Nobody said one word.
My aunt looked at the carpet. My uncle, who had asked me to play, said, “Fair enough, Adele.”
That instrument went to a shop on Carrow Street in the January of 1986 for ninety dollars, and I have looked for it in every second-hand shop I have been in for thirty-nine years.
PART 3 — THE SUMMER
Here is what Gil did in the summer of 1986, which I did not know until a Tuesday night at sixty years old.
He came to our house to ask my mother.
He was nineteen. He put a jacket on to do it. He had four hundred and eleven dollars saved from two summers at the cannery and a ring in his pocket from a shop in Ashmere.
And Adele Meade sat him down at our kitchen table and told him the truth about where we were.
We were losing that house. I did not know that either; I found out in the September when we moved to the flat over the chemist.
