Husband
by Philip Schultz

The Train to Ghent
by A. H. Wald

Coltrane’s Sound
by Keith Raether

Mick on the Make: Notes
on an Unusual Name
by Dinty W. Moore

Coltrane’s Sound
    Keith Raether

My father was late for dinner again, and I was grateful. There would be no tirade at the table, no rant about not being able to park his own car in his own garage because of my brother’s drag racing projects. No frenzied straightening of my mother’s desk, where she wrote her daily pleasure of letters, before he performed his ceremony of separation from the office: double scotch, splash of soda, twist. And no badgering of me, before the coping agent kicked in, because I’d given up baseball for war protests and general petulance. My mother and I could eat in peace. Or I could anyway. When it was just the two of us at the table, we usually listened to music of my choosing during dinner.
    It was 1967, the year John Coltrane died, though I had no idea then who he was. As I track back now, it might have been the month of his death: July. School was out, Pasadena was suffocating in smog, and the Dodgers were already done for the season without Koufax.
    Mom and I often had dinner by ourselves in those days. My sister was out of the house, married with two children of her own. My brother spent most of his waking hours with his cars, or with his girlfriend in one of his cars. And my father? Suffice it to say he was a stoic reflection of his times: post-Depression son, postwar dad for whom the Horatio Alger ethic seemed more commandment than choice. He’d long since established the office as his principal residence.
    Music helped my mother and me get through dinner, even when the background sound was Hendrix or Cream. There were only so many silent spots that each of us could fill, night after night, and often what I had to say was ill-tempered, impatient, or contrary for the sake of contrariness. I vented often, deaf to the echo of my father in my harangue. I was fifteen.

Continued in volume 43, issue 3, summer 2007