Tempo Change Read Free

wrote a note to my mother saying that he had to go find himself. This she explained later, not right away, and I’ve never seen the note, so all I have is the hand-me-down version. He said (according to her) that his priorities had gotten shifted around because of his success and he couldn’t hear the music in his head anymore, and without that, he had no idea who he was.
    He went around the world for a year and we’d get the occasional postcard. He finally landed in Bali and said thatwas where he intended to stay. He said it was a magical place and the air was clear and he could think. He sent instructions for us to join him. My mother actually started making the plans, and then she got another letter and it said, “This is no place for you two. Hang tight and I’ll be home when I can.”
    My mother hung tight for a while and then she dropped me off at Joss and Mimi’s and went to find my father. I was certain she’d be able to bring him home. She was going to pick him up, the way she picked me up from school. My mother back then was feisty and determined. She had tattoos. Small ones, where you mostly couldn’t see, but this was way before anyone was doing it, let alone girls or mothers. She had short hair and it always changed colors and her eyes were green and had laughter and mischief in them. Back then. Not so much as time went on.
    She didn’t bring him home.
    In fact, he wasn’t even in Bali when she got there. He had moved on. She hadn’t found him. For a long time after that, she didn’t even hear from him.
    It’s hard to talk about the next few years. Her not leaving her bedroom. Us getting kicked out of the house. We went to live with Joss and Mimi, which felt entirely different from me just staying there during the daytime.
    There was so much going on I couldn’t understand. I didn’t even know my mother was drinking in her bedroom and that was why she couldn’t leave it.
    I didn’t know what had happened, either, when she suddenly got sober. Joss and Mimi, turned out, were able tohelp make things improve. They dragged her to AA meetings and then she started eating again and then she started talking in rhymes and slogans but she was able to leave the house and get a job.
    Finally, when she moved us to Santa Monica, I felt we’d left Los Angeles altogether. Gone was the edgy feel of being in a city, the crazy loud landscape and the odd collection of people. Santa Monica was like a small town, like the one she had come from somewhere back East, and later she said she moved us there because it felt like someplace she could manage. We rented a tiny house a few blocks from Main Street and the ocean. Main Street was exactly what it sounded like, a quaint little stretch of stores and restaurants. Mom worked in a clothes store and then she became a manager. She had pulled it together (not expecting any help from my father). Eventually she opened her own place. It was called Biscuit. This clothing store took all of her time, and she said it was our future.
    She decided to look into sending me to private school because she was worried about me not getting into a good college. She wanted me to have a life with choices. I took tests and scored high enough to become a scholarship kid at LaHa, and that was how my life was shaking out. LaHa wasn’t a great school, Mom had a career but not really, Santa Monica was in Los Angeles but so far from it you could barely get a glimpse of the fancy life. We were on the periphery of everything.
    Now that I think about it, it was probably part of the AA program that made my mother forgive my father and notsay anything bad about him. She never said anything about him at all.
    The last really negative thing I heard her say was on Christmas Eve when I was twelve. They had been talking on the phone and he must have made some vague commitment to come back for the holidays and then he’d backed out. She said to me, “That’s just typical of your father. He never wants to