The bank vault was geometric, the doors of the safe deposit boxes fitted together in perfect rectangular arrays, vertical, horizontal, closed and flat. A mausoleum for money and documents. No windows. Odorless, except for a faint tang that might have been ozone. Artificial light. I imagined my father, with his claustrophobia, hurrying to get in and out of the place.

Mom was with me. She'd never heard of this bank. After the reading of the will, when I was driving her home, she'd said, "Why did he leave it to you, Gabriel? What's in it?" I said I didn't know, and invited her to come open the box with me.

"Is this the right box?" I asked. It was five feet high, and three wide. I didn't know they made them that big.

The woman glanced at the card in her hand, and at the box. "The numbers match," she said. "This is the one."

She turned her key, and I turned mine, and we opened the door. Inside was a stack of three-ring binders, with only a foot or so of empty space above. A white envelope with my name lay on the top binder.

"I'll be upstairs," the woman said. "If you need anything, or you finish, just call." She indicated a dial-less white phone on a long table in the middle of the room. She locked us in as she left.

There were six chairs. I took the envelope and sat at the table. Mom sat next to me.

Goodbye.

I passed the letter to mom and she read it.

"I'd like a copy," she said. After a while she asked, "Aren't you going to look at the songs?"

"Not yet." She couldn't read music, and she would get bored while I turned the pages. I didn't want her looking over my shoulder. Besides that, going through the music was going to be a massive job. There must have been hundreds of songs, maybe thousands. What the hell was I going to do? Just reading them would take months.

"I'll drive you home," I said. "I'll come back later." I picked up the phone and called to be let out.

I wanted to burn the damn things -- too much responsibility -- but curiosity made me read them. The binders were in chronological order, with the oldest on the bottom. All of them were three and a half inches wide, labeled with the month and year of the oldest and newest songs. They started in 1972. Each song was preceded by a handwritten page or two of notes: the beginning and ending dates of composition, the song's origin, suggestions on how to record it, singing style -- anything that applied.

I lay all the binders on the table, and started flipping through them at random. The detail was staggering. When he wanted feedback, he wrote it out like any other instrument. There were notes on how live performances should differ from recordings. I didn't hear written music in my head as well as he did, but I could at least listen to the melodies that way. The chord progressions were amazing, like jazz, but accessible; fresh and unexpected, but familiar feeling. There was something baroque about some of them; they had a cheerful energetic headlong quality. There were a few somber ones in minor keys. And one or two in weird modes I'd have to play, to hear. Sometimes he specified unusual instruments: pairings like harmonica and bagpipes, sitar and sax, theremin and hurdy-gurdy. I wondered how he'd decided on the combinations, and whether he could anticipate the sound clearly, or whether he'd been guessing. Then I opened the first binder, and read it front to back for a while. That took too long, so I looked at the books in order, but only reading the first and last songs in each one. There was a certain consistency to the writing. They were well crafted. Nothing was brilliant, but most of them were good, some quite good.

Then it changed. The year was 1985. The last song in the binder was better than anything he'd done, even "Weightless". I couldn't understand why he hadn't shopped it around. I would have killed to get a song like that out in the world. I looked at all the others in the book, and several were just as good.

I had to leave when the bank closed. I took 1985 through 1988 with me.

I was up until dawn. Some of the songs didn't work for me, and I only played them once. Others I had to play several times before I decided I didn't want to use them. There was a deep strangeness in one that disturbed me -- I quit after twenty bars and turned to the next one. But there was a handful of others that I knew I could get obsessed with.

I didn't have any music paper, so I pencilled my changes on the originals. My music was usually at a steady tempo, but dad's was catchy. I envied that, but I had enough sense to leave the rhythms alone. In the end, I changed some of the bridges and added instrumental breaks here and there, and tinkered with the wording, though he was usually a better wordsmith, and changed a note or two of the melodies. At six thirty, Julia touched my shoulder and I looked at the clock. I took a shower and went to work at the hardware store. It was my day to open. My eight hours were long and sleepy, and I was glad that business was slow.

