The Music My Neighbor Would Not Turn Down

The night it finally broke open, my daughter had been asleep for exactly nineteen minutes.

I know it was nineteen because I had been standing in the kitchen watching the numbers roll over on the stove clock the way a man watches a fuse burn. Nora was seven weeks old and she had colic, and if you have never lived in a house with a colicky baby, I do not have the words to make you feel it, but I am going to try, because nothing else in this story will land right unless you understand what nineteen minutes of quiet was worth to us by that point in the summer.

My name is Wade. I am thirty-three. I drive a propane truck for the co-op out of Pulaski, which means my days start at four thirty in the morning in the warm months and earlier than that in the cold ones, filling tanks on farms and at trailers and at the little churches scattered up and down the county roads of Giles County, Tennessee. I have done it eleven years. I like it. I like the quiet of the first run, the fog sitting in the bottoms, the deer standing in a hayfield watching me pull in. I am not a man who needs a lot. A truck that starts, a wife who still laughs at my jokes, a roof. We rent the old Dillard farmhouse out on Mink Slide Lane, which is a gravel dead end that runs about a half mile off Dry Creek Road, crosses the creek on a low concrete slab, and quits at the tree line. Seven houses on the whole lane. I grew up two miles from it. My granddad is buried at Dry Creek Baptist, which you can see the steeple of from our front porch if the corn is not too high.

My wife is Hannah. She is twenty-nine. Nora is our first.

We wanted her so bad it scared us. Two years of trying, one loss in between that Hannah still does not talk about, and then this red-faced squalling miracle in April who would not, could not, be comforted. The doctor in town called it colic and said she would grow out of it around three or four months and that there was not a thing wrong with her, which was supposed to be a comfort and somehow was not. Colic means your baby screams for hours and nothing you do fixes it. Not the car rides at midnight. Not the vacuum cleaner running in the hall because somebody online swore by it. Not the bouncing, not the shushing, not the drops from the pharmacy, not Hannah walking the floor until her feet swelled. Nora screamed. And when she finally wore herself out and slept, you did not breathe loud, you did not run the water, you did not let the screen door bang, because the smallest thing would start it all over, and you would be back at hour one.