Catherine (21 page)

But where would I go? I wasn’t ready to give up my search and crawl home to Massachusetts.
I couldn’t face my father, knowing what I knew about his marriage to my mom. I’d have
to explain where I’d been and what I’d learned, and how could I do that without breaking
his heart?

As I stuffed clothes and my mother’s journal into my backpack, I tried to think who
in all of New York City would be willing to give me a bed for the night. That’s how
I wound up on Jackie Gray’s front stoop.

A thousand strangers lined up for Dad’s wake, waiting for more than an hour to see
that waxy-looking, made-up body I could barely believe had ever been him. I knew I
should be grateful for how beloved Dad was, for how many people knew him and how important
some of those people were. Sal Battaglia, Dad’s best friend, stepped in to handle
the arrangements, organizing the wake and booking the space for the memorial service.
TV crews came, and the room filled up.

“Standing room only,” Sal whispered in my ear during the service. “Jim always did
like a full house.”

I tried to smile, but all I wanted was to be left alone so I could have a nervous
breakdown in peace.

On my other side, Q looked grim and pale in one of the Italian suits Dad liked to
buy for himself but never seemed to wear. That
whole afternoon, he didn’t so much as speak a word. It was nothing like when Mom died
and the two of us held on to each other and cried. Sitting beside this silent version
of Q in his oversize Armani suit was almost worse than being next to a stranger.

So many of Dad’s friends and business contacts wanted to speak at the funeral that
it seemed endless. Guy Snarker—Dad’s least favorite of all the acts he broke—showed
up in leather pants and gave a long talk about how Jim Eversole was a visionary, and
a rebel against conformity, a John the Baptist who cleared the way in the wilderness
of commercial radio for prophets to come. It wasn’t lost on anyone that Guy Snarker
was Jesus Christ in that scenario.

Guy’s speech was the first of many. I’d known Dad was important in the music world,
but I hadn’t realized
how
important. I should have been proud of all the photographers and news networks straining
to get footage, and impressed by the people who’d never even met Dad who showed up
wearing black and sobbing audibly. But the man they all were talking about sounded
like some distant celebrity—not the generous, spontaneous, funny, loving father I
had known. It was hard not to feel that Q and I had wandered into some ghoulish three-ring
media circus. I kept wishing we’d told Sal to make the funeral private so I wouldn’t
have to keep endlessly shaking hands and comforting acquaintances who struggled to
come up with the right words.

Hence came to the service. He sat near the back, with Jackie and her mother. He should
have been beside me, but we’d fallen into the habit of secrecy for Dad’s sake, and,
now that he was gone, we hadn’t yet worked through how important it was to maintain
the secret. All through the funeral, I had to fight the urge to run
to the back of the church, to grab Hence by the hand and drag him up to the front
of the room with me, where he belonged. I was really, truly sorry I’d never told Dad
about me and Hence. As he died, did he worry that he was leaving me alone in the world?

Of course, as far as Dad knew, Q and I were as close as we’d ever been. He wouldn’t
have wanted to know otherwise. Dad had been an only child and thought his life would
have been so much better if only he’d had a brother or sister.

As we rode in the back of Sal’s car to the funeral home, I put my head on Q’s shoulder
and he didn’t pull away, even when my tears spilled down Dad’s charcoal-gray jacket.
For a moment it felt the way it used to between us. We’d both lost Dad, but at least
we still had each other. But when we got home, Quentin ran straight upstairs, locked
himself in his room, and stayed there all night, leaving me to wander through an apartment
that felt too large and full of echoes, too emptied of my father’s booming laugh.

A few days after the funeral, Q and I went uptown to Dad’s lawyer’s office, Harmon,
Federman and Gluck, for the reading of his will, one more official sign that our lives
had changed forever. I didn’t want to go, but I had no choice. I needed to find out
what would happen next, to us and to the club. I only wished Hence could have come
along to hold my hand in the fancy waiting room, a warm and steady friend to keep
me from falling apart.

Q’s presence was the opposite of calming; he paced, jingling keys in the pocket of
the pin-striped trousers he had taken from
Dad’s closet as if he was now the man in the family and had to dress the part. He
seemed more anxious than sad, and I couldn’t help feeling he was worried about what
Dad had left him. But maybe the truth wasn’t that ugly; maybe he was concerned with
how he would look after me from then on. As for me, I didn’t care what stuff Dad had
left us. I didn’t want his money or his property—I only wanted what I couldn’t have:
him.

Danny Gluck had been Dad’s roommate in college. The two of them used to play together
in that band Dad always talked about, and when he walked into the room, he clasped
first Quentin’s hand, then mine, moisture in his hooded blue eyes. “Your father was
a good man,” he said. “The best of the best.”

Tears sprang to my eyes in response. After that, it was hard to sit up straight in
his gold-and-blue-striped office chairs and listen, but I caught the most important
parts. Q would be getting the club itself. And Dad left me money—enough to put me
through any college I got into. But college felt a million years away. I could barely
imagine how we would get through the next few minutes, hours, days.