That was a Tuesday, and I had to work all week. I couldn't get back to the bank until Monday. I spent the nights practising. Julia would come out of the bedroom at two a.m., blinking and saying, "Shouldn't you get some sleep?" I wouldn't go. We bickered like an old married couple. She sat on the couch the second night, listening. I wanted to know what she thought. She fell asleep before I could ask -- before I'd finished playing the first one.

The band had a gig Saturday night, at the old movie theater on Mass. I played dad's songs solo. The reaction from the crowd was less than I'd hoped -- polite applause and a few whistles.

Sunday was a practice day, and then we didn't have another gig for a couple of weeks. We rehearsed four or five more times, until we'd mastered three of the songs. Verne's voice was best for them -- best in general -- but I insisted on singing.

Our next date was a strange little three-level bar in the old part of Wichita, and the reaction was more favorable than it had been in Lawrence, but still disappointing.

We were driving back in the van, somewhere around Matfield Green, when "Werewolves of London" came on the radio.

I turned it up. I said, " 'He's that hairy-handed gent who ran amuck in Kent. Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair.' " I was sitting in front, with Don.

"Maybe we should cover that instead of your songs," Rake said.

I hadn't told them yet that the songs were my dad's. I didn't until we were committed to cutting a CD. "They're good songs," I said.

"They're the wrong kind of songs."

"They're better than anything else we do, including covers."

"I mean -- "

Verne spoke up. "You mean they aren't the kind of songs you play in bars."

"Yeah," Rake said. "That's it."

They were right. I'd picked songwriter's songs, not entertainment. The songs could go on an album, but a bar crowd didn't want to hear this kind of thing when they were partying, or trying to pick up a girl. They didn't want to think about the words. They didn't want a pretty melody. They wanted thump-thump. They wanted boogie. All right, then. There were plenty to choose from. The problem was narrowing them down to a manageable number. All five of us worked hard, separately and together, to make good party music of some of the others. From the first time we played those songs we got requests to play them again. Bootleg tapes started circulating, a good sign.

We cut our own CD and started selling it at our gigs, and from our website. We sold out in three weeks and cut more. College radio gave us airplay around the midwest, so we mailed the CDs to the others around the country. Our hit count jumped, and we had to pay our internet provider more money, but we didn't care -- we were making enough sales to more than cover the cost. Fans started putting up web pages about us.

The big record companies heard about the CD and started calling. We turned them down. We arranged distribution with an independent label, to get the disc in the stores. Then we hit the charts. None of us believed it. We arranged a national tour -- ten weeks on the road. We quit our day jobs, got ready, and went.

I was repeating my father's life in L.A. The band was fracturing under the strain. Rake and Verne were getting big egos, and Don and I were having a hard time holding the group together. The royalties were a problem -- I took forty per cent for Dad's songs, so I could give mom her half, and there was resentment over that, even when I pointed out that my share was only twenty per cent, to their fifteen apiece. The only thing that kept us together was that we all knew we owed our success to someone else. I didn't say anything, because that would have rubbed the sore spot. Dad's songs were uncredited on the album -- no writer listed. This became part of our mystique. We got a lot of publicity because of our refusal to talk about authorship.

By the end of the first month every venue was the same sea of waving arms and screaming faces, and I wanted to hurl the keyboard at them. I wanted to go home. I was tired of dirty laundry and long bus rides and shitty food and never enough sleep. I remembered my dad telling me how people made themselves into idiots to ingratiate themselves -- men offering you drugs, women offering you themselves. (Now I understood that he was trying to prepare me, so I'd be able to ignore them.) I hated the radio stations for running contests so people could win backstage passes. Backstage was a phony obligatory party, and I finally understood why rockers turned into assholes. But I wouldn't do that. That was the road to notoriety and resentment, and worst of all, more publicity. I smiled and nodded and tuned out. I could usually find a place to take a nap, and Don would wake me when it was time to go. At the end of the tour, in Tampa, instead of taking a week to rest and see south Florida with the rest of the band, I flew home. We'd had the R&R planned from the start, and I left some irritation when I bailed. Fuck them. The tour was over, and I was going home. I missed Julia, and rubbing her neck while she complained about her boss. I missed her spaghetti and meatballs. I missed the curve of her jaw, and the mole at the corner of her mouth. I missed her nipples when they stood up like thimbles. I missed her beautiful delicate feet, and her Modigliani face, and her uncontrollable hair.

