“You wanna do anything else?”
I shake my head. I’ve fulfilled my obligatory “tutoring” hour. It’s not my fault he didn’t actually want to learn the language.
He looks at me. I shake my head again.
My phone is still for the rest of the drive.
After a twenty-minute drive, we park in the Chautauqua lot and approach the gate to have our passes scanned. Barry’s wearing his around his neck, but I took mine off before entering Grape Country Dairy. I don’t think the people here realize how pretentious it looks to wear something that proclaims their status to everybody. Here, it’s routine to wear Rolexes or carry Gucci bags.
Or drive Ducati motorcycles. Like I do.
Touché me.
Pondering the dichotomy of my moral choices, I walk down the cobblestone streets, past manicured lawns, parks, pavilions, and amphitheaters, to my house. Chautauqua Institution, my summer home, is an interesting place. It’s a gated community on Chautauqua Lake that focuses on education, the arts, politics, and religion. Every summer, there are tons of concerts and lectures and performances. It’s like an intellectual summer camp for privileged adults. There really is no other place like it in the world.
Anyway, I’ve been coming since I was just a little kid. The house was passed down through my dad’s family, and he and my mom thought it was the perfect place to take their young family for the summer. There’s a wall around the town, after all, and the whole atmosphere is inclusive. It’s the perfect place for my deaf dad and CODA (child of deaf adult) mom to summer with their three adopted deaf kids. We’ve been coming for so long that we’re something of a staple here. Some of the snowbirds learn basic ASL simply so they can communicate with us. My mom does ASL interpreting at the morning lectures and my dad does some architectural consulting work out of his summer office.
“How’s Barry?” my mom signs as I walk into the kitchen. She’s up to her elbows in flour and her hands are covered in the stuff. My sister Trina is standing on a stool next to her. She’s nine, and she’s wearing a sparkly turquoise T-shirt and little black shorts. Her blond hair is pulled up into a ponytail, revealing her turquoise cochlear implant, or CI. To describe it very basically, a CI is a really complicated, high-tech, invasive device that enhances hearing ability. Part of it is permanent, implanted under the skin and attaching to the cochlea, and part of it is external, removable. I don’t have one and never will.
“Barry is fine,” I sign. I pull a stool up to the island, across from the two of them. “His horizons have not been broadened. He learned exactly zero ASL. Fancy college will have to wait.”
“Sorry,” my mom signs back. I shrug. I wasn’t expecting it to be a roaring success. I guess he’s failing Spanish. His parents think the brilliant way around this is to teach him ASL this summer so he can test out of any foreign language requirement. That in itself shows you how ignorant he is. There is no way he can learn an entire vocabulary and language structure in seven weeks. Maybe he can learn enough to hold basic conversation. Maybe he can learn enough to scrape by. But fluent? Ha.
I watch as my mom kneads a big loaf of bread and Trina kneads her own little loaf. It’s adorable.
“Looks good,” I sign, and try to snag a piece.
Trina slaps my hand away. “Mom!” her mouth says, and then she turns to Mom and I can’t see her face, but her mouth is still moving, since Mom can hear her. I take the opportunity to grab a piece of dough. You know how cookie dough tastes almost better than the cookies themselves? Bread dough is the opposite. Terrible. I choke it down.
“Manners,” my mom signs and says. She takes Trina’s face and turns it my way. Then takes her little hands out of the dough. “Use sign,” she signs.
Trina rolls her eyes. She’s had her CI since she was a little less than two years old; so long she’s practically hearing. She’s just begun to realize that the whole world doesn’t talk with their hands, and she likes to practice that freedom. It’s frustrating to my parents, who debated long and hard about getting her implanted so young. They like the independence her CI gives her, but it’s frustrating that she’s already using it against us.
“Carter is stealing!” her little hands say.
“Carter, don’t steal from your sister,” my mom admonishes.
I hold up my hands in surrender.
“How was your trip? Where’d you go?”
“A diner in Westfield,” I reply. “Grape Country Dairy.”
“What?” my sister asks.
I sign it again, carefully.
“That doesn’t make sense,” she signs and says.
“I know,” I sign. “But the food was good.”
And the server was pretty cute.
“What’d you get?”
“Bacon cheeseburger. A milkshake.”
A smile. A wave good-bye.
“Will you go back?”
Will I?
“Yeah.”
Chapter 3
Robin
The music flows soft from my heart, liquid through my fingers, and hard against the guitar strings, into the ears of the congregation. I fingerpick slowly.
The choir comes in softly with the chorus of, “Awake, my soul!” Trent’s stand-up bass joins my guitar, rounding out the accompaniment and quickening my heartbeat. He winks at me while singing the verse and I almost forget to join him in the bridge, when the keyboard and second guitar add in. We let the last note of the bridge ring out for a minute in the big, old-fashioned church. This is the best part: the moment before a kiss, when you’re breathing the breath of the person you love. There’s a gleam in Trent’s eye as his fingers slide up the neck of his stand-up bass, pounding out a new rhythm.
My right hand begins a rollicking strum pattern, and I find that I’m smiling. These are the little kisses—the tentative, building nibbles. I glance at the congregation. Every foot in the building is tapping and every head is nodding. Some people have their eyes closed. I can practically see the song being played out around them—over their heads and under their feet and around their hearts.
The choir sings of awakening souls, and I can feel mine coming alive inside of me. Something rounded and lovely begins to blossom inside me and it bubbles out through my fingers and my follicles. This is the only time my soul awakens: when I’m in the middle of the music. And now the descant is coming.
I sing over top of the choir. My voice flies as my soul soars, peering down at the heads of the people in the crowd, joining their souls as they fly among the mahogany beams in the vaulted ceiling.
Too soon, the instruments cut out, one by one until just Trent and I are left. I’m fingerpicking again, and we sing out the last line, slow, in unison, but separated by an octave.
I end the song looking at the neck of my guitar and breathing a sigh, savoring the last notes as they echo above the heads of the listeners, finally fading away.
The congregation claps politely, a kiss on the nose after five minutes of passion. I set Bender, my good-enough-for-now guitar (Fender Bender is her full name) on her stand. I look and nod at them before going back to my seat in the hard pews, between my parents. It’s weird to be clapped at in church. I don’t mind, but somehow I don’t feel like I should take all the credit. The sermon is fine, I guess. Something about loving God and loving people. But my fingers twitch and my brain replays, and my heart can’t stop pumping out the beat of the song that just ended.