Free Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Ed Tarkington Page A

to “redecorate,” she said. She thought the house needed another guest bedroom.
    “Why?” the Old Man asked. “We never have any guests.”
    “This is a home, not a memorial, Dick,” my mother said.
    They were talking in the kitchen while I sat on the other side of the door, doing schoolwork at the dining room table.
    “You didn’t do this after Annie Elizabeth,” my mother said. Even through the door, I could detect a tremor of caution in her voice.
    “Annie Bet isn’t coming back,” the Old Man said.
    “What if
he
isn’t coming back?” my mother asked.
    Nearly half a decade had passed since Paul had disappeared. Still, I didn’t want the Old Man to answer the question. Until we learned otherwise, I thought, why should we behave as if he would never return?
    “I’ll take Paul’s room,” I said, loudly enough to make the crystal vases vibrate on the sideboard behind me.
    I rose from the table and pushed through the swinging door. My mother was leaning against the edge of the sink; the Old Man stood with his arms crossed in front of the stove.
    “I’ll take Paul’s room,” I said again, more quietly.
    “It’s a smaller room, Richard,” my mother said.
    “I like the windows,” I said. “I’m always in there anyway. Listening to records.”
    The Old Man’s eyes drifted off to the window behind my mother’s head.
    “I’ll keep everything the same,” I said. “For when he comes back.”
    The Old Man beamed. My mother sighed.
    “All right,” she said. “On one condition.”
    “Name it,” I said.
    “You must promise me that you will never smoke a cigarette in this house.”
    “I promise,” I said.
    She had nothing to worry about. Paul’s cruel prank forever purged me of even the most remote desire to put a cigarette in my mouth ever again for as long as I lived.
    TH US DID I appoint myself caretaker of Paul’s memory. My once burgeoning stardom in the Spencerville Little Theater having been abandoned and forgotten, I cast myself in the lead part for a production with a phantom audience of one. I spent all my allowance adding to what I thought of as “our” collection of what were already being called “classic rock” records. Aloof to Michael Jackson and Prince and Madonna, to new wave and hardcore and hair metal, I cultivated a curator’s taste in the likes of Steely Dan, Zeppelin, the Who, Dylan, Rod Stewart, and all the other minor saints in the pantheon beneath the holy trinity of John Lennon, Mick Jagger, and Neil Young.
    That fall I entered the ninth grade at Paul’s alma mater, Macon Prep. Macon was still all-male then, though the board of trustees was already moving to admit girls as soon as possible as a means of boosting tuition revenues and attracting donations from alums whose philanthropic interest in Macon waned when their children were born without testicles. There were about two hundred boarders and sixty day students in grades seven through twelve. With the exception of a few scholarship students, we were all either children of alumni or miscreants from wealthy families on their second or third stop after getting booted out of Woodberry, Episcopal, or one (or more) of the tonier New England schools. Everyone was a snob, a racist, or both. But the faculty and staff were good people—warm, kind, and idealistic. The rules were a little extreme, but I didn’t mind what most of my classmates couldn’t stop bitching about—especially the dress code, which enabled me to borrow from Paul’s collection of navy blazers, oxford shirts, and regimental ties.
    Around this time, the Old Man decided to launch a formal father-son bonding campaign by driving me to school. Unlike most private schools back then, Macon had a bus route that looped through the surrounding neighborhoods, which I rode home in the afternoons. Nevertheless, the Old Man insisted on dropping me off every morning when he wasn’t away on business. Sometimes he woke me an hour earlier so that we could