Songs Only You Know by Sean Madigan Hoen Page B

That’s how I missed her, in flashes of guilt. I’d mailed a postcard to Will but had yet to call home since the band left Michigan.
    “Help yourself,” the promoter said, about the phone, hardly bothering to turn from the video screen.
    A few rings. Then Caitlin answered with a midmorning rasp. “You’re not causing trouble,” she said, “are you?”
    My sister was not above irony. For my November birthday, she’d given me a mauve sweater with an oversize golf ball embroidered across the chest, a canny nod toward my previous status as a hateful, underpaid scooper of fairway goose shit. As I’d opened it, she’d laughed herself to the floor—a rare burst of glee amid the family sorrows she’d been taking so hard. The cable-knit atrocity must have cost twenty bucks, and she’d wrung every penny out of the joke, gesturing for me to try it on. This was her humor—rarely spoken. When it came to words, Caitlin was heat seeking, impossibly literal.
    “Doing anything stupid?” she said.
    “I’m fine.”
    “You better be careful, brother,” she said, passing the phone to Mom, who explained that things back home were basically copacetic. Caitlin was working extra hours pouring coffee, saving her tips, preparing to live in the Michigan State dorms. Dad, three months out of rehab with four new valves in his heart, was making it to Ford Motor every day, rising to his usual 5:00 A.M . alarm.
    “He’s upset, though,” Mom said. “Ford gave him a bad performance review for the first time.”
    Each morning, before heading to work in Dearborn’s schools, Mom had been attending mass. Now that summer vacation was here, she might have been putting in extra hours at the pews. I watched Repa pecking though the estate’s record collection, shaking his head with each flip of the album jackets. I heard a shower running—Ethan making the most of the home’s plumbing. Our host thwacked the controls of a pixelated go-kart that sped across his giant television.
    “Be careful out there,” Mom said. “Don’t make me worry.”
    “We’re good.”
    “Where are you?”
    “Texas.”
    “Is it hot?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Real hot.” And when I said, “I love you,” I said it low enough that Repa, pulling an album he approved of from the stack and checking for scratches, couldn’t hear me above the promoter, who shouted, “Outta my way!” again and again in a fit of virtual road rage.
    I T WENT LIKE THAT: van sleep in truck stops to posh suburban bedding. The excitement of never knowing what came next. Anarchist communes; outdoor riverside stages; crowds too narcotized to stand; crowds of drug-free youth dancing violently with giant X’s marked across their fists. Houston to Austin, through Fort Worth, and northward to Denton, where we pulled up to a ranch-style house with a lawn of dirt. On the porch, a gaggle of black-haired kids sat with beers between their feet. According to our itinerary, we’d located the place—the evening’s gig.
    “This it?” I said. “Who’s the promoter?”
    Ethan consulted our rumpled spreadsheet of dates and addresses and contacts. “Spider,” he told me. “That’s what it says.”
    The trees lining the street were infested with gray sacks, nests of some kind, sagging from the branches. Repa walked to a tree and pulled out his lighter, reaching for the lowest of the cocoons.
    “You don’t wanna do that.” A shirtless Texan in a black mesh hat stepped out of the house, wagging a finger, a black widow tattooed on his breast. “Hell, nah.”
    This was the place, all right.
    The porch dwellers flashed us the stink eye, parting apathetically as we carried our equipment into the house. The usual rub: locals sizing us up as we rolled in our speaker cabinets. None of us were punk rock protocol. Me, barefoot with my home-cut locks. Ethan in cock-printed shorts and a five-dollar Caesar he’d commissioned from an Ohio barber. Repa was sallow and jowled, a dark horse ready for any