The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(89)

“Sorry?”

“You must be one of the composers’ guests?”

“I am one of the composers.”

“Oh.” He glanced at his wife as if he needed help in coping with this odd situation, then pulled out a folded program from his pocket and looked through it. “You must be, uh, how do you say your name?”

“Guerraoui.”

“And what does the N. stand for?”

“Nora.”

“I’m David Ford,” he said, shaking my hand vigorously. “This is my wife, Liz.”

The Fords made small talk for a few minutes before moving away, but my experience with them left a bad taste in my mouth. So it was with a great deal of trepidation that, the following morning, I met with Geri Turner and Roy Gilmore, the bass player and drummer who would be performing with me at the end of the week. Each of us worked in different styles, but Geri and Roy were so easy to work with that by the end of our first rehearsal I felt as though I had played with them many times before. I remember looking up from the piano and catching Geri’s eye as she was about to start her solo, or the little nod that Roy gave as I started mine.

Still, the pleasure I derived from playing with these musicians was too often overshadowed by my experiences outside of rehearsal. A security guard stopped me as I tried to go into the venue on my first morning, asking me to show my ID and tell him what business I had in the building. Standing in the middle of the café one day, trying to decide on lunch, I was handed a tray of dirty dishes by an attendee who assumed I was part of the help staff. Another time, a music critic talked to me for a good fifteen minutes before I realized that he thought I was Tahira Khan, one of the publicists at the festival, a woman with whom the only thing I had in common was the color of my skin. Everything else about us was different: she was taller, heavier, prettier, and she even spoke with a British accent. For years, I had wanted to be included in one of these prestigious venues, and now that I had finally been admitted into one, I felt out of place.

I was caught between the contradictory urges of running away from Silverwood and proving myself to all the David Fords in attendance. My rehearsal week brought about an anxiety the like of which I had never known before, and by the time the day of my performance arrived I was seriously contemplating calling in sick. I had been out and about every day, so I knew I couldn’t claim to have the flu, but I could easily have complained of food poisoning. Maybe from shellfish. Or deviled eggs. I was in my hotel room, frantically searching for the festival director’s phone number, when my mother called. She wanted to tell me that she was clearing out the cabin and locking it up until probate closed in October, at which time it would be sold along with the restaurant. She would take care of moving my old piano back, she said, but did I want to keep the antique chandelier I’d bought? Or could she just leave it there for whoever bought the place?

“I can’t really talk right now, Mom. I’m in Boston.”

“What are you doing in Boston?”

“I’m featured at Silverwood.”

“Silver-what?”

“Silverwood. It’s a very big deal.”

“So you want to leave the chandelier here?”

“Whatever you like.”

She gave a sigh of exasperation.

“What is it now?” I asked. Standing at the window, I saw that clouds were gathering for an afternoon thunderstorm, and the sunlight had dimmed. In the street below, a car raced to make it before the red light and another one honked as it waited to turn. It struck me how much I disliked the noise of big cities, how unsuited I was to them. At heart, I was a desert creature.

“You left everything,” she said accusingly.

“I don’t understand. Isn’t that what you wanted? You wanted to sell the restaurant, and I said it was fine. Now you want to clear out the cabin, and I’m telling you that’s fine, too. I’m agreeing with you.”

“I never said I wanted you to leave.”

Even after I’d declared defeat and walked away from my mother’s fights, she wanted to drag me into a new one. I was speechless, my mind reeling for a retort that would put an end to the conflict between us, but coming up with nothing. And she must have sensed an opening, because she pressed on. “You always run away, Nora. When it gets difficult, you run away. I did this, too, when I was your age.”

When she was my age, she had moved to a new home, a new country, a new continent. She had meant to change the course of her life, but she’d changed my sister’s and mine, too. How different would things have been for us if she had stayed? Maybe I would’ve had the ordinary life I had always wanted. I would’ve felt that I belonged somewhere. I wouldn’t have been taught, by textbooks, the newspapers, and the movies, to see myself once through my own eyes and another time through the eyes of others. I wouldn’t have wanted so badly to fit in and, paradoxically, to stand out.

I could go on like this forever, imagining the other world that might have been. Then it occurred to me that my mother, too, had been imagining a world that might have been: a nice house on the western side of Casablanca, a husband who taught philosophy at the university, one daughter a dentist and the other a doctor, both married to men who were comme il faut, neither greasy account books nor dog-eared music sheets in sight. She’d spent years trying to mold me into someone she could be proud of, but I had been so busy breaking out of that mold that I hadn’t noticed all the ways in which I was already like her. My blindness to cheating. My running away when things got tough.