“Good. And how did it go?”
“F— f— fine,” he would say.
I believed him. What else could I do? Once, I asked my mother as she was leaving if Simon had practiced his clarinet.
“His what?”
“His clarinet.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sure he did.”
That meant she had no idea if he had or not.
There was only one weekday I knew for certain that Simon had practiced. I had gone grocery shopping and had the oil changed in our car after work. By the time I got home, Frank was sitting at the kitchen table, watching Connor spoil his appetite with a plate of cookies.
“I th— th— thought S— Simon was t— taking p— p— piano lessons,” Frank said to me.
“He didn’t take to the piano,” I said.
“H— he’s not t— taking to th— this, either. S— s— sounds terrible.”
Connor, chewing another cookie, laughed. “You’re funny, Daddy.”
Frank smiled with the kind of pride a grown man should never take in a compliment from a four-year-old.
“He’s learning,” I said. “You should be proud of him. He’s trying to improve himself.”
I hoped Frank heard my suggestion that he’d stopped trying to get better at anything a long time ago. I was thinking only about myself—what I had hoped for and stopped hoping for in married life—when I said that to Frank. If I’d been thinking about Simon, I might not have said anything. Telling a man that he doesn’t stack up to his son does the son no favors.
It was after work on a Thursday in the middle of August, the day after one of Simon’s lessons, when I got into my car after work and saw Simon’s clarinet case sticking out from underneath the passenger seat. I pulled the case out from under the seat and opened it. Each piece of the instrument was nestled into the velveteen-lined mold that matched its shape.
When I got home, I knocked on Simon’s bedroom door and opened it, keeping the clarinet case behind the wall, out of his sight.
He was sitting on the bed with his clock radio tuned to some commercial or other. He turned the volume down and stared at me.
“Hi, Simon,” I said.
He waved.
“How are you?”
He nodded, which meant, Good.
I nodded back and raised my chin and eyebrows, asking him to say the word.
“G— g— good.”
“I’m glad,” I said. “Did you do your scales?”
Yes, he nodded.
“For a full hour?”
Simon nodded again.
I brought the clarinet case into the room. Simon only blinked. It seemed that lying to me about his practicing had become so routine that he had gotten used to the idea that he would be caught in the lie, eventually. And in that moment, I realized that all my suppositions about my son’s diligence and willingness to better himself were wishful thinking. All I knew for certain was that I’d been wasting my Monday and Wednesday lunch hours and forty-five dollars a week, and that Simon, right then, looked very much like his father.
I pulled the radio out of his hands and turned it off. The look on Simon’s face was one I might have expected to see if I strangled a rabbit before his eyes. He sat up on his knees and reached for the radio. I held it away from him, over the foot of the bed.
“You’ve been lying to me, Simon.”
“M— Mom—” he said.
But I wasn’t finished, and this time, I decided, Simon would wait for me to finish speaking.
“I’ve been driving you all over town on my lunch hour for weeks! Do you know how upsetting it is to find out you’re not practicing? So you can listen to commercials?”
I held up the radio in front of him. Simon eyed it. I think he thought I was going to take it away from him. I let him believe that I would.
“You could have music, Simon!” I said. “Music! You could make music speak for you if you would practice!”
Then, like a hungry cottonmouth, Simon lunged toward the radio with his entire body. I pulled the radio away from him, and Simon’s momentum carried him over the foot of the bed. I dropped the radio and grabbed for him, but only changed the angle of his fall for the worse. His shoulder and head hit the floor with a thud that made the room shudder, and his thin neck bent strangely to one side as it bore his weight for an agonizing instant. When he came to rest on his back, Simon looked up at the ceiling. By the time he let out his first cry, with his mouth and eyes wide open, I was on the floor, holding him in my arms. I stroked Simon’s head and rocked him back and forth while he waited for the pain and fear to go away.
“Is he okay?”
Connor’s question was barely audible over Simon’s moans and my softly spoken comforts. Connor stood in the doorway, nervously poking the corner of his closed mouth with his finger. The sight of his big brother crying on the ground had robbed my four-year-old boy of his bold tongue.
“Simon fell off the bed,” I said, reassuring the boys and myself. “He had a fright, but he’s fine now.”
Connor said nothing.
“Go back to the living room now and watch TV,” I said. “We’ll be out in a minute.”
When he had stopped crying, Simon sat up and scooted out of my arms. Sitting on the floor, he looked at me, waiting for me to hand down some punishment or leave. When I did neither thing, he picked up his radio and turned it on. The plug had been pulled out of the wall in the commotion, but the batteries I’d loaded into the black plastic underbelly months ago, at Simon’s request, powered the radio’s single speaker. Simon drew the tuner past music and static until he found a speaking voice, a woman’s. She told me how hard it is to be the working mother of an infant, and how much easier my life would be if I’d only use her same brand of formula. I pictured a woman shaking her head with a sympathy she didn’t really feel, and her face breaking into an empty smile.
“M— M— Mom,” Simon said.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Th— this is m— myoo— music.”
The commercial was not music. It was chattering nonsense. But I buried this opinion deep inside me, alongside the very next thought I’d had: If there is any music in this, Simon, it’s a kind of music you’ll never make.
•••
AFTER SIMON GAVE up on the clarinet, I focused my energy on something I could control. My boys would never be equal in every way that mattered, but I could do everything in my power to show them they were equal in my love.
For example: if, at dinner on Monday, I asked Simon about his day before asking Connor about his own, I made sure to ask Connor the same question first on Tuesday evening. If I read a book to Connor, I’d listen to the radio with Simon for the same number of minutes I’d spent reading. Chores were doled out in pairs—one for Simon, one for Connor—and if one boy’s chore proved easier than the other’s, he was made to help his brother finish his job.
“You start together,” I’d say, “and you end together.”
All of this came naturally because I loved my boys equally. But even my demonstrations of equal love would join speech therapy and clarinet lessons on my list of failures.
Connor’s fifth birthday was August 25th, two weeks after Simon’s seventh. That night, when the cake plates and empty