The Music My Neighbor Would Not Turn Down

He let me finish. He let it hang there a second so his buddies could all be looking at me. And then he laughed, not a mean laugh even, a worse thing, an easy laugh, like I had said something cute.

He said, This is my house, partner. You hear me? My house, my yard, my music. He said, The world does not go quiet because you decided to have a baby. And then he leaned in a little, still smiling, and he said the thing that I carried around in my chest for a long time after, he said, Buy the kid some earplugs. Problem solved.

And he reached over to the little board on the wall and he turned it up.

I have thought a thousand times about what I should have said. In my head I say ten different things and all of them are the right thing. Standing there in the gravel in front of four laughing men with my daughter screaming across the lane, I did not say any of them. I did not say anything. I turned around and I walked back home with my face burning and that bass pushing on my back the whole way like a hand, and I went in my own house and I shut my own door and it did not help at all, because the sound came through the door, came through the walls, came through everything, and in the nursery my wife was sitting on the floor with our screaming baby rocking her and crying and she looked up at me and she did not even have to ask. She saw my face. She knew how it went.

That was the lowest I have been as a man. I will just say it plain. I had gone to stand up for my family and I had come home smaller than when I left, and there was my wife on the floor, and I could not fix one single thing.

I did not sleep. I sat up at the kitchen table in the dark while the party went and Nora cried herself out around one and the music went till two. And somewhere in there, sitting at that table, I quit being ashamed and started being something harder and better than ashamed. I started paying attention.

Because here is what I noticed, sitting at that window at one in the morning. I was not the only light on.

Down at the Tedders’, Earl and Loretta, both near eighty, their kitchen light was on. Across from them, Dana Buford’s car was in her drive but every window of her little house was dark and I knew for a fact she worked nights in the emergency room up in Pulaski, which meant she needed to sleep days, and I wondered for the first time what Chet’s two in the afternoon leaf-blower and his midnight bass did to a woman trying to sleep against the clock. And at the mouth of the lane, old Roy Pike’s porch light was on, and I could see the orange dot of Roy’s cigarette out there in the dark, Roy who had come home from Vietnam in 1971 and had never once in fifty years talked about it but who everybody on the lane quietly knew did not do well with loud sudden sounds in the night.