The Song Reader Read Online Free PDF Page B

incapable of being needy. Unlike so many of her customers, she never wanted more from a guy than he wanted to give.
    Whenever I asked her why she wasn’t married yet, she always shrugged off the question. I might have thought she just didn’t care about that part of life, but she certainly didn’t sound that way talking to other women. “A man has to be more than a paycheck and fun on Saturday night,” she would say. “There has to be a soul connection, an unbreakable tie to your heart that can’t be confused with hope. When you find that, trust me, you’ll know.”
    It was talk like this that helped make her an authority on relationships to her customers. They believed her when she said she was sorry but reporting lines from “Endless Love” was actually a bad sign. It was the kind of song you only sing when you’re not in love, but desperately want to be. “Bette Davis Eyes,” also popular that summer, was better, because it hinted at the confidence you feel when you’re having a good time with a man. Best of all was something intensely personal and not current. A song associated with happiness in the past that comes back to you suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere—because you’re happy again.
    For one person, it could be a show tune they sang in high school; for another, a lullaby their mother used to sing as they went to bed. When Janine Thompson started seeing a new guy, her chart was filled with lines from Bing Crosby songs. Mary Beth helped her remember her sweet grandpa had always listened to Bing Crosby, so of course she should keep dating this man.
    I loved listening to my sister talk about these things. After Tommy was asleep, we’d sit on the floor with the windows open and the fan blowing, updating the charts, preparing for the next Saturday. Of course if the chart was a guy’s, I’d pump my sister for what he looked like. But the chart was almost never a guy’s, and when it was, Mary Beth would roll her eyes as though I’d asked something as irrelevant as whether he preferred waffles or pancakes.
    She herself was tired of all these romantic problems. She’d taken to groaning whenever she heard “Endless Love,” and I heard her complain more than once that she wanted a chart with “some meat on it.”
    Rebecca Mathiessen seemed to fit the bill. She showed up in the middle of August with a list of songs that filled four charts, both sides. Her problem had nothing to do with a boyfriend, Rebecca was clear about that. Otherwise, she didn’t say much, but normally that wouldn’t have been a problem. Normally, my sister could figure out the trouble from the songs the customer couldn’t get out of her head.
    “But no one can hear this much music,” my sister insisted. She was sitting at the kitchen table, making stacks of the coins she’d dumped out of her tip jar to roll up for the bank. “And why won’t she tell me what lines affect her? Something’s not right here.”
    Rebecca was an unusual customer in another way. Her family lived a full forty miles from Tainer, in a town that wasn’t even a town, really, since most of the people who lived there commuted to St. Louis. St. Louis was a long commute, sixty or so miles each way, but Rebecca made the trip every morning to work at an advertising company. She thought nothing of the drive to Tainer. She told my sister that she got her card from a hairdresser who knew the owner of the beauty shop here in town, A New You.
    Mary Beth wondered if Rebecca wasn’t serious about the reading, but Rebecca kept saying she was. In the office, she even cried once or twice, but her tears weren’t connected to the music she reported. One time Mary Beth asked if any songs upset her, and she said, “Yes, but don’t put them on the list. They have nothing to do with why I’m here.”
    Finally, Mary Beth told Rebecca she couldn’t help her if she wouldn’t be honest. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” my sister concluded. “Until you