Featured Prose | February 23, 2024

Parents often worry, “Am I doing this right?”—a question that takes on humorous complexity in Robert Long Foreman’s “Song Night,” which tells the story of a pot-smoking father who discovers his teenage daughter has been following in his footsteps. Beset with concerns no less pressing for being commonplace—about the quality of his parenting, about the strength of his marriage—the narrator learns from his daughter and her friend how to loosen up. First published in TMR issue 46.4 (Winter 2023), “Song Night” is a tender, funny account of what it looks like to bend to contingency—to be along for the ride, to be a river, broad and strong but also helpless in its outflow.

Song Night

Robert Long Foreman

I thought about calling this “What We Do in the Basement,” because there are several things we do in our basement.

It’s a good basement. It’s furnished. It has a fireplace, a couch, a TV we rarely use, and some comfortable chairs. The carpet is ugly, but so are most carpets. It came with the house, so I guess it has other people’s eyelashes mashed between the fibers. There’s a desk and a chair, where I sit and work all day. I have a record cabinet with all my records and a turntable on top. Sometimes I remember that I live in the twenty-first century, so I plug my phone into the receiver and play a song from an online streaming service. What a world. What a basement.

Clara, my wife, keeps her workout stuff there: a yoga mat and weights. She’s not huge, but she’s toned. Some people like to spend their time defining words. Clara spends a portion of every day defining her biceps and calves. She does it in the morning, before I wake up.

When I wake up, I make breakfast, eat breakfast, and take Clara’s place. I go to work as an in-house editor for an investment firm. I don’t tone muscles, I tone documents. I don’t bulk them up; there’s no writing involved; I only further define them, streamline sentences, cut paragraphs in half. It’s like yoga for reports and prospectuses down there.

The basement is also where Kristin and I have Song Night every Wednesday night. She’s our only child, because one is more than enough.

I never thought I’d have a daughter named Kristin. I had a bad girlfriend once named Kristin. She even spelled it with those same two i’s. She wasn’t the meanest woman I dated in my twenties, but she was harsh. I’d rather not get into how.

It was Clara’s idea to name our daughter that. She insisted. And it’s fine, because since then our Kristin has all but washed away the memory of that other one who was mean. I hardly recall what her face looked like.

When she was six years old, Kristin and I started having basement parties. They weren’t real parties. No booze was involved, though I have been smoking cannabis in the backyard every night for almost as long as Kristin has been alive.

Cannabis is okay. It’s not a drug that obliterates me like alcohol does. It slows my mind in a pleasant way. It allows me to focus on one thing at a time, like the songs Kristin wants me to listen to on Song Night.

When we had our first parties, way back when she was six, Kristin wanted to play board games, not listen to songs. She and I played Sorry! and Trouble until nine thirty every Wednesday night, when she had to go to bed. After the board game phase, we played video games: Knights and Bikes, Heave Ho. She turned ten, eventually, and got obsessed with The Sims. She wanted to find out what would happen if she led a Sim into a room and removed all the doors. It’s what Edgar Allan Poe would have done if he’d had access to a Sim.

We found out what would happen. The Sim starved to death.

Kristin laughed. I didn’t.

Okay, I did. I laughed a lot, actually—mostly because Kristin was laughing so hard it was infectious.

For about five years in there, our parties were suspended. Kristin was caught in the throes of puberty, a phenomenon that occurs among many teenagers. She went from being a little girl to being a stranger who hated me and Clara and wanted us to be miserable from the moment we woke up to when we went to bed.

But Kristin’s was a regularly scheduled animosity: puberty is an evil spirit that visits all children as soon as they’re no longer children. When it came to our house and brought its discord, no one was surprised. We were just hurt. For years. Like we’d never been hurt before.

We get along better now. Kristin and I have parties again, but they’re not like they once were. They’re shorter now, and they’re not really parties; they’re Song Night.

I was surprised when she said she wanted to resume our parties. At fifteen, she told me she’d always hated our parties, even when she was six. She’d only agreed to attend them because she felt sorry for me, because I didn’t have friends and she could tell how pathetic I was.

