By Victor Greto
Barren days fade into years/ As the calendar disappears/ Into the night of forgotten lore/ Years ago when you opened my door
Years were only two – at least it was literally true – when he met Angie, nearly two years younger than himself. Aside from the weekly, at times plaintive, letters he wrote her, which had to make it all the way to Maryland, more than a hundred miles away, Nick wrote songs to her.
He was driving down to see Angie in his 1965 Dodge Dart – flaking puke-green paint, purring slant-six engine and rattling frame – with John, the tunesmith. It was going to be a surprise.
Nick liked writing songs. At least the words. They came easy to him.
He heard the tunes from popular songs in his head and wrote down his own lyrics for them. He thought it was an amazing trick. John would take the typewritten words home, not knowing about any tune in Nick’s head, and either fit them into melodies he was working on, adjusting as he went with the lyrics, or found other chords. He wrote sweet melodies with nice hooks.
When John was done, he’d come back to Nick’s house and they’d go upstairs to his bedroom, sit on the bed, and finish the song.
He had first seen John less than two years before. John was walking down the street in front of Nick’s house with a guitar and a harmonica around his neck. He looked pretentious, a bit of a self-conscious flake, and Nick said something like this to his father who was sitting next to him. Nick looked at John from the porch glider and shook his head. John had looked up while strumming and grinned.
He lived up the street, a quarter-mile past the railroad tracks where most people lived. John’s father, he told Nick later, was mayor of the one square mile that was Ridley Park. His bedroom was at the very top of an old house, and it and the closed-in front porch had a lot of small square wood-laced windows.
Lonely months turn to tears/ As I watch the silent years/ In my room all alone/ Sitting beside a silent telephone
He next saw John when Nick was walking toward his old junior high school by the lake, less than a half-mile beyond John’s house. John was sitting on his front stoop, a good ten yards of lawn in from the sidewalk. He had his guitar on his lap.
“Hey, man,” John said. He was smoking a cigarette, but it looked different. He rolled his own. Tobacco, but he rolled them himself.
John said he’d seen Nick on the school’s TV morning show getting “Student of the Month” for writing a novel. Nick was a writer. John needed a writer. A lyricist.
Nick stood there and smiled. “I’ve never done that,” he said.
John shrugged. He did it comically, exaggerated, and with a crooked grin.
After a while, Nick figured out that the exaggerated motions, which he never liked – it even bordered on disgust – were from discomfort or embarrassment. He said, OK. That was it.
Silent hours probing days (I love you)/ Looking at the moon’s sunlit haze (I really do)/ Thinking of you in a far-off land/ Wishing you’d appear at my command
It was of course Nick’s idea to take the drive. Angie was nearly two hours away, and he decided it would be a great surprise gift to her for them to go there and play some of their songs. He already had written to her about the songs.
He had once made a cassette tape for her with Carl. They spent several hours starting and stopping the machine, including their chatter and songs Nick chose from The Beatles and Jim Croce. After Carl left, Nick listened to it, including his ending soliloquy-pledge of undying love. He did not send it.
He liked the sound of the name of the road she lived on – Woodyard – but he didn’t like the house very much, when they finally found it. He parked his clunker of a car mostly on the grass. He didn’t want to pull in the driveway, worried that he might block someone or be in the way if someone wanted to pull in. There was no sidewalk, no curb. Angie’s house was set deep from a two-lane country road, the twisty-turny kind that Nick liked driving on, but didn’t like the idea of living on, let alone stopping and parking.
The house was one of those split-level ranchers that Nick associated with upper middle class families like the Brady Bunch or the Partridge Family, people whom he sort of liked but who ultimately puzzled him. It was TV, of course, but their problems and the way they related to each other were foreign. Perhaps John’s family was that way, but John’s family lived in a stately home, much better than Nick’s, older, grander. Nick unconsciously forgave families, even Brady Bunch-like ones, if they lived in a house like that.
