At nineteen we promised that if we were both single at sixty we would find each other. I turned sixty on Tuesday, and the old landline rang.
PART 2 — THE WAKE
My father died in the November of 1985. I was eighteen.
He played guitar. Badly, and constantly, and he taught me on the same instrument, which was a cheap thing from 1961 with a repair on the headstock where he had dropped it in 1974 and glued it himself with the wrong glue.
You would know that headstock anywhere.
After the funeral there were about twenty-five people back at our house.
I had the guitar out because my uncle had asked me to play the one my father used to do.
And my mother came across that front room and took it out of my hands.
She did not snatch it. She took it, put it back in the case on the floor, and clicked the catches shut.
And she said, to twenty-five people:
“Give me that. It’s going, Roslyn. We can’t eat a guitar. Put it down, people are watching.”
Nobody said one word.
My aunt looked at the carpet. My uncle, who had asked me to play, said, “Fair enough, Adele.”
That instrument went to a shop on Carrow Street in the January of 1986 for ninety dollars, and I have looked for it in every second-hand shop I have been in for thirty-nine years.
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