It wasn’t true. I have friends. I’ve always had at least one friend. But I am insecure about everything, and Kristin had found some exposed flesh. She dug the knife in and twisted it like her hormones told her to do, for I was her father, and I had to be diminished.

Now on Song Night, Kristin sits on the basement floor with her loser dad. We take turns playing songs for one another. I’m glad we didn’t do this when she was younger. Her taste in music isn’t perfect, just as mine isn’t, but it’s better than when she listened to songs made for people whose brains hadn’t fully developed yet.

Now she listens to MIA. It was one of the first revelations of Song Night. I knew some MIA songs—but not “Bingo,” until Kristin played it for me. It is one of the woman’s best tracks, and I never knew. When I asked where she found it, she said, “Greta showed it to me.”

Greta is her best friend. They’ve known each other since they were eight.

But at our most recent Song Night, I had to ask Kristin a different question: Where did she get the idea that she should smoke marijuana?

I knew the answer. It’s the same answer the kid gave his dad in an antidrug commercial I saw on TV forty times a day in the 1980s: “From you, Dad. I learned it from watching you.”

I had noticed that Kristin’s eyes looked red. I asked her why that was. She said she had been scratching them. Her eyes were itchy. That was all.

I kept watching her. I observed that when we talked, she appeared to be on a one-second delay.

I asked Kristin point-blank if she was high. She shrugged and said yes. Then I asked her my question: What had possessed her to take up smoking marijuana?

She said, “Why are you calling it that?”

“Because that’s what it’s called. It’s what it is.”

“But when you talk about it when you’re not mad, you call it ‘cannabis.'”

“Kristin.”

“Dad.”

“When did this start? You doing this?”

“Six months ago. I learned it from you.”

There it was.

“Don’t say you learned it from me,” I said. “Please.”

“It’s okay, Dad.”

“No, it is not. Not at all.”

“But then, what? It’s okay when you do it?”

“I’m middle-aged. No one cares what happens to my brain. It’s too late for me and my brain. Yours is fresh. You still have a chance.”

We were silent for a half-minute, Kristin leaning back against my record collection.

What was I feeling? Shame? It was something like shame, but I also knew this wasn’t such a big deal. Teenagers get high. They’ve been doing it since at least the 1960s. They probably did it in the 1860s. And why shouldn’t they? Sure, they should take care of their internal organs, but then, everything causes cancer, now that the world is a trash heap. Even the water we drink causes cancer, as does the air we have no choice but to breathe. And it’s not like teenagers have urgent business to attend to that being stoned would prevent them from addressing properly. They should probably be high all the time, since in the years ahead, there’s nothing but dullness awaiting them and people they won’t like having to deal with but who are somehow in charge of whether they keep their jobs and how much money they’ll make.

She said, “Do you want to hear my song or not?”

I grunted. She took it as a yes.

She played a song she’d discovered on Spotify called “Run Cried the Crawling” by Agnes Obel. It was atmospheric, with piano and strings and Obel’s breathy Scandinavian vocals all mixed in the same aural pot.

It’s a song that walks around you in a circle, never coming close enough that you can touch it, always out of reach.

“It’s a great song to hear when you’re lit,” Kristin said when it ended.

“Come on,” I said. “Don’t talk like that.”

“Am I wrong?”

“I don’t care if you’re wrong, Krissy. I don’t want to hear you say those kinds of words.”

“What kind of words?”

“‘Lit,'” I sneered.

She laughed.

“I have failed,” I said. “I’m the worst father in the world.”

I felt like such a fool. The song I’d played for her prior to her song was “The Shore” by Corrina Repp. It’s another song that’s even better when you’re high, with those vocals that sound like they emerged from the Marianas Trench—like she’s channeling something ultrahuman—and her guitar tone that has bounced off asteroids on its way to your sad little ears.

To be fair, all songs sound better when you’ve been smoking. It’s like what Ralph Ellison’s unnamed and unseen narrator says at the start of Invisible Man, when he describes listening to Louis Armstrong after smoking a marijuana cigarette.

I ended Song Night early. I was high and felt sleepy, and I was mad at Kristin for doing something I had to admit I’d been doing for a long time, often in her vicinity, which meant I had normalized it for her and it was all but inevitable that she’d take up the habit herself.