He had once seen a picture of a house that Mark Twain lived in Hartford, Connecticut. It was red and Gothic-perfect. He could see Twain as his dad, someone rough around the edges, but kind, busy, full of purpose and something to say, and Nick admiring the man who walked out to the back and had his own little place to write. That was American, too – in fact, it seemed that it didn’t get more American than that – but it was more real to Nick, as if, despite his background and his family, he could have been in a family like that.
Angie’s family was like his, she told him, Italian on both sides, but, at first sight, they were living like an American family, in an American-style home, on an American-style country road. Nick even saw an air conditioner in one of the bedroom windows, something unthinkable at his house. That big dead-green fan his mother put at the front door when it was ungodly hot, and did nothing, especially when she turned it to the outside, convinced that it would somehow make air circulate better throughout the house. No fans upstairs in the bedrooms, just dead air from the windows against which he pushed his bed. He lay there on his back in his underwear, arms and legs spread apart, waiting for the breeze that would never come. The only thing that came was the sound of the train in the dead night air like it was just outside his window.
When Nick looked over at John and said, breathing heavily, “Well, you ready?” he thought for a moment how stupid what they were doing might be. But then he stopped himself. It wasn’t stupid. This is what men do when they’re in love. They come at curious times and surprise their lady-love with songs. He was part of a troubadour-duo, a poet with a one-man band, and it, and he, and they, seemed irresistible.
Nick stood on the lawn, waiting for John to grab his guitar. He looked around. The air was still and it was late afternoon. There seemed to be nothing going on in the house. They marched to the door.
There was a doorbell. Nick pushed it. There was noise within and the heavy door opened, and he could see what had to be Angie’s mother on the other side of the screen door.
“Hi,” Nick said.
“Yes?” she said. She seemed older than his own mother, fuller-bodied, and with longer, thicker hair. Her eyes were dark.
“I’m Nick,” he said. “This is John. Is Angie home?”
She scrunched her eyes and they registered something: “Oh,” she said. “Nick.”
She relaxed, even smiled – or Nick thought she smiled because playing around her lips was something he recognized from his own mother, an amusement in spite of itself, bordering on annoyance. “Is she expecting you?”
“It’s a surprise,” Nick said, smiling. “We wanted to play music for her.”
“I see.”
She stood there for what seemed the longest time. John shifted a bit and moved more to the side, away from the view from the door. Her eyes hooked into Nick’s and her mouth formed, “Angela!” loud, but not at first; the name seemed to come out of her full lips like the sound from a speaker someone turned up while it was making a sound. She was fully in command, and Nick couldn’t help but smile.
When Angie came to the door, Nick couldn’t help himself. He reached and opened the door so he didn’t have to see her through a screen. He didn’t register the surprise on her face; he just saw her face, eyes, nose, mouth, chin, hair, all of it, and let it play in his head. He knew why he wrote the songs he wrote. He knew why he wrote the novel about the week he met her.
Remembering nights we were together (I need you)/ The way we laughed about forever (To touch you)/ Carrying you on the soft white sand/ While your face caressed my hand
“Hello.” It was John, and he wore that goofy, crooked grin. Angie looked at him and nodded but then turned back to Nick.
“You should have told me you were coming,” she said. But she was smiling.
“Can we come in,” Nick said, and he was already stepping in. Both Angie and her mother stepped back, walking backward through the small foyer into a large living room.
It was not a Brady Bunch or Partridge Family home. It was filled with pictures of family and they seemed everywhere, on mantels, end tables, any place that had space. It was clean but it also felt full, of heavy, old furniture and odds and ends that meant everything. It felt good to follow them inside. It smelled of cooking, gravy.
Nick liked looking at the plethora of things, knick-knacks and pictures and wall hangings. He’d never seen so many before. Walls and surfaces at home were as sparse as possible. His mother called those kinds of things dust-collectors. Now, it was like Nick could do nothing but see each of the things individually, think about it, then go to the next thing. Pictures of boys and girls growing into men and women, and so many of them. But more fascinating than that was a large picture of Venice – or what seemed to Nick like it had to be Venice – with gondolas and boats and people dressed in Renaissance clothing. Even in Angie’s home, he would have dived right in if he could.
“Would you boys like something to eat?” Angie’s mother asked.
