Page 149 of Playing By Ear

Jamie raised his glass. “I bet Uncle Mickey’s already set up a firm down there, trading in fire and brimstone.”

Martin bobbed his eyebrows. “Aye, there’d be a healthy market for weapons.”

“You think? Why shoot or stab someone who’s already dead?”

Martin shrugged. “Just for something to do.”

Jamie didn’t want to laugh, but he did anyway.

“Play something else,” his father said. “Something livelier so I stay awake.”

Jamie played a score of seventies and eighties songs, like Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing,” The Jam’s “That’s Entertainment,” and the Pogues’ version of “Dirty Old Town,” which reminded Martin of Jamie’s mum, for they’d indeed met by the gasworks wall in Provanpark. His father sang along with every word.

But after the third dram, Martin’s eyelids began to droop, and his voice softened in both tone and volume.

“Time for a lullaby?” Jamie asked.

“Get tae fuck.” His dad pulled the blanket from the back of the couch. “But aye, take Layla outside once more while I put my pajamas on.”

“Need any help with that?”

“No,” Martin snapped. “Not yet.”

Jamie followed the elephant dog, who had risen from deep slumber at the sound of her name, out through the back door. While she did a final perimeter check, he went to the other rear garden, the one he’d grown up playing in. The terrace’s bricks had been replaced, now lying flat and smooth, and its wrought-iron table and chairs were new.

He stared hard at the beds of perennials lining the garden and tried to remember his mother. Everyone said he’d been too young to form memories, but he’d always felt her presence strongest here, especially in spring when the lilacs bloomed. Tomorrow he’d cut some blossoms and bring them inside. Maybe their heady scent would spark a memory Martin could bear to voice.

Layla gave a soft woof, breaking his trance. She stood over by the new home’s back door, clearly anxious at letting her master out of her sight.

Inside, Martin had changed into his jim-jams and was lying on his side under the blanket. Layla went and lay on the floor next to him, stretching her limbs along the length of the sofa so that no one could get to Martin without going through her.

“Need anything before I’m away to bed?” Jamie asked him, though it was just gone nine. He wanted madly to FaceTime with Perry.

“One more song, if you’ve got voice left.”

“I’ve always got voice left.” He picked up his guitar and sat in the chair again, noticing how his body already felt at home there. “‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’?”

“More Bruce. Something quiet, maybe off Nebraska.”

Jamie picked up his phone and hit his browser’s back button to find the alphabetical list of Springsteen tunes.

His finger froze before it could scroll. In the list, immediately above “My Hometown” was a song from Nebraska so dangerous, he didn’t dare play it.

He looked to his dad for a more specific request. But Martin’s eyelids had drifted nearly shut. So Jamie pulled up the lyrics to the perilous song, checked his tuning, and began.

He played the intro and first verse to “My Father’s House” twice without singing, so his fingers could settle into the chord sequence he was picking in 6/8 time, as well as the grace notes that popped up now and again to provide that extra emotional twitch. He wouldn’t embellish much in this playing; it would take enough focus to keep his composure.

Martin’s eyes remained closed, but Jamie swore he heard a noise of recognition.

The melody was deceptively calm, almost meditative, considering the subject, a son’s desperate but futile attempt to reconcile with his estranged father. When Jamie sang the title words the first time, his throat ached, as though a bamboo shoot had suddenly sprouted within.

He kept going, and in the fifth, heartbreaking verse he tried the trick he used when busking an emotionally heavy song: He stopped thinking about the story in the lyrics and focused on hitting all the notes just right.

But the melody was simple, for both voice and guitar. It flowed out of him like water from a downpipe. And so the despondent words dripped, one after another, from his tongue.

The last plucked note faded with his voice. He pulled in a long breath through his nose and braced himself before looking at his father.

Martin had rolled onto his other side to face the back of the couch.