The next morning, Kristin was in the kitchen, ready to go to high school. The daily shit show. I came up and looked in her eyes.

She said, “What?”

“You know what.”

Clara was taking a shower. Kristin was standing, eating toast, taking small bites like she always has. Her mouth is pretty small.

She said, “Are you checking to see if I’m high?”

“Are you?” I asked. “High?”

“No.”

“Are you going to get high with Greta before school?”

“No.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“We’re not getting high before school. We tried it once, and she hated it.”

“But you didn’t hate it.”

“No. I did not.” She bit toast and said, munching, “School is terrible.”

“I know it is. It’s school.”

“And getting high makes it easier to deal with how bad it is.”

“You’re a straight-A student.”

“I know. Exactly. It’s fine.”

We heard Greta’s car horn. Kristin shoved the rest of the toast in her small mouth and fled.

I wasted no more time. I went to the bedroom and swung open the bathroom door.

Clara jumped. She yelped. “What,” she cried, “the fuck, John?”

She was naked, putting lotion on herself, her skin like cream and the lotion literally cream. She has perfect legs, a flat stomach. Clavicles straight from heaven.

Clara wasn’t mad that I could see her naked. We’ve been together twenty-one years. She was mad that I’d scared the shit out of her by banging the door open. I hadn’t surprised her that way in a long time.

But my god, Clara looks good without clothes. My freaking god.

She said, “What do you want, John?”

I said, “Kristin gets high.”

“What?”

“Kristin. She smokes marijuana.”

“You mean cannabis. That’s what you usually call it. You always say they only ever called it ‘marijuana’ because they wanted it to sound foreign and dangerous.”

I didn’t know what to say.

Applying a different lotion now to her naked face, which jostled her breasts, because her arms moved a certain way, Clara said, “Are you trying to make our daughter sound foreign and dangerous?”

I said, “Aren’t you mad about it?”

“I’m not happy about it.” She squinted at herself. “I don’t know if I’m mad.”

“Well, what are you, then?”

“I’m your gorgeous, aging wife. Oh, come on. Don’t look at me that way.”

“I just don’t understand how you’re so—”

“So what?”

“You don’t seem to care.”

“I care! I do. It’s just—I don’t know. I smoked pot when I was fourteen. I’ve told you that. Do you have an erection?”

“I do. Yes. You’re beautiful.”

“Well, shut the door. I can’t help you with that right now.”

In the kitchen, both of us clothed, neither of us still lugging an engorged sex organ, we had our second cups of coffee.

“You look worried,” I said.

She said, “I’m not worried.” After a pause: “Okay, I am. I don’t know. This isn’t great.”

“It’s not great,” I agreed. “But how bad is it?”

“It’s not that bad.”

“At least Krissy’s not doing heroin. That we know of.”

“I’m pretty sure she is not into heroin.”

“Or meth. That would be bad.”

“I tried meth when I was seventeen.”

“You did?”

“Yeah.” Clara shrugged. “A few times.”

“Well, no. No. You tried it once. After that, you weren’t just trying it anymore.”

“We need to have a conversation with her about this.”

“I already had one with her.”

“We need to have a better conversation. A real one. You know what I mean; don’t give me that look.”

I knew what she meant. Clara knew how to really talk, especially to Kristin.

So we worked all day, or most of the day. We work from home. We have office jobs without the offices. It’s great.

We cleared our late-afternoon schedules so we could intercept Kristin when she returned home. She walked in with her headphones on and found us sitting in the living room.

She stopped when she saw us and said, “You’re kidding me.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” Clara asked.

I said, standing, “Do you smoke crystal meth? Kristin. Tell us the truth.”

Greta came around the corner behind Kristin. “What’s up, guys?” she said.

I hadn’t expected her to be there. Neither had Clara.

Clara said, “Kristin, why are you wearing headphones when Greta’s here with you?”

Greta said, “We don’t like the same music. She keeps her headphones on in my car so she doesn’t have to hear mine.”

“You don’t talk to each other?”

Greta said, “Not with my music playing.”

