“You mean because my own music is harder?”
“Yeah—not that you’re not allowed to like different kinds of music,” she said.
“My mom was into the folky protest music of the sixties.Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie and early Dylan. But especially Peter, Paul and Mary. I learned to play music—piano, initially—on their songs.”
“What’s your favorite song of theirs?”
There was a pause that seemed a little fraught, like it signified more than just Teddy trying to settle on his favorite song. He finally said, “I guess it’s this one called ‘Lemon Tree.’ My mom and sister and I used to sing it all the time.”
“Can you play it for me?”
There was another pause before he said, “How about this one instead? It’s called ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’ It was actually written by Seeger—a lot of Peter, Paul and Mary’s hits were written by him.”
I shamelessly settled in to listen. The song seemed to be about the futility of war. It was beautiful. I didn’t dislike Concrete Temple, but I tended to mentally discard any music I couldn’t use for my kids at the studio, and Concrete Temple was too hard for Miss Miller’s of Minnetonka.
This song wasn’t recital material, either. It was—at least as performed by Teddy—plain, almost stark, but it was all the more beautiful for it. He had the perfect voice for it—a perfectly imperfect rasp. His voice reminded me of his calloused hands.
The song was circular—each verse built on the next, and the simple but powerful chorus was repeated frequently. Eventually Teddy’s student picked it up and started singing high harmonies on the choruses, then on the verses, too. As she grew more confident with the song structure, they both started messing around vocally, with volume and with more elaborate harmonies.
When they finished with a decisive chord, stopping the song abruptly, it was if I snapped out of a trance. Damn. That had beenfantastic.
I could hear them wrapping up, so it was time for me to flee. I had to go to my cabin and get out the phone I wasn’t supposed to be using and look up “Lemon Tree.”
Later, on my way to swimming, I stopped by Jack’s porch, where he and Teddy were parked with their end-of-day drink.
“Hey, Knight, you promised me a Laurie, and I’ve come to collect.”
I’d listened to “Lemon Tree” three times back-to-back in my cabin, trying to figure out what Teddy thought about it. Why he called it his favorite but didn’t want to play it. The conclusion had been pretty obvious. It was a blatant antilove song, warning that no matter how pretty or fragrant a lemon tree was, its fruit was always sour.
Clearly Teddy wasn’t over Karlie yet. Which made me feel weird. Which was why I’d addressed him by his last name. We’d accidentally spilled some secrets to each other, and I wanted to put some distance between us.
But as his last name rolled off my lips, it sounded more like an endearment than a formality. Everyone else called him Teddy, but here I was calling him Knight, like I thought I had special status or something.
“Right,” Teddy said. “I’ll talk to him tomorrow.” He looked at me as if waiting for me to say something else, but I couldn’t imagine what. I transferred my attention to Jack, who was looking at me the same way he always did: with indifference that felt like it could tip over into disdain given the slightest nudge.
I didn’t wait for that to happen, just danced off. I had a lake to get to.
The next morning I slid into my crappy Target bathing suit. It must have been too late in the summer for there to be a lot of selection left; I’d had to settle for what I could get. It was a basic red one-piece that was not my color at all. With my pink-tipped hair, I probably looked like Pamela Anderson’s less endowed, arty cousin had come to visit theBaywatchset. But the suit was gloriously dry as I fumbled it on in the early-dawn light—I liked to not turn on any lights in my cabin and let the dawn function as a reverse dimmer switch, turning on the day while I was in the lake. And no one else was ever going to see this suit, so aesthetics didn’t matter.
“Hey.”
I shrieked as my heart kicked into high gear.
I had crept around Teddy’s cabin, as I did every morning. But unlike every morning, today he was sitting on his porch holding a guitar. It was momentarily discombobulating: that was hiseveningspot.
“Sorry. I was trying tonotscare you. Didn’t want to startle you once you were in the water.”
So much for no one seeing my ugly suit. Well, what did I care? I was here on my man cleanse, right? My crone-ification project. Although crones probably swam either naked or in Victorian-style bathing costumes.
“A morning swim sounded good, so I thought I’d invite myself to join you.” He paused. “Unless I’d be in your way.”
“It’s a big lake,” I said with what I hoped was an air of nonchalance, but I was feeling very non-nonchalant all of a sudden. Very chalant, one might say. Because unlike EveningTeddy Knight with Guitar on Porch, Morning Teddy Knight was wearing swim trunks. And nothing else.
I reminded myself that I had already seen Teddy Knight naked and walked by him and stepped off the dock. I swam underwater for quite a way, and when I surfaced, he was in the water, too, but close to the shore. He was only up to his knees. I wanted to go closer so I could see his tattoos, but I refrained.
“Wow,” he called. “This issomeseaweed. Do you call it that in a lake? Lakeweed?”
“Not much of a swimmer, I take it?” I called back.
