Free I Want to Show You More (9780802193742) by Jamie Quatro

to see the writing. But when she previews this photo all she sees is her own hand, which is ugly—the part of it that shows, anyhow: thumb and index finger with chewed nails, cuticles torn, fingertips raw; the skin between crinkly, webbed. For a moment she has clarity: she is middle-aged and flattered. The man on the phone is a fiction, her own desperate creation.
    She hands the scrap to her son.
    Do you know what this says? she asks. Can you sound it out?
    The boy shakes his head, mouth open.
    I want you to keep this, she tells him. Like a present from me to you, okay?
    The boy nods, clutching the piece of paper.
    Okay, she says. Now hold it up, like this, so I can take a picture.
    The classroom window is open despite the drizzle. Sitting in the outdoor amphitheater, the mother can hear her daughter playing a Bach Invention, low octaves in the left hand blending with a flute trilling in the classroom next door. On the floor above, a baritone voice sings a single phrase, over and over. German, she thinks. Wagner. She feels the light flutter in her stomach she used to feel before her own piano recitals. She is waiting for her phone to vibrate. Tuesday, 4 P . M .—any second the other man will call.
    She looks down to where her four-year-old son is hopping from bench to bench. He’s taken the hood on his raincoat off; strands of wet hair cling to his temples.
    Careful, she says, it’s slippery. The boy stoops to run his hands over the slick wood.
    The mother turns to look at the classroom window. Inside, her daughter will be sitting at one of two Steinways, which have been placed side by side so the student can observe the teacher’s hands. The teacher, Lena Ivanov, will pace behind the girl while she plays, stopping to sit down and demonstrate how strong this sforzando should be, how light that staccato. She’ll ask the girl simple questions—What does the pp mean? How many flats in the key of F?—but her accent is strong, the diphthongs rising and falling in the wrong places, and her daughter will remain silent, staring at the calendar above the piano. It’s an old calendar, from eight years ago, but Lena Ivanov still displays the months in sequence, each page depicting an important Russian landmark: the Hermitage Museum, the Volga and Neva Rivers, a statue of Pushkin.
    On the way home from the Conservatory, her daughter will scowl. I don’t like piano, she’ll say. I don’t like Miss Ivanov. But by the time they’ve reached the top of Lookout Mountain, she will have stopped complaining—she’ll be cheerful, full of chatter—and the mother will convince herself, again, that the discipline is good for her, that it’s important for her to learn to adapt to different teaching styles.
    There’s also the matter of the phone calls from the man, the hour of near-privacy the lessons afford. Yes, the mother will tell herself. There’s that, too.
    Today she’d planned to tell the man a story, something a cardiologist said about heart ablation being a search-and-destroy mission. But when the phone vibrates in the pocket of her raincoat and she hears the man’s voice saying her name, she finds she’s biting her lip to keep from crying.
    It’s like this great darkening has taken place, she hears herself say. Like I’ve sucked the light out of the world and into myself, and only you can access it.
    It’s what happens, when it’s love, the man says.
    I’m a sieve, she tells the man. I need more and more contact with you just to feel normal.
    She looks down to where her son is pulling at weeds growing up between cracks in the concrete.
    Two more months, the man says, and we’ll have our meeting.
    The mother watches her son toss a handful of shiny wet weeds into the air above his head. He looks up at her.
    Watch this, he says, climbing the benches.
    Too high, she calls to her son.
    The boy doesn’t look at her. He’s