“I’ve never even seen meth,” Kristin said, finally answering my question.

“I’ve seen meth,” said Greta. “Didn’t try it, though; they didn’t offer me any.”

“Greta,” I said, “you’re not even supposed to look at meth. Do you want some coffee?”

She did want some coffee. And I wanted to leave Clara and Kristin alone. They had to talk.

I went to the kitchen. Greta followed. I got a whole pot of coffee going. I mean, why not? I asked Greta how her day had gone.

“It was fine,” she said. “Is Kris in trouble?”

“Sort of. It’s complicated.”

“You know about the weed, then.”

“I guess you do it, too? Do your parents know?”

“No way. They’re not nearly as cool as you guys. They’re absolute freaks—in an uptight way, I mean. They get passionate about organizing closets.”

I wondered two things: How did Kristin talk about me and Clara when we weren’t around, and how did I not assume by now that Greta was getting my daughter high every morning before school? She had on a hemp necklace. She had a look in her eye that told you that even if she wasn’t stoned right then, she would be in the next forty-eight hours. Well, let’s be honest: the next four hours.

But wait a second.

I said, “How many times have you and Kristin smoked before school in the morning?”

“Just once.”

“Did she tell you to say that?”

“No. Did she say she would tell me to say that?”

“Greta, no. If she was going to tell you that, why would she tell me first?”

Greta shrugged.

I said, “Did you get Krissy started with this?”

“With smoking? No. She started on her own, with your stuff.”

I nodded. My head felt heavy. “She learned it from watching me. How long have you been doing it?”

“Shoot. Uh. Two years?”

“Has Kristin been doing it that long?”

“No. For her it’s been, like, less than a year. She doesn’t really do it that much.”

“She shouldn’t do it at all.”

“Probably not. It’s better than drinking, though. Our classmate died from drunk driving.”

“I remember.”

“And we don’t drive high. We’re really safe about it. What are you most afraid of, Mr. York?”

“What am I most afraid of?” I sighed.

“Yeah. You can tell me.”

Could I? Really?

Why not.

“I’m afraid,” I said, pouring Greta and myself mugs of coffee, “that my wife is only pretending to still love me.” It may seem strange, my sharing this with Greta, but I’m an open book, always. “I’m afraid that as soon as Kristin’s gone to college or she sees a different opportunity, Clara will drop me completely. Move out of the house or kick me out. And I’ll be all alone because it’s too late for me to go on dates, I’ve only looked worse every year since we met. And Kristin will blame me for the breakup, even if it’s not my fault. She’ll never talk to me again. It could happen literally any day.”

I sipped the coffee I had poured for myself.

“I meant,” said Greta, “what are you most afraid is going to happen to Kristin? Because of the weed thing.”

“Oh.”

“Are you really scared about all that? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Greta.”

“It’s so bleak.”

“I know it is. It’s my greatest fear. I thought that’s what you were asking me.”

I sipped more coffee. Greta sipped hers.

“Really, though,” she said, “what’s your worst-case scenario? For Kris?”

“There isn’t one. Or, that’s not true. I don’t want her getting into anything more serious than weed. I don’t want her smoking crack—or doing cocaine.”

“She’s not smoking crack. And no one does cocaine anymore.”

“My friend Jim does cocaine. He makes a lot of money, too. A lot more than I do.”

Before I followed that thought to its natural conclusion—that I should get my hands on some cocaine—Clara and Kristin entered the kitchen. Their eyes were puffed. They had been crying.

I said, “Is everything okay?”

Kristin gave me a big hug, the likes of which she hadn’t given me in a long time. She said, “I’m sorry, Daddy.”

I said, “It’s okay.” I patted her back. “I just want you to be safe. And make lots of money.”

“Fuck that,” she said, pulling back to wipe tears from her eyes.

It really was okay, though. I had already known it was more or less okay—”it” being our whole situation, or life, or whatever.

But that must have been the precise moment when I knew, definitively, that I didn’t care if Kristin smoked cannabis like her father and mother did. Yes, Clara smokes it, too, just not as often as I do.