I'd planned to surprise her, but she wasn't in the apartment, and I couldn't get her at work, or on her cell phone. I waited all afternoon and evening, and I was almost ready to report her missing. She walked in the door at eleven p.m.

"You're home early," she said.

"You're home late."

"What a romantic homecoming. No flowers, no kiss. Just 'You're home late'."

"What a romantic homecoming. No flowers, no kiss. Just 'You're home early'."

She threw her purse on the couch. "So, do you want to know why I'm late?"

Not if she asked me that, but I couldn't safely answer. I said nothing instead.

"I had a date," she said.

Hoping not to hear that was exactly why I hadn't answered her question. "How did it go?"

She laughed. "You don't care?"

Of course I did. "Care or not, I lose either way," I said.

She looked puzzled, then went ahead: "This is about people not meeting each other's needs."

" 'People'? You mean you."

"Whatever." She waved her hand. "I'm tired of your tricks, always trying to confuse me."

"I'm not trying to confuse you. I want you to know what's bothering you."

"What's bothering me," she said, "Is that you're never home. You're a parasite. You take, and I give, and I'm tired of it. You don't contribute."

"Contribute? I'm making more money than you do."

"Don't give me that sad old line that you're doing this for me."

"No. I'm doing it because I want to."

"Well I'm tired of it. Where's my support? I go to bed alone and I wake up alone. When you're here, I go to bed alone and I wake up and you're still asleep when I leave for work. You haven't touched me in weeks."

Touched her in weeks? How? Through the Internet? Besides, not seeing her was exactly how I lived when she was busy with a project, which was most of the time. I tried to put my arms around her, but she stood back.

"Stay away."

"Julia -- "

"You prick. I'm just an emotional refueling station to you."

"You slept with him, didn't you?"

"No."

"Yes you did."

"Who made you psychic?"

"It's easy, when I've spent almost half my life with you."

She squinted and looked out the window.

I stood next to her. There was nothing to see but night, and the asphalt lot behind the apartment building, and the parking sheds, and beyond that the next apartment building. I waited a while, then I said, "Tell me what happened."

She stepped back. "I didn't exactly sleep with him."

"Are you in love with him?"

She looked as if she didn't understand the question.

"Are you in love with him." A tune started up in my brain, a weird minor-key country fiddle thing, over and over, first the melody, then an inversion, then a diminution, then the entire thing repeated all over again, repeatedly. I wanted to hit myself in the head until it stopped.

"Maybe I should move out," she said.

"Why?"

"I'm confused. Angry. You're always gone. I went out with him because I was lonely, and I complained about you all through dinner, and he was so nice, he just listened, and I kept drinking, and, and he brought me home, and he had to help me upstairs because I kept falling, and when I woke up in the morning he was in bed with me. I thought it was you and rolled over and kissed you, I mean him, and he wanted to do it and I couldn't fight him off, he was big and strong. I was hung over, and he got inside me for a minute, and he wouldn't stop until I started to throw up and he let me go to the bathroom."

I sat down on the carpet, thinking I never expected I'd be glad she was hung over.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm not mad at you. I said those things because I was trying to make it your fault." She knelt next to me. "Can you forgive me?" When I didn't answer, she went on, "I didn't have a date tonight. I was driving around, trying to figure it out. I didn't think you'd be home yet."

I lay back and looked at the ceiling. The news didn't hurt yet, but it would soon. I wondered how long the suffering would last, and how bad it would be. The only thing I knew besides the approaching pain was that Julia needed reassurance. I had to make her think I forgave her. I had to do it now, or I would lose her. The root of her self-forgiveness would be her belief in mine. Fixing the lie would have to wait. I couldn't know when I would forgive her for real. Some day at breakfast I could tell her I didn't blame her any longer. "Really?" "Honest." Then we would smile at each other, and plan our day.

She was touching my chest, my shoulders, my arms, as if she was trying to find where I hurt, or prevent me brushing her off by not staying in one spot for long.

"I should kick his balls up into his throat," I said, and groaned. Wrong way to start.

"Oh, Gabe, I'm sorry, so sorry."

"You made a mistake," I said. "That's all. Anybody can make a mistake."

