“The one I was going to give you before I went. That summer.”
And I said, “Then why did you marry somebody else?” — which is a question I had not let myself ask out loud in thirty-nine years.
And that man started crying down a telephone.
“That’s what I’ve spent forty years wanting to explain.”
Then, very quietly: “Come to St. Ide’s. There’s something here you need to see. Once you’ve seen it you’ll understand why I stopped.”
Forty minutes later I pushed that door open.
He was in the bed. Thinner than the boy, and completely, unmistakably him.
But it was not Gil that made the noise come out of me.
It was what was propped on the chair beside his bed.
PART 2 — THE WAKE
My father died in the November of 1985. I was eighteen.
He played guitar. Badly, and constantly, and he taught me on the same instrument, which was a cheap thing from 1961 with a repair on the headstock where he had dropped it in 1974 and glued it himself with the wrong glue.
You would know that headstock anywhere.
After the funeral there were about twenty-five people back at our house.
I had the guitar out because my uncle had asked me to play the one my father used to do.
And my mother came across that front room and took it out of my hands.
She did not snatch it. She took it, put it back in the case on the floor, and clicked the catches shut.
And she said, to twenty-five people:
“Give me that. It’s going, Roslyn. We can’t eat a guitar. Put it down, people are watching.”
Nobody said one word.
My aunt looked at the carpet. My uncle, who had asked me to play, said, “Fair enough, Adele.”
That instrument went to a shop on Carrow Street in the January of 1986 for ninety dollars, and I have looked for it in every second-hand shop I have been in for thirty-nine years.
PART 3 — THE SUMMER
Here is what Gil did in the summer of 1986, which I did not know until a Tuesday night at sixty years old.
