Page 27

WHEN I GOT to the Revelry that afternoon, the front door was already unlocked, and the office light was on.

I dipped my head in through the window to see if anyone was there.

A few boxes had been pulled down from storage shelves and rifled through, papers and old Christmas pageant flyers and show set lists strewn across the room, as if someone had considered cleaning it out but didn’t quite know where to start.

I frowned—was it Dad? But then the swoony sound of Roman Fell and the Boulevard drifted through the lobby, and a smoky voice I recognized sang along to “Little Loves”—Mom.

Putting my keys and wallet in the box office, I crept to the doorway of the theater and leaned in to watch as she rummaged around an old box at the bar, humming through Roman Fell’s discography.

Growing up, before GPS location sharing, if I ever needed to find my mom, I knew exactly where she’d be—the Revelry.

It was hard to believe that it had been Dad who’d grown up here, because Mom just fit .

I liked to think that I fit, too, like a puzzle piece in a missing hole, but I wasn’t sure I did. I was probably more like Sebastian Fell in Vienna Shores—utterly out of place. So out of place, you could tell with one glance.

The jukebox shifted to the next song—“Wherever.” Mom began to sing along with it.

When Mitch and I were little, she sang Roman Fell songs disguised as lullabies.

It was a bit weird that I was now working with Roman Fell’s son— and my teenage self would freak out if I went back in time and told her, but that novelty wore off a long time ago.

Mom pulled out a few pieces of paper from the box, a mix of photographs and ticket stubs and lost invoices, and slowly sorted through them, pacing around the table.

I finally slipped into the theater, and the door creaked closed behind me.

She gave a start at the sound and whirled to me.

“ Jesus! Heart, you could have told me you were here!”

I sheepishly smiled. “Sorry, I didn’t want to interrupt you.

” “You could join. I know you know the words,” she added, bobbing her head to the song.

She swayed to the chorus, humming along to it.

I shook my head, pulled a stool down from the bar top, and sat on it.

Mom came up beside me and nudged me in the side. “You’re no fun anymore.”

I gasped. “I’m always fun!”

“When you were little, you refused to go to sleep to anything else.”

“I didn’t know what the song was,” I replied. “It has a nice beat.”

She agreed. “I remember when he first pulled out his guitar and played it right there on that stage.” She folded her arms over her chest, hugging herself tightly, a little lost in her head. “It feels like a lifetime ago.”

The look in her eyes was foreign—like regret. I asked, “Is everything okay?”

She blinked, coming back to herself. “Oh, no worries, heart. I’ve just been lost in my thoughts while cleaning out these boxes.

” She gestured to the one on the bar. “Thought I’d go ahead and start so we won’t be in a rush at the end of the summer.

” She motioned for me to follow her over, and I did.

Beside the box were piles of sorted things—ticket stubs and flyers and photographs.

I picked up a photograph I hadn’t seen before.

It was grainy and faded, one of my parents years and years ago, at some Halloween party.

They’d gone as the Goblin King and Sarah from the movie Labyrinth , but Dad had lost his blond wig before the photo was taken.

Uncle Rick was in the middle, posing as Dolly Parton. I snorted a laugh.

Mom glanced over at it. “Oh, that was when you were five—no, six? I would tell you about it, but honestly, we were so shit-faced I don’t remember.”

“Was that the year Dad came home with a lampshade on his head?”

“No, that was the Christmas party when you were eight. I remember that one because Mitch superglued the babysitter’s hair to the couch.”

I grimaced. It had been me , actually, but no one believed Mitch, and I certainly wasn’t ever going to correct them.

“Look at what else I found,” she said, showing me another photograph from the pile.

It was of a four-year-old me sitting at the Steinway, slamming my fingers on the keys.

My feet didn’t even touch the ground. Then another of Mitch hiding in the curtains.

One of him looking serious in the middle of a bunch of old rockers.

One of the Revelry packed, the lights from the stage so bright I couldn’t make out who was playing.

There were photos of some of the old barbacks and bartenders who had worked at the Rev for years.

So many photos, so many memories, so much life .

As I looked through all the things she’d already pulled out, she started to sort through more in the boxes.

My parents rarely got rid of things—if there was a small trinket that held a moment in time, they kept it.

