Part 3 — The Second Track
The CD skipped once, then caught, and Mickey the DJ pressed his headphones to his ear and nodded at me.
Track two began with a bar of piano, tinny and slow, and then Sonnys voice came in, rough and warm.
“Roxy, the song is The Way You Look Tonight. I know it is corny. I sang it to you in the parking lot the night we met, and you laughed so hard you dropped your keys.”
The whole bar went quiet, and Patty put her hand on her chest.
“Before I sing it, one more thing for the kid. Dustin, son, the Harley is yours. I want you to have it, and I have always wanted you to have it.”
“But you owe your mother eleven thousand dollars, and you are going to pay it back to the penny. I will not have my boy start his life on a lie.”
My husband sang the whole song through, cracking on the high note, and nobody in that bar breathed until it was over.
Dustin stood at the front with a glass in his hand he had forgotten to drink. When the last note faded he set it on the bar and crossed the floor to me. He did not try to explain. He said he had been drowning in a debt he had hidden from everyone, and he had taken the money thinking he would repay it before the month ended.
The next morning we sat at my kitchen table with the bank manager, a woman named Ms. Ruiz. The account was mine in every way that counted, and the bank had already flagged the withdrawals.
Dustin repaid the eleven thousand dollars out of the sale of a boat he owned, wire by wire. Ms. Ruiz marked the file as returned in full and said that no further action was needed unless I wished it.
I did not wish it.
The recordings turned out to be safe. The baker behind whose shop Dustin had tossed the boxes, an old man named Kowalski, had seen the garbage truck pull up and carried every shoebox into his stockroom. He had kept them on a shelf behind the flour for three weeks, waiting for somebody to ask.
Dolly drove me over to collect them. Forty years of Sonny, every Friday, in handwriting I knew.
On the next Friday we held the true memorial at the bar. The chairs went up at closing, the lights went down, and Mickey queued Sonnys discs one at a time.
Dustin took the microphone last. He said he could not sing a note, and he proved it.
The bar cheered him anyway, and when he sang the last line of his fathers song I turned to Patty and said, “That is the prettiest bartender in New Hampshire, and she is crying into the ice.”