The Song Reader Read Online Free PDF

Up Your Feet and Stay Awhile. This used to be the town slogan. The women who came to my sister insisted it was an all too perfect description of Tainer’s couch potato men.
    Or as one of Mary Beth’s customers put it, “I am woman, hear me roar. I am man, hear me snore.”
    I was used to hearing this kind of thing. One of my earliest memories was of Mom telling me how ridiculous it was that men were considered tougher. “Women give birth,” Mom said, “and most men can’t even stand the sight of blood.” I nodded, but I was wondering what blood had to do with birth. At six, I had given up the stork theory for the much more reasonable conclusion that the baby popped out of the mom’s belly button.
    I was used to hearing this kind of thing, but it didn’t change how I felt. I was thirteen that summer, and I knew “Endless Love” by heart, along with all the other romantic songs my sister’s customers reported. I’d been imagining what love would be like for a long time. It started with my parents’ honeymoon at the Lake of the Ozarks. The one and only fact I knew about the trip was that they’d bought a rocking chair from a little craft store on their way home. They strapped it to the top of their Mercury, but they didn’t tie the ropes tight enough and it fell off and slammed into pieces on the highway. It was late and the road was almost deserted, luckily, because if that flying rocker had hit another car, the people inside could have been killed.
    My version supplied the missing details. How she told him it was all her fault because her side of the rope was too loose, but he said no, it was his fault because he hadn’t used a double knot on the back piece, and how they put their arms around each other then and said that it doesn’t even make sense to talk about fault when you’re in love. How they both cried, not because of their lost rocker, which they knew was only a thing even if it would be impossible to replace (it was a very special, one-of-a-kind rocker: hand carved with flowers on the slats that looked just like the roses at their wedding), but because they were so grateful no one had been hurt. Being in love is like that, they both said later. It makes you care about everyone more, almost as if you’re in love with the whole world.
    My deepest wish that August was for my sister to fall in love. If only she would get married like Prince Charles and Lady Diana, I would get to be a bridesmaid and wear a beautiful gown. But she hadn’t even had a date for more than a year, because she was already in love—with a thirty-three-pound, two-and-a-half-year-old.
    Tommy was pretty irresistible. The baby nobody wanted had grown into the cutest toddler. His skin had become a rich, golden brown and he still had those beautiful black curls. He gave the goofiest sloppy kisses and this whole-faced grin when you came in the room that made you feel like you were the most important person on the planet. He’d waddled at eighteen months, and now he could walk perfectly and talk in sentences. And he seemed to be over his biting phase, which made hanging out with him a lot more relaxing.
    I didn’t mind taking care of him on Saturdays so Mary Beth could meet customers downstairs in the office. I wouldn’t have minded baby-sitting him in the evenings, too, except she hadn’t gone out in the evenings since Tommy came to live with us.
    She’d set up a permanent schedule at the diner—Monday through Friday, seven to four—so she could leave Tommy with Mrs. Green, an older woman in our neighborhood who took in four toddlers. Mrs. Green was sweet, but Mary Beth felt Tommy needed her personal touch as much as possible. “Human beings weren’t born in litters, you know,” she would say.
    I thought what Tommy needed was a father. I knew Mary Beth could find someone if only she’d try. She’d never had trouble attracting men. Being tall and blond didn’t hurt, although I knew it was something else, too. She seemed