As long as it didn’t interfere with other aspects of life, what difference did it make? As long as Kristin wasn’t high all the time, what was the harm?

Greta was right. Smoking cannabis was far better than drinking, which was a problem in my family and in Clara’s family. It killed her father and his parents, killed my aunt and uncle, nearly killed my sister before she quit and got religious. It’s far more dangerous to drink than it is to smoke weed. Whether they’re driving or operating heavy machinery, or just hanging out and trying not to break anything, I’d rather have a stoned person do it than a drunk one.

Anyway. That whole episode ended without anything really changing, but with everyone feeling better about the status quo. Kristin didn’t quit smoking, nor did I, nor did Clara. Nor did Greta, I guess.

We didn’t punish Kristin, because she outgrew punishments long ago. They never even worked in the first place. She was always the same impossible child after she was punished as she was before it.

The following week, we had another Song Night. It was better. I felt certain Kristin was high that time, again, but so was I.

She played for me “The Magic Number” by De La Soul, which I’d heard before, though I pretended I hadn’t. I played for her the first song from The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest, and she liked it. She hadn’t heard it. Or she pretended not to have heard it, like I had with “The Magic Number,” the song that says three is the magic number because De La Soul has three guys in it.

Two nights later, that Friday, Kristin and Greta were in Kristin’s room for a while. When they emerged, Greta was holding something made of glass. It was purple, and at first I thought it was a sex toy, which made me feel like I was about to have a panic attack.

Then I saw it was a thing made for smoking stuff out of. Like tobacco.

“Hello?” Clara said, looking up from her phone.

We were watching Succession, but when the TV is on, no matter what we’re watching, Clara looks at her phone.

Kristin said, biting her lip, “Greta thinks we have to get high together.”

“I think it’s the only way,” Greta said.

“The only way to what?” asked Clara.

“To fix everything. Kris told me how tense you’ve all been since the other day.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “No one’s tense. We’ve been normal.”

“Exactly,” said Greta. “You’re tense people. I can feel it just standing here.”

Clara said, “Greta, do you talk to all your friends’ parents like this?”

“No,” she said. “You guys are cooler than other parents. Mine especially.”

I knew she was flattering us. I also knew it was true. Most parents are fucking idiots.

“Why,” asked Clara, “do you think us getting high together would be a good thing?”

“I just think it’ll, I don’t know, make things clearer? When you smoke with someone, you’re vulnerable with them. You let yourself be your realest self. You have to.”

She kept talking, but I didn’t pay attention.

I wouldn’t have the best memory of what she said even if I had been listening, because when she finally shut her mouth we all went to the back porch and smoked out of the thing she’d been holding on to.

It was, she said, a steamroller. I’d heard of them but never used one. The way it works is, there’s a hole at the end of the pipe. First you light the weed, cover the hole, and inhale. Then you uncover it and keep inhaling so that all the smoke that’s collected in the body of the steamroller rushes past your mouth into your lungs.

If you’d asked me last year if I would ever smoke weed with my daughter, wife, and daughter’s best friend, I would have said no. But Clara and I had been planning to share a joint halfway through Succession anyway. And it wasn’t like Kristin’s smoking was a secret anymore.

Once we were all sufficiently high, we went back inside and resumed Succession. Greta and Kristin sat with us, not on the couch but on the floor nearby.

“What is this show even about?” Kristin asked.

“Rich people who hate each other,” Clara said.

I said, “It’s like a highbrow version of those reality shows you watch. About wealthy people from the same family who all have massive problems. It’s funny.”

“It doesn’t seem funny,” said Greta.

“It just looks dark,” said Clara, “so it doesn’t seem funny at first. It takes a couple episodes to catch on.”

“It’s like Arrested Development,” I said, “but with a different tone.”

“What’s Arrested Development?” Greta asked.

Clara paused Succession. “Are you kidding me, Greta?”

“About what?”

It turned out, we actually were the worst parents ever, because we’d been raising Kristin for seventeen years and she hadn’t seen Arrested Development. Greta hadn’t either, obviously. So we switched over to Netflix, and Clara found the episode where Michael thinks his brother’s Colombian girlfriend is cheating on him with a guy named Hermano.

