Thank You for the Music Read Online Free Page B

passionately committed than ever. The pastor and his wife, Claire, had almost no time to come visit after that. Claire was soft-spoken, a first-generation Latvian with warm blue eyes and an ability to quote long Latvian poems that seemed to always include wet brick streets. Quietly insightful, intelligent and somewhat melancholy by nature, she was an old friend by now, but too often during their visits, the pastor’s brother would be pretending to talk to Claire, when really he’d be listening rapaciously to the conversation going on across the room, the ones where the pastor and Rachel would somehow fit Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Coltrane, and Celtic myths into the same conversation. The ones that transformed his wife (beauty almost aggressively residing in her face as she listened), and to a lesser extent transformed the pastor too, though Claire and the rest of the world had never bothered to notice. He felt stranded during these times, and because in his heart he knew his daughter, Maria, lived her entire life feeling stranded, he’d turn to her in memory, aching for that little girl she’d been, crouched in the tree fort out back, curlyhaired with a tinge of wild light in her green eyes, her smiling lips a secret, her sandals and a worn blue dress she wore like a uniform: The images seared. When he felt like that he’d write her a letter so imbued with nostalgia he always ripped it up a few hours later, despising its sentimentality. For all she knew, he was a calm and ordinary father, often monosyllabic on the telephone. Every so often sending her a check.
    The pastor’s call came just as he decided to turn the radio off.
    â€œTim?” The pastor’s voice was like their father’s: deep, warm. Tim’s own voice seemed by contrast thin, higher pitched.
    â€œHey, John!”
    â€œI’ve got news.” Tim stood at the front door watching it snow; his narrow street was wonderfully white in the lavender light of evening. He still loved snow, after all these years. Still loved the way it erased edges in the town’s neglected streets. Loved it in his wife’s hair, in his dog’s sleek black coat, in his own hands when he packed it into a ball to throw. “What’s up?” he said, and imagined another grandchild had come into the world. The pastor had five grandchildren already, all with biblical names like Ruth and Noah, the oldest one a great violinist.
    â€œI’m retiring.”
    â€œRetiring? You’re kidding!”
    â€œHey, I’ll be sixty-five.”
    â€œBut you’re—you’re in the middle of things! You can’t retire! You’re young!”
    â€œI’m two months from sixty-five, brother.”
    Tim had broken out into a sweat; they would have to go to Pittsburgh, they would go to the retirement party, they would go stay in the old house, the one his wife loved, they would stay for a week, and now Tim stepped outside onto the front stoop and waved at a neighbor child, a fat little thing in a blue coat and squeaky snow pants making tracks in the street. The child waved back, his face red and plump like an illustration, quaint like something Tim and his brother would have seen way back in the forties in Nebraska, where their mother had called them in from the lace-curtained kitchen window, long before John had blossomed into the spiritual man he was, long before he’d gone to Harvard Divinity School and made the entire family so proud they’d made Tim his shadow. Somebody had to be the shadow! They hadn’t been emotionally sophisticated; in those days, who was? Tim hardly blamed them. In fact, he felt his own memories as clichés: Look at the brother, the pale one in the corner whose spark you can’t see when the older brother is in the room. The older brother with his wide, freethinker mind (like his professor uncle) and his enormous heart (like his mother) and his quicksilver way of making everyone