Free The Last Will of Moira Leahy by Therese Walsh

tore through me. It’s just a storm, Jesus Christ, don’t be a freak . I couldn’t control my response, though I tried to hide it. I wanted my dad to see I’d become a well-adjusted adult after all, to tell my mother so.
    He waited until another bolt of lightning flashed, and then he pushed back his chair. “I’ll stay through the weekend,” he said. “Your mother, she can’t do it all herself.”
    I regretted the words right away but couldn’t stop them. “No, she can’t, but she’ll still try.”
    I GATHERED SHEETS, a pillow, and a quilt, and put them beside Sparky’s prone form on the couch. “Lazy dog,” I said, and scratched her head. She stretched, but kept her eyes closed.
    “You going to sing, Mayfly?” My father leaned against the doorway to the kitchen. “Sing a bedtime song?”
    Like I was fourteen again, and he was in the hammock with a lemonade cradled between his hip and hand as Moira and I played for him— sang in the only way we could. Neither of us could carry a tune with our own vocal chords.
    My best naps I owe to you , he’d say, and ruffle our hair.
    “Sorry, but my landlady lives upstairs and she doesn’t like music.” This detail may or may not have been true, but it served the moment well enough. “I could recite a French poem, though. Italian. Latin. Spanish. Portuguese. Even Romanian, if you don’t mind a bad accent.”
    “No music?” This was the real foreign concept to my father, the thing I couldn’t put words to. The sky rumbled again.
    “Should we take the dog out before this hits?”
    We stumbled into another uncomfortable moment outside. As Sparky did her business, my father looked back at my apartment and grunted. The blinking lights of my landlady’s Christmas tree illuminated a second-floor window. I pretended not to notice.
    “Looks like less sky out here, eh?” he said.
    I couldn’t see any sky at the moment, just dark, but I agreed. It had taken me a long time to get over the feeling of claustrophobia here. Less sky, too much land. I felt the draw of the sea, too, a force as ancient and enduring as a siren call.
    “Some things never change,” my father said. I thought he’d go on about storms and how they smell and sound and feel on the skin before the first spill—he was a Castinian, after all—but he surprised me. “Stars are up there, Mayfly, above the clouds. Can’t see ’em all the time, but they’re there, day and night, fair weather or gale.”
    He kept his face slanted upward as if he hadn’t meant anything more than what he’d said. I knew better. But so what if I didn’t have pictures on my wall or a tree covered in lights. So what if everything was neat and I had a nearly empty bottle of Windex. So what if I had no music in my home and couldn’t sing to my father. It had nothing to do with stars and constancy. It was just … just . And I had a lot, had done so much with my life. I was a great teacher, I—
    Thunder split the air again, and this time I flinched.
    “It’s a good storm, Mayfly,” my father said, as the first rain hit my cheek.
    Good storm. Heel. Roll over. Don’t stay .
    I left man and dog to their pseudonight, and crawled back into bed. I listened as clouds labored over drops of water, as the afterbirth of every storm known to man seemed to fall. The noises were there, too, riled up in my head like positive and negative charges, wanting to write themselves into a song about a storm out of time.
    Daylight filtered through the seams of my shade when I finally gave in to temptation. I pulled my dusty saxophone case out from under my bed and stared at it, perhaps the way an alcoholic looks at a bottle of Scotch. My hands shook as I opened the latches, lifted the cover.
    Vivid scent hit me first—dusky brass and bittersweet cane. My mouth watered, but no instrument lay atop the matted-plush in-sides. Instead, there were folded notes, mementos, my passport, a few reeds from my old sax, and some stones from Castine. I