We seldom brought people to our apartment. It was an automatic thing, neither spoken about nor a source of shame. Mainly the place was one we’d rather not be at and weren’t as much as possible. I don’t recall asking Lydia to come over, she just sort of followed us as we all spoke excitedly about the altercation and got our stories straight if such were needed. But I figured, correctly, that the Jody would claim he had fallen or something other than admit to having his assed thoroughly kicked by a grade schooler, off company property. Still, it was a very very  long time before either Tess or I went back to the House of Values.

“Who plays?” Lydia asked when she saw the guitar Tess had repaired.

“Sarah,” Tess said.

“Do not, not a lot yet anyway,” I said. And I felt a slight blush on my cheeks. Sometimes I’d fiddle with the thing when the radio was on and managed to match the bass line to songs. Tess had copied chord diagrams from a library book and instructions on how to tune the damn thing. I’d gotten to the point where I could do basic first position major chords without causing that damn buzzing sound.

Lydia picked it up and strummed a G chord. She then twisted a couple of Tess’s homemade nobs (which involved plastic and screws) and played a fairly sweet sounding G to D to C. “That’s all you really need to know to start,” she said.

“Didn’t know Jehovahs played the guitar,” Tess said, for she always said stuff like that. Even as an adult she’d say whatever popped into her head. Some people thought she did so without examination; but it really was her way. Yet there was never anything snide about her attitude, in some ways she was always a child.

“Or wore coveralls,” I added.

“Sure they do,” she said. “I was helping my mother in the garden, earlier–was thinking about getting more seeds at the House of Values–Can’t garden in school clothes. I’m allowed to have music, freckles too.”

Lydia smiled on “freckles.” I’d never seen her smile before. She had what used to be called a “mannish” face and it was also on the thin and long side. She had pretty eyes, high cheekbones and great teeth–but each quality appeared to be on its own, too far spread, without support from the others. But when she smiled the distances closed and rare beauty bloomed. Over the years to come I’d get to know that smile through a wide series of events–including many disasters.

Naturally, Tess saw Dreampurple in Lydia’s smile. Tess was a shelter for hopeless dreams and unlikely causes. They were invisible to all save her. And of the five top life changing sentences I’ve heard, she probably spoke at least three of them.

Looking back that next moment returns with eidetic clarity. Even the fight at the foot of the bank is sepia toned and affected by memory. But the time that had lain between Lydia’s first smile and what Tess said often returns to me as though it were right now. I can feel the soreness in my wrists where the pig had pinned them; I see Tess and Lydia in the slanting late afternoon sunlight, all of us sitting on my bed, Lydia quietly picking an A minor chord on strings I’d boosted from Cates’ Music a week or so earlier; and I can smell the moldy sweat of our plaster walls that were always damp even in late summer. My mind contains at least three other similarly, continuously fresh vignettes, but most of them are painful and only come to mind when I’m too happy about something.

The scene always ends the same. Tess says “You guys are going to start a band.”

The End