Part One: The Empty Stand

I want to start with the stand, because the stand is what I actually saw, and because for about eight months afterwards I told this story as though what I saw was my son’s good heart, and that is not what I saw.

I saw a piece of furniture with nothing on it.

It was a Tuesday in the October of 2023 and I came down the hall with a laundry basket on my hip, the plastic one with the crack in the rim that we have had since Julian was four, and I went into his room sideways the way you do with a basket, and I put it on the end of his bed, and the room was wrong.

It takes a second.

A room you have walked into every day for nine years tells you something is missing before it tells you what.

The stand was there.

It is a heavy thing, oak-coloured laminate, a floor stand with a yoke at the top and two arms at the bottom, and his father bought it at a music shop that has since closed because the guitar had been leaning against the radiator for a week and I had said something about it.

And the yoke was empty.

I checked under the bed.

I checked the closet, where he keeps a snare drum he does not play and a box of comic books in plastic sleeves.

I checked the hall, and the living room, and the garage, and the back of the car, because the idea that formed in me first was that it had been stolen, and the idea that formed second was that he had left it at school, and the idea that formed third, which took about ninety seconds to arrive, was that neither of those was true and that he had done something.

He came in through the back door at twenty past four.

I was standing in the kitchen with my hands flat on the counter, which is apparently what I do.

“Honey,” I said.

“Where is your Fender?”

And my thirteen-year-old son stopped on the mat with one shoe off, and looked at his own sneaker, and said: “I sold it, Mom.”

Part Two: What He Told Me