Page 62 of The Cabin
It doesn’t feel so lonely out here, now. It was solitude at first, and I’m not really even sure when it became loneliness. When he came out, maybe. But now that he’s over there, and I can hear his voice and his guitar, I’m not as lonely.
He moves without pause into “The Boxer” and I hum along under my breath.
Dad used to love this song. He’d sit on the screened-in back porch on summer evenings, with the cicadas singing and the heat oppressive and he’d be shirtless, hairy and a little overweight, and he’d have his old Yamaha on his belly and his feet would be propped up on a battered blue milk crate, and he’d play every song he knew, with a beer sweating on the floor beside him.
God, why is everything reminding me of my father, all of a sudden?
I swear to God, if Nathan plays—
Yeah, there it is. “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin.
It’s like they have the same damn playlist, him and Dad.
Then, Nathan surprises me even more. Freestyle. He just strums, picks, and hums, nothing I recognize. It’s a slow, sad melody, and it seems half remembered and half improvised.
There’s a long silence, then, the last notes quavering across the lake.
“What was that last one you played?” I ask, just loud enough to be sure he hears me.
“Didn’t know you were there,” he says.
“Just stargazing. And eating chocolate.”
“It’s, uh…a little thing I used to play. For…well, uh. For someone who’s now gone.”
I recognize that hesitation. Where you don’t want to even mention it, because it brings on the “I’m sorry for your loss” and the pitying eyes and the questions they don’t know how to ask.
“It’s a beautiful piece of music,” I say. A pause. “I wasn’t intending to eavesdrop, Nathan.”
“I know. I just haven’t played in, oh god, years. Lost the habit. Life gets busy, and somehow it’s the things you really love doing that get left on the wayside, you know?”
“Like me and watercolors.”
“That’s right—you said you painted.”
“I mean, sort of. It was just for me. I started doing it in high school as a way to cope with…loss, and stress, and things like that. Then, like you said, life happened.” I sigh, something not quite a laugh. “I wasn’t very good.”
“Neither am I. I started playing for similar reasons. My dad…those were all his favorite songs. I learned them as a way to…connect with him, I guess.”
“You are good, though.”
“I was once told I sound like a chainsaw at the bottom of a well when I sing.”
I snicker at that. “That’s not nice. And untrue.”
I mean, his voice isn’t good. It’s rough, deep, and dark. Smoky. He can carry a tune well enough. But there’s something raw and real in the way he sang, how he sounded.
“I wouldn’t mind if you played another one,” I say. “My dad…he used to play most of the same songs when I was a kid.”
“Thus the watercolors,” he says.
“Thus the watercolors,” I agree, but I don’t know if it was loud enough for him to hear.
“Uh, how about…” A few idle strums. “Ah. Betcha you know this one.”
Three chords in, and I know it.
“Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” John Denver.
God, this one. Dad would hum this one while he puttered in the garage or flipped the venison steaks, and it was always the last one he played before he put the guitar away. It was his anthem, I think.
I laugh out loud. “Good god, did we have the same father, or what?”
He pauses. “Well, I grew up in the backwoods of Louisiana. You?”
“Atlanta girl, born and raised.” I laugh again, and it feels good to laugh. “When I say Atlanta, though, I’m being generous. Backwoods would be a polite term for where I grew up.”
He picks up the melody again, and when he starts singing, I can’t help but sing with him. If you’d asked me ten seconds ago if I knew the lyrics to this song, I’d have laughed in your face—I haven’t heard it since Dad died. But yet, with the melody on that guitar, his rough-hewn voice singing the words, damn if I don’t sing every one.
Is it weird that it feels better to miss Daddy than Adrian? The old hurt is more palatable. It’s a nice break from the raging, gaping wound of missing my husband.
The music fades, and I sigh. Eventually, I stand up; wrap my blanket around my shoulders. “I’m heading in,” I say. “Good night, Nathan.”
“‘Night.”When I wake up the next morning, he’s put the thermos on my porch again—I’d returned it yesterday. This time, there’s a brown paper bag with it—a blank sketchbook with thick paper suitable for watercolors, a couple different palates of watercolors, as if he had no idea what’s good or not, so he just got the most expensive they had and the cheapest, and a clutch of different sizes and kinds of brushes. Because it wouldn’t fit in the bag, he’d set the easel on the deck beside the bag.
