One Last Thing Before I Go

into.
    “So, Silver. Before I read your mind, I just want to get to know you a little bit. What do you do for a living?”
    “I’m a musician.”
    “You any good?”
    “I’m OK.”
    “Yeah, me too. That’s why I’m playing a bat mitzvah. It’s all about the craft, am I right?”
    The crowd chortles appreciatively.
    “So, is there anything you’d like to say to Ashley, right now that we have everyone’s attention?”
    “Congratulations, Ashley.”
    “And how do you know the bat mitzvah girl?”
    “I don’t know her.”
    “What, are you, gate-crashing a bat mitzvah?”
    “Yeah. I guess I am.”
    Zellinsky suddenly looks uncomfortable. He’s not sure how to play this one. He gives Silver an inquisitive look, and Silver shrugs. A quiet falls over the room. Silver is suddenly aware of Zellinsky’s flop sweat, trickling down from his bald pate to his temple. He can feel his own sweat chilling the flanks of his back. His eyes fall on Casey, who has stepped away from the wall and is shaking her head, desperately pointing toward the exit.
    “Casey,” he says, and waves. He had not realized that Zellinsky still has the microphone extended to him, and his voice fills the room. Casey cringes as three hundred pairs of eyes turn to find her. She blushes and waves back, offering a forced but, Silver thinks, still charming smile. Silver takes the mike from Zellinsky, never taking his eyes off of Casey.
    “I’m so sorry, baby,” he says.
    Casey’s eyes grow wide, and she starts to shake her head emphatically.
Not now! Please!
    But it’s like he’s watching himself from the ceiling, from a perch on the grand crystal chandelier that hangs in the center of the ballroom, and there’s nothing to do but watch, along with everyone else.
    “I don’t want to be here,” he says. “I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t mean here at this party, although, to be honest, I don’t know why I’m here, either. I don’t know these people, and if this ridiculous party is any indication, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like most of them. But that’s not what I mean.”
    He is dimly aware that the silence in the hall has taken on a new weight, a clarity it didn’t possess before. There is not a single clink of flatware on a plate, not a whisper or even a discreet cough. It has been transformed from a polite silence to rapt attention. Casey has stopped motioning to the door. She is now just staring at him, and he can’t tell if she’s appalled or interested—the lights from the video crew are throwing a glare at his one good eye. But he has her attention and he doesn’t know when he will again.
    “I don’t know how I became this person, this quiet, pathetic waste of space. I’ve been going over it in my head, trying to find some moment or event where it all went wrong, and I just can’t. It’s like, I went to sleep one night, and woke up numb.” She has moved a bit, stepped between some tables, and he can see her face well enough now to know that she’s crying.
    “I haven’t felt anything for so long, Casey. I forgot what it feels like just to feel something. But then that day I woke up in the hospital, I was suddenly feeling things again. And I have been ever since. I’ve always known how much I loved you, how proud I was of you, but now I can feel it again, and it’s enormous. It fills me up. And that’s why I don’t want to have that operation. I’d rather die right here, right in this spot, feeling this way, than live another thirty or forty years like I’ve lived the last ten.”
    Casey is crying openly now. Behind her, near the ballroom entrance, he can see the man he assumes is Mr. Ross, speaking heatedly with two security guards. The guards begin to weave their way through the tables toward the dance floor. Silver looks over at Zellinsky, still standing next to him, looking like he’s going to be sick.
    And then, from behind him, the bouncing climb of a familiar bass riff fills the room. A flicker of lead guitar flits in and out, and then the drums kick in as the band starts to play that old chord progression. In an instant the music takes him back to a warm spring morning. He is sprawled on the couch with his new baby girl lying across his chest. He is kissing her bald head, inhaling her baby scent, and humming to her—a loose, free-form melody that gradually takes shape into the thing that will become this song.
    Silver turns around. Danny Baptiste is up onstage, grinning at him as the