The Song Reader Read Online Free PDF Page A

started to ask her why. But when she interrupted him to find out how my first day of school had gone, he seemed to suddenly remember why we went to the Laundromat to begin with. He put down the laundry basket in the middle of the kitchen floor and covered his forehead with his hand. I saw the look of alarm in his eyes, the fear and confusion in his slack, open lips, and I reached out to take his arm. Before he could speak, I told Mom I had refused to go to school, that Dad had tried to get me out the door but I’d insisted on staying home and helping him with the laundry.
    She started to fuss at me, but when she looked closely at Dad’s face she stopped. She got up, motioned him into their bedroom, and closed the door behind them. I guess he must have told her something like the truth because she never mentioned that first day of school again.
    I watched the bright colors of our clothes spinning in the dryer as I remembered all this, and I was only a little sad. Mary Beth had said if you find yourself stuck on a song, there has to be a reason—and I was amazed at how right she was.
    The song was “Please Come to Boston.” I didn’t know where or when I’d heard it, but I’d been humming it for days, including this very afternoon in the Laundromat. And it fit amazingly well. The song was about a girl wanting a man to stop drifting and come home to her. I’d been thinking about Dad for weeks. No wonder that tune was on my mind.
    I was planning to tell Mary Beth about this, but then I went home and looked up “Please Come to Boston” in her book of lyrics. All I’d known was the melody and the words of the first verse. I didn’t realize that the chorus had “a man from Tennessee” and a girl who was his “number one fan.”
    It fit all right, but it was so embarrassingly obvious I couldn’t bring myself to share it with her. The only thing that would have been worse was if the chorus had said the man was from Shelbyville, Tennessee: my dad’s hometown.

chapter
three
    M ary Beth’s song reading caught on quickly, but it wasn’t until late in the summer of ’81 that she became known all over Tainer. My sister called it the “summer of endless love,” both because “Endless Love” was the number one song reported by her customers, and because everyone who came to her suddenly seemed to be obsessed with romance.
    Maybe it was because Prince Charles had just married Diana. Maybe it was because Luke and Laura on General Hospital were finally getting engaged. Whatever the reason, the women who flocked to my sister that August wanted to know one of two things. Would he ever show up? Or was he here already, in the form of the ordinary guy they were seeing, the one with smelly socks and a dirty car and an irritating tendency to cry over baseball?
    Tainer was a small town, but it was big compared to the tiny places around it. Most of them had one traffic light, tops, where we boasted of eleven. They had one corner with a Fina or Texaco; we had two grocery stores, a strip mall, and a theater that could show four different movies at the same time. True, we didn’t have any cool clothing stores, as my friends liked to point out, but we had a good-size JC Penney. Then too, Tainer had all the guys. Even if they didn’t live here, they had to pass through. The plastic factory that employed most of the county was down on River Road. The only farm equipment place for fifty miles was a few blocks from our neighborhood, over on Twain Boulevard.
    My sister’s customers would often find men, but they usually lost them just as fast. The guys around here worked, but according to the women, that was about all you could say for them. It had something to do with the town’s history, or so the joke went. The local legend was that Tainer was founded by a trader from back east who was heading down south on the Mississippi and got tired and just stopped. On the wall of Mr. Lucas’s drugstore, he had a plaque that read Tainer. Put