Taft Read Free Page B

Newspapers, napkins, Kleenex, the mail, Marion shredded them like a pack of hamsters.
    "Baby," I said from way over on the other side of the room. "Why don't you and me get married? That would make all this better. Franklin needs to have married parents. Then we'll be a real family. We'll get married and put the past in the past. What do you say about that?"
    But she didn't say, because by then she was crying. Marion didn't like to cry in front of people. She scooped up all the paper shreds and took them into the bedroom with her and shut the door.
    Six months after she moved out she came back again, saying she decided what she wanted was to go to nursing school and she figured I owed her that. Marion had been working as the cleaning girl at a Catholic school because the hours were right, but anyone could see she was a million times too smart for that and it was bound to make her crazy. The nuns were always getting on her about how she dusted the statues, had she wiped behind their feet? Cleaned their heads? Marion said the glass eyes on the Virgin Mary chilled her. I was all for seeing her go back to school, especially if it meant them coming home. Franklin was all over the place at that age, talking in sentences, picking up everything so fast I thought he must be way above average. I wanted to see him every day, not just on the weekends. I thought if they moved back we might be able to work things out, the three of us.
    "I'm talking about lots of school here. I need to take classes just so I can start taking classes. That means time and money. Regular money," Marion said. "You're going to have to find yourself a salary job."
    "Band's doing fine," I said, though I knew good and well what she was talking about.
    "One good night, one good week, that's not going to cut it." We were sitting at a table at Muddy's at the time, having a couple of beers. She was twenty-one years old, but she was so steeled up inside nobody would have believed that. She still looked pretty, not the same kind of pretty she was when I met her, but maybe better. She wore her hair brushed back in a tight knot now instead of fixed up and she didn't bother with makeup. The fact that she didn't smile that much anymore made her look kind of mysterious. She was sexy now, even when I knew that sex, at least where I was concerned, was about the furthest thing from her mind. She was sexy in that way that pretty women who couldn't care less can be sexy.
    "So if I get a regular job, you and Franklin'll come back?"
    "You help me pay for school, take care of Franklin when I'm studying," she said, and took a sip off her beer. All cards out on the table, that was Marion.
    I put my hands flat against my thighs. Whatever it was, it wasn't going to be forever. I was a drummer. That was all I'd ever been. Now I was a drummer and Franklin's father. I didn't see how those two things could cancel one another out.
    Marion looked at her watch. "I told Mama I'd be home to help with supper," she said, and finished off the beer. "You let me know."
    "I'll let you know now," I said. "You and Franklin come on home. I'll get a regular job."
    "We'll come back when you've got the job," she said.
    I walked up to the bar as soon as she was out the door and talked to a fellow named Danny King, long since disappeared from Memphis. I asked him, Did he know what was out there, what had he heard? The next thing I knew I had a job at Muddy's, first booking the music and running the floor at night, then six months later the manager quits to buy a dance club and I had the whole place to myself. Easy as falling down.
    Of course, it wasn't what Marion had in mind. She wanted to see me out checking phone wires for South Central Bell or selling Subarus. Jobs that took place in the light of day. But she didn't press it too hard. She knew it was the first regular job I'd had in my life and that these things took some time.
    Marion went to school during the day while I watched Franklin and then she came