John cleared his throat and Nick turned away from the picture and looked at Angie’s mother.
“No, thank you,” he said. “We just want to play for her.”
He looked again at Angie. She was dark, thin, beautiful. She looked at him with cooler eyes than he remembered. They weren’t cold, Nick quickly decided, they were analytical, and she even tipped her head back as if surveying him, eyes darting back and forth and up and down. A glance over at her mother showed she did the same. It would have been disconcerting for him alone, but John was there and he was there for a reason.
“Angela has told me about you and how you two met,” her mother said.
Loud waves hitting a sandy shore (Shrouded in blue)/ I’ll always remember how it was before (How it was before)/ You in my arms and love in my mind/ I’ll always wish for that earlier time
Nick didn’t want to talk about that. He had songs.
“Yes,” he said. “We have these songs we – I – wanted to play for her,” he said to her mother. “I hope that’s okay.”
“Of course, dear,” she said. “But we had plans this evening. She doesn’t have too much time.”
Nick looked at Angie and she was smiling and he noticed, finally, that she was dressed up. She wore several rings on the fingers of both hands, a jangly bracelet on her left wrist, a light blue blouse and a darker-blue skirt that made him think of Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
“You’re going out,” Nick said. He couldn’t get himself to say she had a date.
“I didn’t know you were coming,” Angie said. She smiled, though, which helped. He looked over at John, who wore his goofy grin and shrugged.
“Well, we only have a couple of songs,” John said.
“That would be nice,” her mother said.
Nick nodded to John and they played four songs. John played flawlessly, and although Nick’s voice cracked when he first started to sing, they harmonized well. He could tell Angie and her mom liked the music, the words. Nick had practiced the idea of looking into Angie’s eyes when he sang his words, but he found himself looking at her rings, her fingers like her mother’s, the pale blue blouse that cinched toward the center, and her dark blue skirt, which he thought the most beautiful combination of colors he had ever seen.
Silent rains hitting wet sand (The touch of your hand)
Knowing I’ll never understand (Never understand)
What it is that makes me cry
And what it will take to finally make me die
When he finally worked up the nerve to look into her face, he saw the most beautiful expression he’d ever seen in his life.
After they finished, Nick looked at them. They seemed nervous.
“What?” Nick asked.
“I’m sorry,” Angie said. “I didn’t know you were coming.”
Nick could see and as quickly forget everything that might have happened.
How, if he lived nearby he would be the guy taking her out; that he would be the guy with whom she’d fall in love, holding her gently, loosely, not even needing to touch her, just having her nestle in the crook of his arm, her head on his chest, and then just being; and then, if she fell in love with him with the passion he felt, he saw, over time, himself retreat and wonder who she was and why she was there, and he would feel nothing but curiosity as to why they were together and how he wished he could feel for their kids what he was supposed to be feeling instead of feeling empty and wondering what to do with human beings who were half of who you were and half of what she was and still, inevitably, alien and alone.
He could stop that line of thinking but he could not stop the course of his life that knew nothing about something, anything, outside of himself.
That was it.
Her mother, he saw, embodied bountiful, curved like someone who had figured things out and knew, even when she was barely twenty, how to be. Angie was different, angular, perhaps harder, but as pointed outward, and he understood in the moment after he sang four of his songs riddled, he believed, with all the poetry he could muster and still hanging in the air, that her eyes, curiously soft and curiously open, repeated she had to leave. He thought he could hear himself forty years later say, “You know, I never knew how lonely I had been until I fell in love with you. Tell me you’ll wait for me, and that we’ll be together from now on. I ache for you. When I see you again, I will be complete.”
How, never having seen her again, he would, decades later, older and alone, hear himself, half-awake, plead with Angie to help get it off, then, waking alone in the damp dark, stare into the nothing.
John was silent when they finally settled into the car.
“I don’t know, man,” he said after they got on to I-95. He wore the goofy grin, his head shaking slowly. “I still like the songs, though.”
Nick couldn’t help himself: he imitated John, smiled crookedly, even shrugged. “Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.”
© 2026 Victor Greto