on your shoulder, especially after all this time.”

I let my hand drop out the window and land with a smack on the side panel. We sat for a languid spell under the dim interior car light, the one sign of life in the whole ink-black parking lot.

“Teddy, when I come home at night, I like what’s waiting for me.”

I said, “I’m not here to sweep you out of your life and away from Lauren and your kid. But come on, Warren, I know you. You love everything about making music. You may say you have no interest in doing a record with me, but whatever you decide, however this ends, we both know that’s not true.”

He let that claim hang unanswered as we continued our silent contemplation of the night. Out past a line of trees, I was just barely able to make out the lonely risers of the football field. Given our condition, it was entirely possible that we’d still be sitting here when dawn broke over those bleachers. And that would be just fine. I’d enjoy watching the window of morning slowly push open the sky.

“You play these songs for anyone else?” came Warren’s low voice. “Other than that dipshit?”

“I played them for Sonny.”

Warren turned. “Sonny Rivers? He still talks to you?”

“Reluctantly.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me to go make a record. If you want to get technical about it, he said ‘Go make a record, motherfucker.’ ”

Warren humphed.

“And if you can believe this, he wants to produce and he wants to help shop it around.”

My passenger was shaking his head now, staring out into the darkness as his fingers explored his facial hair. There had to be an answer to all this out there somewhere—or somewhere deep in that beard.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “You get Mackenzie on board and I’ll think about it. That’s not a commitment. You understand me, you annoying pain in the ass?”

“Okay,” I said, containing the edges of my grin.

“Don’t smile, you bane of my existence. You haven’t reeled me in. I am merely agreeing to give it further thought. That’s it. And believe me, I’m not doing anything that takes me away from my family. Get that through that tiny, irritating, narcissistic, desperate, delusional head of yours.”

“Message received,” I said, somehow smug about this now. That was all the mistake I needed him to make. Just one measly error in judgment. From the barest flame abounds the all-consuming blaze.

Warren sighed a deep, defeated breath and reclined into the seat back. His eyes folded closed and he seemed on the verge of sleep. “If you’d mentioned Sonny two hours ago, you could’ve saved us both a bitch of a hangover.”

“Look at it this way. If this all works out, you can resurrect Clark, the brother you never had.” I slapped him on the chest. “I know you loved doing that twins thing.”

He let out a listless grunt. “You do know that to normal guys that means something completely different.”

I regained consciousness under a blanket smelling of cedar. It was like awakening in the woods among the oaks, pines, and Rocky Mountain Douglas firs, the scent of a fire wafting from a nearby cabin. The rustic peace was soon obliterated by the pounding on my skull. I had a vague recollection of Lauren pulling into the school parking lot and glowering at me as her husband and I slumped into the backseat of her car. Someone had left a glass of water and two maroon ibuprofen tablets on the table. Being served painkillers in strange houses was developing into a pastime of mine.

I slipped out before anyone else had stirred, but not before finding a pen and a stray piece of paper. “Thanks—and sorry in advance,” I scribbled.

Squinting into the early-morning light, I took in the Warrens’ row house on this quiet tree-lined street on the outskirts of Lambertville. The neighborhood seemed very aware of itself as a choice for a specific type of living, a town for people who’d gone looking for simplicity in the form of food fairs and antique shops.

Hoping to be reunited with my car, I set out in the direction that I guessed the high school to be. In town, I bought a cup of coffee in a little corner bakery, the kindly graying woman asking if I needed a nice lemon muffin to accompany it. I croaked out a thanks but no thanks, the first words of the day sounding as if they were spoken by me plus fifty years, and shouldered on.

I left Sara a voice mail as I sailed down the highway toward home. She hadn’t responded to the text I sent letting her know I wasn’t going to make it home last night. Nor did I hear from her as I sloped from one room of the condo to the next during the balance of the morning, dragging my headache with me into the afternoon.

Ravi Chatterjee had left another message on our home line, yet again trying to locate Sara without sounding threatening or overly concerned. It hardly comforted me that I wasn’t the only one trying to track her down. She could’ve been up at Josie’s studio, ducking the universe, or she could’ve been with Billy, sifting through the particles of an old universe. Something could have set her off in some other direction. It could’ve been the estranged husband who’d reappeared out of auld lang syne, or the longtime boyfriend who’d dematerialized into a fantasy of his own creation, or something else I didn’t know about. What else, I wondered, did I not know about Sara Rome?

Worry mounted as the afternoon limped by. When evening descended, there was still no trace of her.

To distract myself, I considered the next order of business in my own jigsaw—that being the making contact with and recruitment of Mackenzie. Mackenzie Highsider. There was nothing about that name that didn’t rattle my nerves.

For years I’d been playing out the scene where we met again, older and wiser. Seasons upon seasons of pondering the abstraction of our reunion had only allowed the fantasy to flower. I pictured her catching sight of me across the street or in a restaurant, and with a double take, her jaw would drop and she’d pause with hands on hips. We’d hug and she’d tell me I looked the same. She’d tell me she’d missed me and that she hated the way things ended between us, that she’d finally let go of her anger.