(Sandpoint, Idaho, around 7-25-05)

Karen had become a kind of surrogate mother for me in Sandpoint, including me in all her family activities and introducing me to all her Sandpoint friends.  Not to mention, she’d gotten me a great rate at her daughter’s boyfriend’s motel and let me camp out in her brother’s fish head on the beach the night before. 

Meeting her at the Panida [Theatre], she unlocked the stage door and we entered the dark hall, like all empty theatres, alive with expectancy and history.  The piano was already in the middle of the stage, a Young Chang grand, and as I approached Karen watched breathlessly.  Perhaps she wondered if I could play at all, given that months earlier when she suggested my recital serve as Panida’s anniversary event, I hesitated, overwhelmed by the invitation — “are you sure?” — and I still remembered Karen’s unsettled reaction to my own less-than-thrilled response.  After all, I’d called to ask for a concert.  Wasn’t hers the ideal answer?  

It might have been my imagination, but Karen seemed relieved once I started to play, and after a few notes she left to go downstairs and check through ticket sales with a woman who managed the gift shop next-door, the same woman who yesterday had given me a dirty look when I asked to use my debit card for a Dr. Pepper. 

I didn’t practice long, and started toward the stairs leading to the lobby.  “Oh, great!” I heard Karen say, still out of sight at the bottom of the stairwell.  “If those are the extra tickets then I’ll just grab them.” 

I took a sideline into the bathroom, its rounded walls and shiny fixtures restored to their full deco glory.  It was while I urinated that the screaming began.  At first I assumed the two women were kidding, but after a few seconds it became clear they were not — not at all — and I crept from the restroom to the top of the stairs, poised there like a child eavesdropping on two fighting parents.  Anxious reflexes triggering and tensing and releasing across my body, heart-fluttering and stomach-recoiled.  My mother lifts and slams a wooden chair into the linoleum kitchen floor and screams at my father, sending shockwaves through the house.  I’m crouched in the stairwell.  One of my only memories of them together.  

“But what did you think you were doing!” the Dr. Pepper woman hissed.

“Just getting the leftover tickets for our concert,” answered Karen casually.  I still couldn’t see them.

“Don’t you ever go through my drawer!  Who do you think you are?” 

“I just want my unsold tickets,” repeated Karen, stunned.  I heard the metal rattling of a cash register.

“You are not the Panida!” the woman cried. 

Then I heard a male voice pleading, “How about your store no longer sells Panida tickets?” 

“Fine!” Karen answered for her.  “I’ve been saying that for years!”  By now I’d edged halfway down the stairs, and Karen spotted me. “Let’s go!”  We bustled out the door and into her car.  From the passenger seat, I stared at her intense, trembling focus on the road ahead, and I became angry myself.  I started to defend her, encourage her, console her, but Karen was shaken and her spirit bruised, and everything I said she answered with a brusque, almost unthinking reply.  “It’s just ridiculous,” she kept saying.  “I don’t care.  I don’t care!”