Like people in sidewalk cafés feed sparrows. If my mom caught me, she’d get mad and tell me to get to sleep, I had school tomorrow and didn’t I want to make something of myself? Then she’d smile at everyone like she was really saying something and go, in a real sweet voice, “If you miss school tomorrow, you miss music class, too. You don’t want that to happen, do you?” As if I gave a shit. She was always bragging that I had my daddy’s voice, and someday I was going to be a singer, how my music was my life, and that the school music lesson was the only way she could get me to go to school.

Dumb. Like singing “Farmer in the Dell” with forty other bored first graders was teaching me a lot about music. Music was okay, but I never understood how people could live for it like my mom did. She’d never learned to play any instrument, and while she could carry a tune, her voice was nothing special. But she lived for music, like it was air or food. Funny. I think the men she took in might have respected her more if she’d been able to create even a little of what she craved so badly. I could see it in their eyes, sometimes, that they looked down on her. Like she wasn’t real to them because she couldn’t make her own music. But my mother lived music, more than they did. She had to have it all the time; the stereo was always playing when she didn’t have an in-house musician of her own. I’d be half asleep watching her swaying to the music, singing along in her mediocre voice. Sometimes she’d just be sprawled in our battered easy chair, her head thrown back, one hand steadying a mug of tea or a beer on her belly. Her brown eyes would be dark and gone, not seeing me or the bare wall studs, not seeing the ratty couch or scarred cupboards. Music took her somewhere, and I used to wonder where. I thought it was dumb, the way she lived for a collection of sounds, for someone else’s words and notes.