“But I’ve done everything you asked for the last twelve years. You said I’d have a choice!”
“You do. The choice is between electrical engineering or biochemistry. Not music.”
I watched his hands bend into claws of frustration. He looked so like my father, from his sandy blond hair to his perfect-for-piano length fingers. Yes. Too much like my father.
“Then why did you let me study piano? Why enter me into piano competitions if I wouldn’t be allowed to take it to the next level?”
“It looks good on college applications for you to be well rounded. And music helps with math, right?” I could feel his heart breaking, but he didn’t know what I knew about an artist’s life.
My father’s passion for music had brought him joy, but forced me and Mom to scrimp on everything from warm clothes to meals. I still remember my mother on the phone every month, begging to keep the lights on, paying in installments. Sometimes we’d end up sitting in the dark anyway.
I swore my son would never be hungry, never fear homelessness. And he hadn’t.
My son’s shoulders drooped the way my father’s had after a long night of bar gigs or busking on the street. His classical piano career petered out early — he wasn’t nearly as talented as my son, but he refused to give up on music and played in any hole-in-the wall that would pay him. He made a few extra pennies playing his concertina on the street corners or outside of the farmer’s market on weekends.
My son looked at me with the same determination I’d seen in my father’s eyes when my mother begged him to get a real job.
“Mom, if you won’t pay for me to major in music, then I won’t go to college at all.”
I laughed. “Don’t be silly. You’re not going to throw away all of your hard work. Just get the engineering degree and you can play music for fun, on the weekends!”
My son walked to the hall closet and pulled down my father’s concertina from the top shelf. Then he grabbed his backpack from the hook inside the door. It was already packed full. When had he done it? How could I not have noticed?
“Goodbye, Mom. I’m sorry.” He slung the backpack over one shoulder and the concertina over the other and walked out the door.
Deborah Sale-Butler is a Portland Oregon based writer whose fiction, humor, non-fiction, and craft articles have appeared in Etymology Press, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Mystic Owl, The Artisanal Writer, and Greener Pastures. She is a repeat contributor to 101 Words and Witcraft. Additional stories are forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine, Aunt Jane, and Uppagus.
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