Legend of a Suicide Read Free Page B

those guns? Come and meet the kid.”
    She poured herself another.
    “Dad loves you,” Rhoda said.
    “Open your eyes, Rhoda.” Her mother stared at her. “Ha,” she said and laughed, then began coughing again. “You always have been much too pretty, Rhoda. It’s not good to show up your mother.” She looked at me and winked. “Don’t think I don’t know what I’m about.”
    Rhoda’s father came in walking slowly, looking short and wide-chested beside my father. “I think you’ve probably had enough,” he said to his wife.
    She winked at me again and downed her glass.
    Rhoda’s father didn’t look so much angry as embarrassed and unsure. He rubbed his hand lightly over his balding head.
    “What did you think of Dad’s collection?” Rhoda asked my father. She was standing closer to me now, away from her mother. I could see the fine, soft hair along her neck.
    “It’s really something. Not every day you see a collection like that.”
    “Please, Sharlene. Not in front of his son,” Rhoda’s father said.
    “It’s okay, Daddy,” Rhoda said, stepping toward him now.
    “We’re not staying long anyway.”
    “Are you talking to me about shame?” Rhoda’s mother asked with her back to all of us. “Is the man who won’t be seen with his own wife in public talking to me about shame?” Prune started growling. He knew something was up, and he was crazy with it. “The man who will slink around with twats half his age?”
    Rhoda’s mother swiveled on her stool and pointed at her husband. “Get out of my way, Rhoda,” she said, because now Rhoda was between them.
    Rhoda’s father put up his hands in apology, then walked back alone down the hallway.
    “Coward!” she yelled.
     
    Later that night, as I listened to Rhoda weeping and my father comforting her, I wondered whether tears came out of her blank eye. The wall separating our rooms was thin, and I could hear everything: their sharp breaths, her weeping again, and Rhoda telling my father she loved him. The strangeness of it is what I remember.
    The next day, Rhoda asked me to join her at the piano. I told herI didn’t know how to play, and she said it didn’t matter. So I sat beside her.
    “Close your eyes,” she said.
    “Are yours closed?”
    “Yes,” she said. “Though my right eye never closes all the way.”
    “Can you see through it?”
    “Yes. Always.”
    I closed my eyes.
    “Put your hands up to the keys,” she said. “Just listen carefully and let your fingers play.”
    We sat for a few minutes in silence. The space between us thickened and rolled in and out.
    Her first note echoed down low. She played more notes, and they took up places in the air.
    “This is great,” I said.
    “Listen,” she whispered.
    I listened until her notes all around me could have been my own, and soon a few of them were. They didn’t sound half bad: a disjointed song that all fit together because her breath was so close to my own.
    I don’t know how long our playing went on, but I do know that I wanted it never to end and yet it ended somehow and my father clapped from somewhere behind us, a sound disagreeably sharp and loud.
     
    “What’s she like, this Rhoda?” my mother wanted to know. She was cutting the fat off chicken breasts.
    “She’s nice,” I said.
    “What else?”
    I poked at the strings of lumpy yellow fat set to one side of the cutting board. “She’s funny,” I said.
    “Oh?”
    “Yeah. And I don’t think she’s afraid of anyone. Except her mother, of course.”
    My mother laughed. Then she ruffled my hair.
    “Oops,” she said. “Sorry about that.” And she grabbed a dish towel to wipe away the chicken fat. “Is she pretty?” My mother’s voice quieted on this.
    “No, she’s deformed,” I said, and my mother laughed again.
    That entire week, I looked forward to when I would play piano again with Rhoda, but the moment I arrived at my father’s place Friday night, I was hustled into his car and he and Rhoda