A Slice of Orange

The first time Merylee heard the tune, she listened out of curiosity. The single had popped up in her YouTube feed, which any other day would have suggested Taylor Swift or maybe Billie Ellish. She clicked on it just to find out what the song sounded like. Old, she thought, way old, but haunting. A band her mother probably loved when she was in college; her mom now just past sixty-five.

The next time she heard it, Merylee was driving to her mother’s, at her sister’s snippy urging. 

“Mom needs help with sorting out her bills,” Lauren said. “Since the mini-stroke, she’s getting more forgetful. I’m worried, but I can’t get over there with everything else going on.” Everything else meaning the dumpster fire that was her sister’s life.

Scanning the stations in her battered Civic, Merylee caught the song playing on an oldie’s station. She listened for a few moments—the singer was Stacy? Susan?—and then kept scanning, finally hitting on a Taylor Swift song. She sang along until she pulled into the grocery store lot near her mother’s house. 

 In the self-checkout lanes, Merylee placed yogurt, bananas, English Breakfast tea, a loaf of multi-grain bread, and three vine-ripened tomatoes in her cloth grocery bag. At the kiosk next to hers, a guy in a Tales from the Crypt T-shirt was humming that tune. Not again.

Ten minutes later, she was putting the groceries away in her mother’s kitchen.

“Mom, did you ever like Fleetwood Mac?”

Her mother sat at the kitchen island, watching Merylee at work. “What?” She frowned as if concentrating on words that were just beyond her comprehension.

“Fleetwood Mac,” Merylee repeated. “A band from . . . the Eighties? Did you ever listen to them? I keep hearing one of their songs. Something about snow-covered hills.” She kept her tone light, but cringed inwardly. I see what Lauren means.

“Nineteen seventy-six.” Merylee’s mother had come alive, her eyes bright. “Gregory bought tickets to their concert.” She smiled and closed her eyes. “We’d been dating for, oh, maybe seven months, but that concert sealed it for us.”

“In Philly?” Merylee tried to imagine her mother and father all those years ago, at a concert. Dressed in . . . bell bottoms? Tie dye? 

Her mother nodded. “The Spectrum.” She paused, her eyes looking at something only she could see. “It was between acts. We were there with Phil and Justine and Paula.” She glanced at Merylee. “You never met them. All of us impatient for Fleetwood to come onstage. I don’t even remember the other bands. And Gregory . . .” Again, she lapsed into silence, the memories seeming to accelerate. “He proposed.”

“You never told me this,” Merylee said. She slipped onto the stool next to her mom. When she reached out to take her mother’s hand, the older woman shook her head and rose to her feet.

“Let me find it,” she said and left the room. 

Merylee heard cabinets and drawers opening and closing and almost stood up to follow, but then her mother was back, holding a small, blue velvet box topped with a white bow. 

“Here,” her mother said. She took her stool and pushed the box toward Merylee. “He gave me a ring, of course. It was a cheap, dime-store ring because he didn’t want to lose the real one in that crowd. But he also gave me this.” She nodded at Merylee. “Go ahead. I wound it in the other room. Open it. I’m Stephanie, too, you know. That’s why.”

Puzzled, Merylee carefully opened the lid. The tinkling from the music box mirrored the same tune she’d been hearing over the last few days. Stephanie . . .  Stevie. That was the singer she’d been trying to place.

“Where did Dad find this?” Merylee cradled the box. Even in her forties, there were so many things she still didn’t know about her parents. And half of the pair was already gone—five years now.

“He never told me,” Stephanie said. “Those friends, Phil and Justine, they were musicians, too, and they played it at our wedding. It was ‘our’ song.”

Suddenly envious, Merylee hugged her mother. “You must really miss Dad. I know I do.”

Stephanie gently detached herself from Merylee. “I’ll be fine. I am fine. I have some rough patches from time to time, but I’m okay.” She patted Merylee’s hand. “It’s you I worry about. Don’t listen to your sister. She’s a landslide waiting to happen.”

Merylee backed out of her mother’s driveway, car windows open to the late August afternoon. Across the street, with his feet propped on a porch railing, a young man noodled on his acoustic guitar. She stopped to listen. This time, the now-familiar tune made her blink back the sudden dampness in her eyes.

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