"Please tell me how to make it right. I wouldn't hurt you, ever, for anything."

I drew her down to me and wrapped my arms around her.

"Are you going to leave? Please don't. Are you going to leave?" She sounded out of breath.

"Why would I leave?"

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry."

"Always beating yourself up. Guilt will make this worse."

"I'm sorry."

"Cut that shit out!"

I went to the bathroom and reached up under the sink, in the crook of the pipe, and pulled out the stash. I rolled a two-paper joint and lit it and took it back to the living room.

We had white carpet and I hadn't brought anything to put the ashes in, so we flicked them into her shoe. Neither of us had smoked in months -- we saved it for special occasions -- and she got so wasted she fell asleep on the floor. I snuffed the roach with wetted fingertips and lay there looking at the ceiling, so far away impossible to reach, as the moon came out and silvered the room. When Julia woke up we went to bed. She wanted to sleep. I wanted sex; more than not having had any, I thought we needed it, to start glueing us back together.

"Now?" she asked. "So late?"

"Just try."

"I don't know."

She lay with her head on the hollow of my shoulder. I stroked her hair. "Every time I see you I feel like I did in high school. I don't want to be with anyone else."

"Oh yes." She rose up on an elbow and looked in my eyes. "Yes. I feel the same way."

Then she kissed me and rolled over on top of me and pulled my head back with her fingers in my hair and kissed my neck. She sat on my thighs and stroked my cock. How did she do that so perfectly? I moaned with my mouth closed, and closed my eyes.

"Like that, do you?" she asked.

"You need to ask? Did you forget?"

"I never get tired of compliments, even if they're only the letter 'o'."

She lifted her hips and grasped the tip of my penis and put it to the entrance of her vagina. She lowered herself. There was a split-second of resistance and I slid in. I groaned again, this time aloud.

"That's the word I meant," she said. "You say it so well."

"Finally," I said. "Why can't I just stay here for the rest of my life? No food, or going anywhere, or doing anything. Just lie here with my dick in you. It's better than heaven."

She rose and slid down.

"Slow," I said. "It's been two months. I'll pop in a minute if you're not careful." I put a hand on her hip and felt her birth-control patch under my palm. I said, "I had an idea. I think we should go away for a couple of weeks. A beach. You like beaches. Choose one."

"Can we afford it?" She leaned forward and the angle at our juncture changed.

"Sure. This is just the first tour. We're planning the next one. For serious money. We'll be playing arenas. We'll put the beach on a credit card and I can pay it off real quick."

"Stop it. You go away for months and then you come back and want to be romantic. I don't turn on and off like a lightbulb. You're always gone."

"What do you want me to do, sell insurance? I want to do what makes me happy."

She stopped moving. "But you're not happy. You're happy when you play music. You're not happy on tour. You sounded sad every time you called me."

"That's because you're here and I'm there. But this is my job. I have to make money now. That was the mistake dad made."

"Make up your mind. Do you want the music, or the money?"

"Both."

"I'm not into this now." She climbed off me. She rolled onto her back.

I wasn't sure she'd let me hold her, but she didn't resist when I pulled her against me. She didn't welcome it, either. She was simply passive.

"I can't be with you sometimes," she said. "I know I don't make sense. I watch myself acting like a shrew, and I think, this isn't me, and it feels strange, like watching some other woman talking for me."

I should have been listening, but all I could think about was the sex. I was judging the state of my erection, and how long it would hold, and whether I could get her back in the mood.

"There are so many things wrong with this relationship," she said.

"Not again. Not now."

"Listen. This time listen. Remember when we didn't talk for three days? The notes on the kitchen counter: 'Don't forget the milk'. 'The tail light on your car is out'. You want kids. I don't. You want a house. I don't. You're always gone, or working. You spend so much time with your band."

Then I interrupted; it was her same old chant. "I know this by heart already. You won't let me forget. I want to be with you, and that will never change. You do things to me here." I put her hand on my heart. "When you learn that, when you believe that, we'll be okay. Stop struggling. Stop loving the problems. They're not as important as us."

"I'm tired," she said. "I'm going to sleep." She rolled over, facing away, and settled her head in the pillow. I nestled behind her, spoon style.

