Page 59 of After Hours at Dooryard Books
And so Patrick shows him.
* * *
“Well, well, well,” Susan says when Patrick and Nathaniel come over with a box of pizza for dinner. “What do we have here?” She sounds like the villain in a Saturday morning cartoon.
“What are you talking about?” Patrick asks, mainly to be difficult. It’s not like they were going to try to keep this from her, but how the hell did she know as soon as she opened the door?
“You don’t need to be a detective to figure this out, boys. Nathaniel, you look like somebody scrubbed your neck with steel wool. Patrick, you need to use hair conditioner in your beard.”
“Oh my god,” Patrick says, his hand going automatically to his beard.
“I’ll lend you a bottle,” Susan says cheerfully.
“I think we should play your song,” Nathaniel says after they’ve eaten. They’re in what’s become their standard positions: Patrick with Eleanor on the floor, Nathaniel sprawled across the sofa, and Susan cross-legged in the armchair. Walt is prowling around the edges of the apartment like he’s on security detail.
“What song?” Susan asks.
“‘Take Me Home.’” That’s the song you couldn’t walk down the street without hearing last summer. The one Susan hates down to her toes.
Patrick looks up from where he’s been trying to detach Eleanor’s jaw from his collar. She’s teething, and the only joy she has in life is gnawing on people’s clothes.
“It’s trash,” Susan says.
“You wrote it. I checked the liner notes. Forget the horn section and the—”
“The xylophone,” Susan says dolefully.
“Forget all that and look at the song you actually wrote.” Nathaniel sits up and reaches for Susan’s hand. “It isn’t going away. You might as well make it yours again.” He hasn’t said that he likes the song, or even that it’s any good. But he’s right that the song isn’t going anywhere—it’s been a year since it came out, and radio stations aren’t playing it as often as they used to, but they play it enough that you’re never surprised to hear it.
Susan looks at him like she’s been betrayed, and Patrick thinks she has a point. “We don’t play love songs.” Her fingers are wrapped tight around Nathaniel’s.
The next afternoon, Patrick’s sulkily unpacking and inventorying one of the mountain of boxes on the second floor, because Nathaniel’s been bribing him with donuts every Sunday if he’s unpacked a box that week. He’s deciding what to do with copies ofLifemagazine from the thirties when the opening chords of that song drift in from the stairwell.
Glad for an excuse to abandon the books, Patrick quietly climbs the stairs. When he cracks open the door, he sees Nathaniel sitting on the sofa, Susan’s guitar in his lap, playing the song. He’s slowed it down, about as slow as you can get and still call it music. Patrick’s no expert but he thinks it’s in a different key, mellower but also a little unsettling. Patrick slips inside.
“A little faster, maybe,” Susan says. And then, a few minutes later, “You’re making it sound like something you’d play. I mean, it feels like the murder ballads and those pieces we’ve beentinkering with.” By tinkering, she means actual songwriting. Patrick isn’t counting, but there are probably six original songs they wrote together.
“You wrote it,” Nathaniel says.
Susan lets out a shaky breath.
“Look,” Nathaniel says. “I’ll drop it if you want. But I’ve seen how you get when that song comes on and I want to help fix it before—”
“Before?” Susan asks. “You have somewhere to be?”
“There’s nowhere I’d rather be,” Nathaniel says, which is about ten times as earnest as he usually is. It’s also not an answer to Susan’s question.
The next morning, when Patrick stops by Susan’s to take Eleanor, he finds Susan already awake and Eleanor still asleep in her crib, slack-jawed and fat-cheeked. Susan’s eyes are bloodshot and puffy. Used tissues litter the bed.
“Stupid fucking song,” she says.
“If you ask him to back off, he will. Or I can ask. He doesn’t want you to be miserable.”
“Michael loved that song, you know. I mean, it’s sugary and has a catchy chorus, of course he loved it.” Susan’s never said outright that she wrote the song for Michael, but it was practically designed in a lab to appeal to him.
“He did love a chorus,” Patrick agrees.
“Never met a chorus he didn’t love.” She’s crying again, so he sits on the bed and puts an arm around her and lets her cry all over his shirt.
