Side B

Dad's records lived in three milk crates under the basement stairs, which is where I found them a week after the funeral, when my brother had gone back to Denver and my mom had gone to bed at seven. I expected the jazz. He'd made sure we knew about the jazz. Coltrane, Mingus, the Blue Note stuff with the covers he liked to hold at arm's length and lecture about. That was crate one and most of crate two, all in order, sleeves faced the same direction, a man who alphabetized. Crate three was not alphabetized. Crate three was the Bee Gees. Not just the Bee Gees. Carly Simon. A Carpenters record with a coffee ring on it. Two copies of the same Fleetwood Mac. A 45 of a novelty song about a truck driver that I had never in my life heard him mention. Kenny Rogers, and not ironically, because there was nobody down here to be ironic for. I sat on the cold floor and put the Bee Gees on the turntable he'd given me for my thirtieth birthday and never come over to hear. The needle hit. The falsetto came in. My dad, who told me when I was fourteen that disco was what happened to music when it stopped trying. My dad, who once turned off the car radio in the middle of a Whitney Houston song and drove twelve miles in silence rather than hear the end of it. I turned it up. Here's the thing I keep going back to. The jazz was on the shelf upstairs for forty years. It was in the living room where guests could see. These were under the stairs, but he kept them. He moved house twice and kept them. Some Saturday afternoon when the rest of us were out, he came down here and lowered a needle onto "Tragedy" and stood in this exact spot, and I will never know what his face did. I found a sleeve with his handwriting on it. Not a title. Just "Sue, '78, the lake." Sue is not my mother's name.

I put that one back without playing it. Some things you leave on the shelf. My mom came down around nine in her robe and stood on the second stair, listening. The Bee Gees were on their third song by then. "Oh," she said. "He thought I didn't know about those." "Did you?" "Honey, I bought half of them." She sat down next to me on the concrete and neither of us said anything for a while, and then she said, "Skip this one. He always skipped this one," and I did.