It didn’t matter what it was—stickers, labels off beer bottles, someone’s random phone number written on a gum wrapper.

It was all here, shoved into these cardboard boxes put on a shelf in the office.

“Oh, look, here’s one of your dad onstage when we used to do the poetry nights! I loved the ascot,” she added as she handed me another one of my dad, his hand wrapped around the microphone, fist raised in the air, his face beet red as if he was yelling.

I squinted. “He’s … quoting ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade,’ isn’t he?”

Mom’s smile turned adoring. “Of course he is.”

Shaking my head, I handed the photo back. Some things really never did change. “Do you have any of you onstage?” I asked.

She gave it a thought. “Probably not—oh, no, actually …” And she reached for a different pile, one over to the side, that wasn’t separated out like the others. She shuffled through it and took out an old photo. “Here.”

It was grainy and faded, like most of the ones on the lobby’s walls, except this one had Mom in it, frozen mid-song, in dirty light acid-washed jeans and a leopard-print top, her hair teased to heaven.

Her arm was around another woman with pixie-cut red hair in a bright pink spandex leotard and a baggy red jacket with wickedly large shoulder pads.

They sang into a microphone on a stand, clearly backup singers in a blurry band.

They looked like night and day, Mom’s muted clothes against the woman’s bright neons.

Mom said, “Your dad took that one the first night we met.”

“You look so young ,” I marveled. I’d seen photos of when Mom was young before, but they were mostly ones with Dad or the pixelated one from Google.

None of them were as sharp or real as this one—it was like she was made of star stuff when the spotlight shone on her.

If this was the night they met, then she was still singing with the Boulevard. “Who is the woman?”

“She was a friend of mine,” Mom replied, absently moving on to another photo, one of my grandparents—my dad’s parents—in the box office. “Look at what else I found!”

But I didn’t want to change the subject quite yet. This was the closest I’d ever gotten to Mom talking about her past. “Do you miss it?”

She shrugged. “The Boulevard? No.”

“Singing?”

“I still do that, you know.”

“I know, but not up there .” I nudged my head toward the stage. “Do you miss that part of it? Performing?”

She gave a half-hearted shrug, pulling out a crumpled flyer for a karaoke night in the early aughts. “Sometimes, but you know the story. It’s not that interesting.”

“I think it is,” I insisted, though this was where she always shut down.

Always said the same thing—she came to Vienna Shores, fell in love, and never left.

That music led her here to her happily ever after.

But … there was more to it. The photo she showed me proved that.

“Sometimes I feel like you had this whole life before the Revelry that you keep secret, and I’m just …

I’m scared that I’ll never know it. I’m scared if I don’t keep asking, then soon …

” My voice cracked when it came to that possibility.

My vision grew hazy, but I blinked back the wetness.

“I just want to learn everything about you before I can’t. ”

Mom silently organized a few more pieces of junk from the box—another ticket stub and two more photos of Dad at another poetry reading.

It was worth a shot, at least, but I wasn’t going to push her any more if she didn’t want to talk.

I just wished—I wished she wanted to. I wished I could be her secret keeper as much as she was one for me.

Just as I began to think maybe I should leave her to her organizing, she said, “It’s complicated, heart.

I think by the time I got here, I was so tired of …

all of it. Performing. Traveling. The road in general.

At that point, I’d met my share of washed-up musicians waiting tables. I didn’t want to be one.”

“Was the Rev special, then? Or was it just somewhere to be?” I asked as she abandoned the box and fetched a beer for me and a root beer for her from the refrigerator behind the bar.

She went to open the top on the bottle opener like she had a thousand times before, as fluid as second nature. She put the cap under the lip. Then took it out again. Confusion flickered across her brow. For a moment, she stood there quietly.

“Mom?” I asked, sliding off the barstool. “Everything okay?”

“Fine,” she replied, but it was clear things weren’t fine as she stared at the bottles in her hands. Like she couldn’t remember how to open them.

“Like this.” I grabbed one of the bottles, stuck it under the lip of the opener, and pushed down. The cap bent off.

Mom’s face crumpled. “ Duh , Wynona. I knew that.” She shook her head, repeated my action, and tossed our bottle caps in the recycling. “What would I do without you?”

I clinked my bottle against hers. “I love you.”