We slept through the alarm in the morning and she was late to work. As soon as she was out the door I called a florist and had a dozen roses sent to her desk, eleven red and one yellow, with a note that said "Forever".

The phone woke me an hour later.

"It's me," she said. "Thank you for the roses. I don't deserve them."

There it goes again, I thought.

"I'm sorry, I'll be late tonight. There's too much to do. I'm eating at my desk." When I didn't answer, she said, "Really. It's an emergency. We have to estimate the Colorado software development all over again. The design changed. It has to be done by tomorrow morning."

"What time will you be here?"

"Late." She waited. "Don't worry. We'll do something this weekend. Really. Maybe we can drive down to that little B and B near Cottonwood Falls. Anything you want." She waited again. "I'm sorry about last night."

"Yeah. Me too. I think things will be better when you quit that job."

"I don't have time to talk. I have to get back to work."

"Sure."

"We'll talk this weekend, I promise."

I went out for the latest Elmore Leonard and spent the day reading. I was sleeping when she came to bed. She tried to get in quietly, but I half-woke, and reached for her. She was wearing one of her knee-length tee shirts. I recognized it by the texture.

"Take that off," I mumbled.

She moved down on me and kissed my balls and the top of my penis. It started to rise.

"Take it off," I repeated.

She ignored me and took my penis in her mouth. She was very slow, and I lay half-awake until I came. She got out of bed, and went to the bathroom. She always spit out the come and gargled. I heard the sounds and must have fallen asleep again, because I don't remember her getting back in bed.

In the morning I woke alone. She must have been up early; she'd left home-made muffins on the counter, and coffee in the thermos. I picked up the phone.

"How about lunch?"

She hesitated. "Okay."

"Something wrong?"

"No. I have to be available in case Denver calls. I'll change my voice mail so they can reach me on my cell."

"Can't we even eat lunch without that phone?"

"It's just in case. I have to be available if they have questions."

I knew what would happen. We went to Lulu's and the food wasn't on the table two minutes when the phone went off. She spent the next half hour talking. She hung up, and our meals were cold.

"You didn't have to wait," she said. She picked up her chopsticks.

"I've been home two days. I've seen you for maybe three hours, and we haven't fucked once."

"What do you call the other night?"

"Incomplete."

"What do you call last night?"

"A blow job."

"My girlfriends say that guys like those."

"Hey, I don't want to sound ungrateful, but I've been gone. Don't buy me off."

"I was tired. You were sleepy. It was late. I needed to get up early. Next time I won't."

"Suit yourself."

"Cut it out." She held her chopsticks pointed down at her food. "My life doesn't start and stop when you come and go. I can't turn things on and off for you. I don't have any control over my work load." She pinched some noodles with the sticks and lifted them to her mouth.

I watched. She always managed to eat noodles so none of them dangled from her mouth. No one else could do that. "You have the most perfect manners. You look like a character from a Victorian novel when you eat." She never made a blunder. She could take a chicken bone from between her teeth and look graceful.

"I could teach you."

"No. That would take away the mystery."

"I didn't think we had any left."

It was time for a grand gesture. This chipping away at each other had to stop. I took the package of gum from my shirt pocket and unwrapped the four pieces I had left. I dropped the gum in the ash tray.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

I shook my head. A minute later I had all the pieces of foil wrapped around each other and twisted into a band. "Give me your hand," I said. She held out her right hand. "Other one. The left hand." She held it out. I fitted the foil around her ring finger. "Marry me."

She looked at the aluminum foil and started laughing.

"Don't laugh," I said. "I mean it."

She shook her head. "Too... funny... Wait."

When she finally stopped she pressed her fingers against her cheeks and said, "Too perfect. Oh, Gabe. I do love you so. You do these things, and they're so wacky, and I remember how charming and perfect you are."

"Does that mean yes?"

"No. It means -- someday." She took out her cell and hit the speed dial.

"Not the phone -- "

She stopped me with a raised hand. "Lorene?" she said. "Tell Doug I won't be back. Stomach. My lunch didn't agree with me." She winked at me. "He can handle it. He's a big boy. I'm turning off my phones. 'Bye."

I threw some money on the table. We stood.

"Come on," we said in unison.