Free The Song Remains the Same by Allison Winn Scotch

nodded to her in agreement. Forgiveness. Yes. I will try. That’s what the new me might want anyway. My mother rubbed my forearm and smiled in a way that reminded me of someone who had taken too much morphine, and told me that she knew it, she knew that I had it in me now.
    Still, though, I’m relieved that Peter has gone back to New York all the same, not because I don’t want to rebuild, or that I don’t think I can trust him again, but because working toward this forgiveness that my mother impugns is exhausting. It requires tangible effort. And I’m already exhausted enough.
    Not that Peter knows this. Before he flew back on Monday, I was breeziness and happy anecdotes (from him, not me, as I still have no anecdotes of my own to speak of) and the occasional kiss, whichstill felt like a first-date kiss—all hesitation and question marks. He brought me chocolate bars and vanilla pudding, which he said were my favorites before, and which now taste good, mediocre good, and the fabulous me wonders if maybe I might enjoy something more exotic, more me, but I thank him and don’t say anything else.
    While I ate, he told me of our first date—a setup, and not a good one at that—stilted conversation, no common ground. But then he got up to put a song on the jukebox, and that he chose “Sister Christian” made me smile and tell him of my sick, deep crush for the lead singer of Night Ranger in the seventh grade. And then we both loosened ourselves up and ordered another beer, and when he walked me home, he kissed me, and—extra beer or not—I kissed him back.
    “You guys had that,” Samantha said over the phone the other night, “that music thing. Every once in a while in college, we’d karaoke and we’d all see how good you were— perfect pitch, you said, but mostly, you were over it. But with him, you found it again.”
    “What do you mean, over it?” I fingered the iPod on my lap, where it almost always sat—plugged into my ear—when I wasn’t being tested, rehabbed, prodded.
    “I don’t know,” she said. “You didn’t talk about it. Only that you once loved it, were great at it, but then…I guess you just lost interest.” I heard her pause to bite into her lo mein, still at her office, stuck waiting for a client to file some paperwork. “Like I said, to be honest, I don’t know all of the details.”
    “Funny, isn’t it? How people only know what we want them to know?” I said.
    I think of Peter, of the confession he made after the first-date story: “In the interest of full disclosure, I want you to hear it from me, all of it,” he had said. That one evening, I was staying late at the gallery to put up a show and we’d been fighting, though about what,he couldn’t remember, only that we were fighting badly and often. And that he and Ginger had just wrapped an H and R Block commercial ( they have music in H and R Block commercials? I’d asked), and that they went to the bar in their building to celebrate. And that when closing time came—armed with either too much alcohol or, in his case, too much vitriol at his wife—they’d become that coworker cliché by retreating to their mixing studio and doing it on the floor. But that was it, he said.
    How well do I know you, Peter?
    “I knew you plenty well,” Sam said, and pulled me back to the conversation.
    “Still though.” I shrugged, though she couldn’t see me.
    “Well, also, you liked that Peter was reliable,” she offered.
    “Ironic since he wasn’t,” I said back.
    “True enough,” she agreed. “The easy reads are never what they appear. Though you are. You were.”
    “I’m not sure if that’s a compliment,” I said.
    “I’m your best friend. Of course it’s a compliment,” she said.
    “So if it wasn’t music, what was it, then?” I asked. “What made me happy? What did I do in my downtime?”
    She hesitated, and I wondered if it was because she was still chewing or if it was because she didn’t yet know the