Free Thank You for the Music by Jane Mccafferty

from another’s suffering, the darkness of summer could ever look the same.

B ERNA ’ S P LACE
    M Y HUSBAND AND I WORKED TOGETHER so that the house would be presentable for our only son and his new girlfriend. “It’s serious, this time,” our son had told me. “I think I’ve found my life.” Life, he said, not wife. But really, he’d found the whole package.
    Jude, my husband, was a newly retired art professor, and an artist—working in oil and acrylic—and over the years our entire house had turned into a studio. We had paint thinner on the back of our toilet, smocks on the railing, art magazines piled into the corners of the dining room. I told myself this was inevitable: How could a man like Jude be contained in one room? Even the front porch had been conquered by his old cans, the dried brushes piled in a heap below the swing, the scrappy canvases he never seemed to move out to the curb for the trash collectors leaning against the wall by the door. (I’d given up.) In his art he was somewhat successful; the best galleries in Philadelphia had shown his work, and Jude was gratified by a number of fellow artists who seemed to think he was some kind of genius. Articles in the seventies about his early neo-Expressionism said as much. Though he’d never admit it, and often made the joke that he was a has-been that never was, I knew Jude needed to think he was a genius. In his heart he still wrestled with that tiresome affliction that most men trade in for a kind of reluctant humility by the time they turn fifty. Jude, at sixty-four, was still going strong, sometimes painting all night long in the attic, Billie Holiday or Bach for company, a view of the skyline out the window.
    He was also very kind; I remember he knew I was tired from a day at work, where I sat behind a counter in a crowded hospital trying to help exasperated, sometimes furious people figure out their health care insurance. When I was mopping the floor to prepare the house for our son and his girlfriend, Jude climbed out of the cave of his work and told me to go take a nap. He’d clean, he said, his eyes still glazed with his art. And I knew he’d apply the same fierce, concentrated energy to housework as he did to his painting. The place would shine.
    My son rang the doorbell that evening at dusk; I was struck by that since usually he burst through the door with no warning. I was used to him raiding the refrigerator as if he were still in high school. This night was different, though. This was the night we were to meet his girlfriend.
    I was the one to answer. There they stood in the dusk, my handsome son in his maroon sweater and ponytail, a twenty-five-year-old young man who liked his dog, reading, Buddhist meditation, and hiking, and beside him, holding his hand, stood his girlfriend, as he’d been calling her, despite the fact that she was, at least compared to him, old. Sixty, I’d soon learn. Sixty. Nine years my senior. She wore a beige raincoat, and moccasins. She was very tall, with high cheekbones and lank, dark hair parted on the side, and my first thought was that she looked like my pediatrician from childhood, a woman who’d visited my home when I’d had German measles. The resemblance was so uncanny that for a moment I thought it was her, Dr. Vera Martin! I was almost ready to embrace her, for she had impressed me deeply as a child, with a sense of authority that seemed rooted both in her eloquent silences and the sudden warmth that transformed her serious face when she’d finally smile. My son’s friend smiled and the resemblance only deepened.
    â€œHi!” I said, and stared at this woman who I knew could not be my childhood doctor, who was in fact long dead. So who was she? Not his girlfriend. Not really.
    â€œInvite us in, Ma,” said my son, and I could see he was enjoying my shock.
    â€œThis is Berna, Ma. Berna, this is Patricia, my