For most of the taxi ride home, Q didn’t say a word. I watched him out of the corner
of my eye, trying to get a sense of how he felt about the will. It wasn’t a huge surprise
that Dad had left him the club; Dad had always said that someday Q would take over
the family business. But Q had never been interested in running The Underground. Instead
of studying business, the way Dad wanted him to, he was majoring in criminal justice
at CUNY, and before Dad died Q had been talking about transferring to some school
in Miami where he could windsurf and jet-ski year-round.

But somebody had to run the club, and I wasn’t old enough. It would have been scarily
easy to imagine Q unloading the club and taking off for parts unknown, but Dad’s will
stipulated that Quentin couldn’t sell the building until I graduated college, so I
would have a place to live if I needed it. When Danny Gluck had read that part, I’d
dared a quick look over at Q. He had looked pained. Now, in the cab, he still looked
like he had a massive headache.

“Are you okay?”

No answer.

“What happens next, Q?”

Still no answer.

I stared out the window, at the first snow of the season falling to the earth in soft,
fluffy flakes. The festive snowfall and the Christmas lights in all the store windows
felt ludicrous. It should have been pouring icy rain on the streets of Manhattan.

The wheels in my head kept spinning. Dad’s will made Quentin my legal guardian until
I turned eighteen, in nine months. And of course Q was Hence’s boss now, too. How
much would it matter to Q that Dad had cared for Hence and wanted to look out for
him?

“What about The Underground?” I asked Q, even though I barely dared hope for an answer.

The question shook him out of his silence. “What about it?”

“When are you going to open it back up?” What I really wanted to ask—but didn’t dare—was
if
he was going to reopen the club.

His answer wasn’t exactly reassuring. “Hell if I know.”

“But what about the shows Dad scheduled?”

“I’ll cancel them.”

“All of them?” Q knew perfectly well that Dad booked shows a year in advance.

But Q had fallen back into silence, his jaw muscles visibly flexing, and I couldn’t
bring myself to say what I was thinking: Q had to reopen the club. It would break
Dad’s heart if The Underground died along with him. I had to believe Dad’s soul was
somewhere, watching over us. Heaven, maybe, or some version of it where they had loud
music, Harleys, and Jack Daniel’s.

When the cab pulled up to The Underground, I got out, but Q didn’t move. “Take me
to Sutton Place,” I heard him tell the driver, and I realized that he was planning
to disappear wherever it was he went for another night.

“When will you be home?”

Q shrugged. “Don’t worry about me.” If he was the least bit worried about me—about
whether I was feeling lonely or depressed or scared—he certainly didn’t let it show.
The cab pulled away while I was still on the sidewalk.

Inside the club, Hence was leaning against the stage, waiting. When he saw that I
was alone, he ran to throw his arms around me, and I buried my head in his chest and
sobbed; though I’d known him for just four months, he’d become the only real family
I had left.

Hence didn’t ask about what happened at the lawyer’s office, and I didn’t tell him
my worst fear—that The Underground would go out of business and Q would kick him out
on the street. I couldn’t think how to begin saying the words. Together, in silence,
we rode the elevator up to my bedroom, where he held me—nothing more—as the snow thickened
and erased the streets around us.

Everything in my life felt heavy that winter. It was all I could do to put on clean
clothes and drag myself to school in the mornings, much less do my homework—all the
term papers and pop quizzes so meaningless to me now. It was good I’d sent my college
applications in early; I would never have been able to make myself do them that long,
dreadful December. College—the future I had been so worried over—now seemed a million
years away, with each of the days in between long and empty.

As soon as I started functioning like my normal self, when I managed to think about
something besides Dad, some random object would remind me of him—his lucky shoes where
he’d left them in the parlor, or his winter coat in the hall closet—and I would fall
back into grief, as though a trapdoor had opened under my feet. Once in a while, when
I was off somewhere with Hence,
shopping for groceries or walking aimlessly around the neighborhood, I would forget
to think of Dad. Then I would remember and guilt would slap me across the face.

Christmas was the worst. Quentin had said he’d be around for the holiday, but when
I woke up that morning, he was gone to who knows where, the way he was most of the
time. Hence and I spent the day alone together, eating mu shu pork and watching old
movies on TV. Neither of us felt like exchanging presents.

On those rare occasions when he was actually home, Q would spend hours locked in his
room, refusing to come out for meals, sometimes not even answering when I knocked
on the door. When I would come home from school and find his parka in the hall closet
and the door to his bedroom shut and locked, it felt worse to have Q there than it
did to have him away.

One day I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. Instead of knocking, I banged on the
door for about five minutes straight, until he opened it and stared at me like I was
a lamp that had come to life and started speaking.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Everything.” I sighed, not knowing how to begin answering that question.
I started over. “I’m making grilled cheese and cream of tomato soup. Do you want some?”

“What?” It was like we spoke two different languages.

“You know. Dinner. Food on a plate? That you sit down and eat?”

And he looked blankly at me, shook his head, and shut the door without so much as
a thank-you. I thought about banging again, demanding that he talk to me, but I was
scared I’d find the
Q I used to know had been completely replaced by the expressionless, almost wordless
guy I’d just seen in the doorway. Even Bad Quentin, with his temper tantrums and steely
eyes, would be better than this new, scary, silent Quentin.