Charles Rafferty

Drift

Long ago, the old friends stopped calling. I used to think they had lost my number. Now I forgive them their children and their jobs, their wives and their divorces, their cancer and their lawns, the fifteen minutes they allow themselves at the piano every night. I am able to go on without them—a kind of orphan from the life I used to live. This is what I’m thinking as I get in the car to take my daughter to her voice lesson. The ride is a quiet one. She is getting older and has learned to keep things to herself. When we arrive at the lesson, she makes it clear, without saying so, that I should wait outside. So I stay in the car—doing the bills, doing the things I hate—as her high notes drift through the studio door, the glass of the car window, the air that will be between us now from here until the end.

by Charles Rafferty, The Smoke of Horses © BOA Editions, 2017.