Jazz Funeral

him: “Dad, you can’t feel guilty, it’ll eat you up. You just have to take responsibility for what’s yours and let Mother take what’s hers. I mean, it isn’t all yours.”
    She was right, he saw that, and couldn’t imagine how she could have known such a thing, and then he remembered that Patty had insisted on sending her to a psychiatrist, that Dr. Richard. He hadn’t seen the point, but he supposed this was the sort of thing that came out if it, and it wasn’t bad. At her age she knew more than he did.
    When he got the news, when the cad came, he somehow wasn’t surprised at what Patty had done. He had lived with this woman for seventeen years, and much as he’d tried to keep his distance from her, to hold back, to live a separate life, he had an inkling of who she was. And what their life was. He knew, he knew when Melody told him, he knew with a thud like an anvil landing that there had been something between Patty and Ham, that Melody was not his child in the same way she was Patty’s.
    He didn’t know how he knew this, or that he’d known it ad her life, he just knew that he had. Perhaps it was something about the timing of the birth, or something in Ham’s manner toward Patty; perhaps Melody was like Ham in some way that suggested paternity. He couldn’t put his finger on it, couldn’t remember much at all from the drunken period. But he knew now that this was why he’d held back from Melody, that there had been something in him like revulsion regarding her. He thought now that she—or his feelings about her—set thoughts in motion, memories, emotions; stirred things up that he didn’t want disturbed.
    Now that he knew all this, he understood that odd feeling he’d had when Ham died—of relief, almost, instead of grief. All those years, in some way he couldn’t yet get to the bottom of, he must have been jealous of his own son.
    He wondered briefly if the old, unacknowledged wound was what kept him from Patty as wed, but felt a tug in his gut that told him it wasn’t that, or wasn’t just that, that there was a lot more. He thought about the rest of it, the other things. These were things he’d always known as wed. It amazed him to see them now, fanned out like a poker hand, and know that they’d always been there, held closely.
    Now I know this. I could change. Maybe it’s not too late for Patty and me.
    But it was. She’d killed his son.
    The sad music was soothing, Melody found. Made her feel better instead of worse, gave her a little distance, a chance to think.
    She was trying to get used to this unaccustomed, unwieldy feeling in her chest. It hurt, it felt like a lump of cement. She thought it was love. Well, she knew it was. But she had thought love felt good, felt happy and joyous, and this thing felt distant and unattainable. It was taking the form of longing; she knew because this was a feeling as familiar to her as her own blue eyes, only usually it seemed to come from somewhere outside.
    The love was for her dad. It was just so new to her she didn’t know what to do with it, and that was what the longing was about.
    He’d gone to sleep yesterday after picking her up at the police station—had simply left her and gone to sleep! She’d been so desperate, she’d ended up taking his car—without permission—over to Ti-Belle’s. And miraculously, Ti-Belle had been there. She was having a glass of iced tea with a strange man. (Though she was quick to explain that he was a drummer, someone whose set she’d just caught at JazzFest because she was getting rid of Johnny Murphy.) Melody didn’t care about that—she just wanted Ti-Belle alone, to herself, wanted to bury her face in her chest and cry. Later, she realized she could have gone to Richard—that Richard hadn’t turned on her after all, but she hadn’t thought of that. Ti-Belle was the closest thing she had to a sister—to any kind of real relative, her mother being in jail and her father the sort of person who could fall asleep an hour after learning his wife had been arrested for the murder of his son.
    But later it turned out he hadn’t been asleep. He’d been thinking—maybe crying, Melody didn’t know. What she did know was the person who came out of that room wasn’t the father she remembered. It was a beaten, vulnerable, much softer man. Or was she different—had he always been like that? But he said it himself: Ham’s death had changed him.
    It wasn’t the first thing he said. If he