Chapter 17: Talent Night

My mother had strung lights between the porch and the maple.

By seven the whole family sat on the lawn in folding chairs, with hard cider and a blanket across every lap.

Someone had built a fire in a ring of stones.

Hay bales made a stage.

Janelle stood beside it with a clipboard, looking like she'd been born holding one.

"Order of acts," she said. "The poem, from Mom's sister. The card trick, one-handed because of the cast. Then Ben."

"Ben who?" my father said.

"Ben, Dad," I said.

"Our Ben?"

"Our Ben, honey," my mother said, from the next chair, with absolutely no expression on her face.

Nick sat across the fire, two chairs down from Janelle's.

He had texted me twice more since the cellar.

I had left both unread.

I could feel him looking at me through the smoke.

Ben came up out of the crowd with a harmonica in his hand.

He climbed onto the hay bale, and he looked about eleven feet tall with the lights over his head.

"My grandfather's," he said, holding it up. "He taught me one song. He said you only need one."

He put it to his mouth.

It was a slow, plain tune, the kind that goes round the same four notes and finds something new in them each time.

The fire popped.

My aunt stopped fanning herself.

My uncle with the cast sat forward in his chair, and my great-aunt woke up.

Ben played with his eyes closed, and halfway through he opened them and looked straight at me across the whole lawn.

I felt it right down the front of my body.

Under the blanket I gripped my own knee and held on.

When he finished, nobody clapped for a second.

Then my father stood up, slowly, in his plaid coat, and put his two hands together.