Free Terminal Grill by Rosemary Aubert Page B

good boy.” The sight of him should have repelled me totally.
    â€œI’ll play more for you,” he said, moving toward the piano. “Come and sit beside me.”
    I did. He began to play and sing, his voice gruff and pained, and, despite its rustiness, clearly professional.
    I listened and as I listened, something in me started to break. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I looked sideways at him, maybe I put my hand on his to make him stop the music. “Matthew,” I said, “Who are you? Where did you come from?”
    He stared at me. Fear danced in the deep eyes, a small white figure gyrating in the distant blackness. “I am who I said I was and I am from where I said I was from.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    I KEPT MY EYES on him.
    â€œI don’t care about your wonderful house or your marvellous career or your important contacts,” I told him. “All I care about is the wonderful person I’ve seen inside you. If you have some terrible problem, it’s all right. I’ll care about you anyway.”
    He smiled. “That’s very sweet,” he said, “but …”
    And then I told him about the song. About the fact that it was credited to someone else. He jumped to his own defence immediately. He said he’d allowed the other person to take credit because he’d been so young himself at the time. He said—just as my brother had said—that the songbooks were often wrong. And then he began to play several famous songs that had been recorded by well-known singers but written by lesser-known composers—to prove that such mistakes were often made.
    Then he sang me two songs I’d never heard—lovely songs that he said were also his. He told me that if I wanted a list of people to call about him, he’d be happy to supply names and numbers—but then the mystery would be gone. “You, too,” he said to me, “are full of mystery.” He played a little longer, then told me more about his wonderful house—“our” house. He tried to teach me to sing one of the pretty songs he’d written. Then he asked me once again to take him home.
    Back out in the night, the weather was wilder than ever, but a frenetic joy seemed to have overtaken Matthew as we hailed a cab. Despite the now bitter cold, he wrapped me in his coat—leaving him in only the panther sweater. He kept saying, “I’ll get sick and you’ll have to take care of me ….”
    In the cab, he couldn’t seem to stop kissing me nor to restrain himself from declaring, “You are the love of my life.”
    We decided we were starved and we headed for the Terminal, but first I had a package I had to drop off at the place where I did volunteer work. It was, by now, 11 p.m., and I felt reckless and young and important. It was the first time in my life I’d ever taken a taxi to one place and asked it to wait while I completed an errand before going on to another place. I left my purse in the back seat of the cab as I ran to the door, through freezing rain, to deliver my parcel. I heard Matthew give instructions to the cab driver as though he often took cabs from one place to several others. He said he’d wait for me in the back.
    When we got to the Terminal, he told me he’d spent all his money on the drugs, so I paid for the cab.
    The streets were slick with frozen rain. Holding onto each other for dear life, we slid our way from the cab to the door of the Terminal, and giggling, burst in out of the hostile night. Matthew threw off his coat and insisted that he had to sit in the booth on the same side of the table as me, so that we touched all along one side as I ate.
    He seemed enormously happy and was full of talk about our future. He loved to talk about how he would go out on the road and I would be waiting for him in our house. He expressed fear that I might be lonely there. I asked him whether any of the band