Free Songs Without Words by Ann Packer

at the front door, his reading glasses hanging from a cord around his neck. “It’s all ready for you to see.”
    A month earlier, he and her mother had taken a Penn alumni cruise up the Nile, but Liz had only seen a few snapshots. As she followed him in, she said a silent goodbye to the idea of a quick visit.
    “Perfect timing,” her mother said as she emerged from the tiny kitchen. “Did Dad tell you? We just finished the album.”
    They spent a few minutes talking, but it was clear to Liz that her parents needed her to look at the album
now
. It was happening, of course—they were becoming her children—but at times like this the transformation seemed sped up. And in fact, the first picture was one Liz had taken herself, of the two of them and their luggage standing on the curb at the airport, looking for all the world like Lauren and Joe on the first day of school, posing on the porch with their backpacks.
    She flipped through the pages. Standing in front of the Pyramids, or against the rail of the cruise ship, her parents looked older than they did in life, almost frail, but so game it was touching.
    “It’s all on the computer,” her father said. “If you want any copies, it’s a snap.”
    “Great,” Liz said.
    More photos, and she came to one of her mother fanning herself with a palm frond. Across the table, her mother leaned forward and peered at the photo, then turned to Liz’s father and said, “Remember how much water we drank that day?”
    “Listen to this, Liz,” he said. “If they served you an open bottle you had to send it back. That’s how contaminated the water was.”
    “Or how paranoid you were,” Liz joked, but neither of her parents smiled, and she felt bad.
    “Oh, honey,” her mother said. “After Mexico we just don’t take any chances.”
    Liz’s father disappeared into the kitchen, and Liz fought an impulse to look at her watch. She wondered what Lauren was doing. She’d almost snapped at Lauren, had certainly felt a kind of automatic urge to snap: to get into it with Lauren, yell, the kind of thing Lorelei had done to Sarabeth every day of her life. Often without even so small a provocation as
Why can’t you fucking leave me alone?
Liz remembered a day when she and Sarabeth were playing with glass animals at the top of the stairs, and Lorelei, passing them in her stocking feet, had somehow managed to step on a tiny elephant. “What’s
wrong
with you?” she’d shrieked at Sarabeth, as if the entire thing had happened according to Sarabeth’s design.
    Liz’s father emerged from the kitchen with a tray of drinks—a trio of tall aqua glasses accented by orange wedges.
    “Oh, good idea,” Liz’s mother said. “Wait’ll you try this, Liz, you’re going to love it.”
    Liz accepted one of the glasses. The drink was cold and dark and iceless, and it tasted like a fruit drink of some kind, but oddly strong and sour, or maybe strong and sweet-and-sour; Liz wasn’t sure. “What is it?” she said.
    “It’s a gaboo,” her parents replied in unison, and they both laughed.
    “The Russells invented it,” her mother explained. “You make tea and chill it, then you add fresh lemon juice and peach Torani and just a tiny bit of bitters and bar sugar.”
    Liz took another taste. Since when did her parents know about bar sugar? Her father was wearing an argyle vest! Yet even the aqua glasses were very contemporary, and she wondered what had happened to the tumblers they’d always had—what had happened to
them.
    Outside, the rain seemed to have stopped, and through a torn place in the clouds she could see a pale, watery blue. On the other side of the sliding glass door there was a patio, but it was too small for much beyond a tiny metal table and two chairs. The big house on Cowper Street with its huge, tree-filled yard, its sunny kitchen, its rooms upon rooms—how could they not miss it?
It was so much work,
her mother had said blithely one day, as if the entire