Leo’s fingers moved across the fingerboard with a kind of hungry precision, his eyes still shut tight, his head nodding slightly to a rhythm only he could hear. The sun caught the side of his face, highlighting the dirt smudge on his cheek and the frayed collar of his shirt.
“Where did you learn to play like that?” I asked when he hit the final chord and let it ring out until the sound dissolved into the afternoon cicadas.
Leo opened his eyes and looked down at the soundhole, his thumb tracing the mother-of-pearl inlay around the rosette. “Self-taught,” he murmured. “The school music program got cut back when I was in seventh grade. They sold off all the band instruments to pay for the new gym roof. I just borrow my friend’s guitar when I can, or use the one at the rec room if the door’s unlocked.”
“You practice every day?”
“Whenever I can get my hands on six strings,” he said, looking up at me with a quick, defensive flash in his eyes as if he expected me to snatch the guitar back out of his lap. “I know three hundred’s way too much for what I’ve got. I’ll leave the twenty here, and you can keep the guitar on hold. I swear I’ll bring the rest by the end of next month.”
I looked down at the Martin in his hands. The wood had a warm, honey-colored patina from forty years of exposure to sunlight and old smoke, and the bridge had a tiny hairline crack that Dad had glued back together with Elmer’s wood glue in ninety-four.
If I sold it to a collector in the city for three hundred dollars, it would end up hanging on some restaurant wall alongside vintage snowshoes and old license plates. It would sit there behind glass, gathering dust while people drank craft beer underneath it.
Dad would have hated that more than anything. He believed instruments were meant to be worn out, beaten up, and passed around until the wood started to give way under the pressure of too many songs.
“Hey,” I said, my voice coming out a little rougher than I intended.
Leo flinched slightly, pulling his shoulders in. “Yeah?”
“Give me the twenty,” I said.
Leo froze. His fingers clamped down on the fretboard as if he were bracing for an argument. “I told you, I don’t have the rest right now, “
“I said give me the twenty,” I repeated, walking over and holding out my hand palm-up. “It’s yours.”
The boy stared at my hand, then up at my face, trying to find the catch. “You’re selling a Martin for twenty bucks?”
“I’m not selling it,” I told him, looking down at the asphalt between us. “I’m clearing out the driveway. My dad wouldn’t have wanted this thing sitting in a case in some antique shop in Albany. Take the twenty, and take the hard case too. It’s in the back by the spare tires.”
Leo didn’t move for a long second. Then he scrambled up off the curb, his sneakers squeaking against the hot pavement, and fumbled the guitar back onto its stand with clumsy, shaking hands before pulling the crumpled twenty-dollar bill out of his jeans and dropping it straight into my palm.
“Are you sure?” he whispered, his eyes wide. “Because if you change your mind, “
“I don’t change my mind,” I said, folding the worn bill into my pocket. “Go on before I decide I want fifty.”
He didn’t need to be told twice. He grabbed the guitar by the neck, tucked the heavy black hard-case under his other arm like it was a sack of groceries, and half-walked, half-jogged down the driveway toward the sidewalk without looking back once.
I watched him turn the corner by the mailbox, his shoulders squared against the weight of the case, holding it out away from his leg so it wouldn’t bang against his knee.
The driveway suddenly felt very quiet. The cigar box of money sat on the folding table, rattling slightly in the breeze.
I turned back toward the house, stepping past the boxes of old drill bits and half-empty paint cans, and pushed open the screen door. The kitchen was already half-packed; the counters were bare except for a roll of paper towels and a lone coffee mug left behind for the final cleanup.
I walked down the narrow hallway toward my dad’s old bedroom, intending to finish sorting through the dresser drawers before the evening pickup. But as I passed the small spare room that Dad used to call his office, I noticed something sticking out from underneath the bottom shelf of the old metal bookcase.
It was a flat, dark green cardboard portfolio, the kind school kids used to use for art projects back in the seventies. The edges were chewed up and faded to the color of dry moss.
I didn’t remember seeing it when we cleared out the desk on Thursday. I dropped down onto one knee, the linoleum cold against my shins, and pulled the portfolio out from the dust bunnies.
When I flipped the brass clasp open, three things spilled out onto the floorboards.
The first was a black-and-white photograph of a teenage boy standing outside a small brick house that looked a lot like this one, holding an old beat-up Gibson with a neck so warped you could drive a truck through the action. The boy in the picture was my dad, looking skinny and awkward in a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up too high.
Written on the back of the photo in my grandmother’s sharp, blue-ink cursive were the words: *Arthur, July 1952. The day Mr. Henderson gave him his start.*
I turned the photo over and looked at the other two items that had fallen from the folder.
One was a dog-eared songbook with handwritten chord charts scrawled in the margins in pencil, mostly old folk tunes and early blues progressions that Dad had practiced until the paper was practically translucent.
The other was a folded piece of lined notebook paper, yellowed with age, bearing a short note written in a hand I didn’t recognize.
*To Art,* it said. *Don’t let it sit in the corner. Music’s no good if nobody’s hearing it.*
I sat there on the floorboards with the photograph in one hand and the note in the other, listening to the hum of the refrigerator in the empty kitchen down the hall.
The afternoon sun was sliding down the west side of the house, throwing long, amber bars of light across the dust motes dancing in the hallway.
I thought about Leo walking down Elm Street with that Martin guitar tucked under his arm, his fingers probably already itching to find the strings.
I laid the photograph back down inside the green portfolio, closed the brass clasp with a soft click, and stood up, dusting off my knees.
The yard sale sign was still tacked to the wooden oak tree out by the curb, fluttering every time a car went by.
I walked back out to the driveway, picked up the cigar box with its twenty-nine dollars in loose change, and carried it toward the back porch.
There was still a box of old screwdrivers to pack, and the sun was dipping fast behind the neighbor’s roof, but for the first all day, my chest felt like it had room enough to breathe.
