A Song for the Road

if it were Christmas Eve. Three news cameras panned the church.
All this for a bigoted, ethically challenged, old-fashioned bully of a congressman who’d cheated on his wife repeatedly before landing with that young thing perched in the front pew?
Miriam took a deep breath to discourage her rising blood pressure. The locket around her neck chilled her skin. She could almost hear Teo whisper, “Be nice, Sassafras.”
Hard on its heels came another voice: her daughter’s, calculated to wound. “No heart,” Talia had said in their last fight. “You can’t fight with someone who has no heart.”
Miriam clenched her fists, but the shaking had spread to her whole body now.
“Miriam.” Becky’s hiss brought her back to reality. Miriam glanced up at the altar, where Father Simeon, her boss, stood looking at her with his eyebrows raised. She’d missed a cue. She launched into an acclamation, keenly aware that not only was she failing at her job, she didn’t even want to do it.
She had to get herself together. Before people realized the only good thing about Miriam Tedesco had been her husband and kids.
Communion took forever. The choir finished singing and joined the procession; Miriam kept playing, her butt cheeks going numb as her rage grew, fed by the never-ending crowd that proved power and fame meant more than integrity. Today of all days, with the loss of her family so close at hand, that reality burned.
Burning … now there was an intriguing thought.
She ought to give this congressman a tribute of her own. A little Johnny Cash, perhaps. If she did it right—played around with the rhythms, stretched out the melody—no one else even had to know she was celebrating a funeral with a song about a man descending into a burning ring of fire.
Miriam snickered as she made the transition. Becky, returning from Communion, frowned at her, but Miriam pretended not to notice. Her body relaxed as she flexed her improv muscles. Burning. Genius. It was perfect on so many levels. She didn’t mean it … exactly. It was more a little joke, to get her through this day. Surely the good Lord would forgive her a private joke.
At least, she thought it was private until, a chorus or two down the line, a hand slammed down on the grand piano. “What the hell do you think you are doing?”
Startled, Miriam lifted her hands from the keys. She looked up to find the congressman’s young widow standing beside her, quivering with rage.
Silence fell in the church. She’d been so absorbed by her musical exercise, she’d failed to notice that the Communion line had finally cleared. A glance around the building revealed a thousand faces turned toward her. A few hid smiles. Most looked confused; some, angry.
But none as angry as the widow—a woman who, Miriam remembered too late, had been up-and-coming in Nashville before she left it all behind to marry Atlanta’s longest-serving congressman.
Of course she would recognize “Ring of Fire,” no matter how Miriam dressed it up.
Well … Okay, she hadn’t dressed it up that much.
Ordinarily, Miriam tried to follow the third commandment. But at this moment, only one word properly expressed the depths of trouble she’d just landed herself in.
Shit.

 2
6:40 PM
NO MATTER HOW MANY times Miriam pulled into the driveway, the sight of the little blue bungalow sitting cold and silent was always a shock. It had always been overrun with noise: piano in the front room and cello in the first bedroom, Teo’s Argentine jam sessions on the porch, with June bugs flinging themselves against every glass surface. Music spilling through leaky windows, sparking impromptu dance parties among the little girls next door. And always Blaise and Talia, working together, shouting at each other, fighting and making up, their tempers no match for the bond of the womb.
Miriam slung the white shopping bag—the only thing she had to show for this whole day—over her shoulder and slammed the car door.
A figure separated from the porch swing and said, “There you are!”
Becky was the only person in the universe who could wear jeans and a pink flowered “Grandma” sweatshirt without looking like a slob. Maybe she starched her clothes to get them to maintain that shape. “What are you doing here?”
Her friend held up a bottle and a flat box. “Birthday treats?” She shrugged. “After today, I figured wine and chocolate were more appropriate than cake.”
Despite herself, Miriam’s lips twisted to one side. “Not gonna argue with you there.” She started up the walkway, inhaling the scent of Teo’s herb garden, which she hadn’t managed to kill yet.
“You disappeared after the funeral. I was worried.”
Miriam stopped at the top of the porch stairs. She looked down at the gray-blue boards and kneaded her forehead. “I, well, Father Simeon called me in for a come-to-Jesus meeting.”
“And?”
“And what? Are you asking if I got fired?”
Becky looked sheepish.
Miriam leaned one shoulder on a support. “Well, no. But I think it’s safe to say I’m on probation. He made it clear I’d better not ever pull a stunt like that again.”
“Were you intending to?”
Miriam gave that smart-ass comment the eye roll it deserved. “Anyway, I knew I wasn’t going to be of use to anyone today. Better to clear out and …”
“Soul search.”
Wallow was the word she’d been thinking of. Becky’s take sounded better. She shrugged. “Simeon … suggested … I go out to the grave site,” she said.
“Oh, Miriam.” The sympathy in Becky’s voice nearly undid her. “You should have called me. I would have gone with you.”
Miriam picked at some peeling paint on the porch support. “I couldn’t get out of the car,” she admitted in a low voice.
Becky hugged her again, the box and bottle bumping the post behind her. “You shouldn’t go out there by yourself,” she murmured. “Let the people who love you help you.”
Miriam melted into the touch of another human being. She couldn’t get used to the lack of human contact—as a wife and mother, someone had always been touching her.
For one moment, she considered