The show was as funny as the first time we watched it because for two of the people in our crew, it was the first time they’d seen it. Plus we were high, so for that reason it felt new. It was a good time, and it wasn’t weird like it was a week later, when Greta returned to our house.

She’d been to our house several times in the interim. She comes over a lot.

Clara went to answer the doorbell, saying, “I bet I know who that is”—and found, when she opened the door, that it wasn’t only the Greta she expected, but also the man and woman who had brought her into the world. Greta’s parents.

They really aren’t cool parents.

I mean, I’m not cool. Not at all. Every truly cool person in the world would agree that Clara and I are, despite the flora we smoke, pretty square. But those two are at a whole other level. A squarer one. Like, if we are squares, then they are cubes. Jake and Susan.

They’re tall, like Greta, and blond like Greta. Jake smiles a lot, Susan doesn’t. She wears braces and possibly doesn’t like to smile because she’s shy about wearing braces at age forty-six or whatever.

Like me and Clara, they are products of the Midwest, but unlike us they never left. They have blue eyes and look like they shop for clothes at a little-known boutique called Casual Church Picnic.

Clara said, “Oh!” when she saw all three of them standing there. Three.

The magic number.

“Hello,” said Jake, Greta’s dad, as he walked in. “Greta said you had something to tell us.” Jake is a direct person. He is friendly and good-natured. Direct, though. When he comes to the house, he just walks in.

He didn’t sound upset. He sounded curious to know what Greta had been talking about. Which Clara was, too, just like I was, as I walked into the living room to join them all, having no clue what was going on.

Clara turned to me as I approached and said, “Do I have something to tell them?” brushing her hair back with one hand like Helen Hunt.

“Actually,” Greta said, “Mom? Dad? I’m the one who has something to tell you.” She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, opened her eyes. “I didn’t make those chocolates I gave you on the way here. I lied about that.”

“Okay,” said Jake. “Who made them?”

“What are you talking about?” asked Susan.

“I don’t know who made them,” Greta said. “Like, I don’t know what guy it was. Or lady. My friend got them at the dispensary.”

Susan squinted. “What dispensary? What is that?”

Oh, no, I thought. Oh, fucking no.

I said, though I didn’t want to say it, “A dispensary is where you buy cannabis products. Now that it’s legal.”

Susan said, “What are you saying?”

Jake said, “Did you feed us drugs?”

Clara said, “We didn’t know about this. We had no idea. Greta, my god, what were you thinking?”

“We got stoned here last week,” said Greta. “All four of us. We watched this crazy old show.”

“Arrested Development is not old,” I said, and then thought maybe it was.

Jake’s face was bright red now that he’d had a second to process his situation. He took Greta by the arm and said, “We are going home.”

“No, we’re not,” she said, pulling away. “You can’t drive with twenty-five milligrams of THC in your system.”

I said, “Jesus Christ, Greta. Twenty-five?”

She nodded.

“Each?”

She kept nodding.

Susan’s face was white. “Is that a lot?” she asked.

“Yes,” Clara said. “It’s way too much.”

Jake said, “I don’t feel anything. Is this a practical joke?”

“It takes a while to take effect,” said Clara. “You can’t drive home. It’ll hit you soon. Oh, god. Come sit. I’ll get you water.”

Jake said, “I’m fine. I’m not staying here. Greta, come on. Let’s go.”

I said, “It really is dangerous, to drive when you’re high.”

“I’m not high!”

“Jake, I’m sorry. You’re going to be high soon.”

“I don’t do drugs,” he said, looking at Susan. “We don’t do drugs.”

“You do now,” Greta said.

Was she trying to get herself killed?

“Is this something you people do?” Jake asked.

“Drug people?” I said. “Without their consent? Absolutely not.”

“He means,” said Clara, “do we use cannabis.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, we do that a lot. It’s great.”

“I’m scared,” said Susan.

“Don’t be scared,” said Greta. “It’s beautiful. You’re about to have the time of your life.”

“Bullshit,” Jake barked.

“It’s really not going to be any fun,” I said. “You’ll be lucky if you’re not comatose in twenty minutes.”

“He’s exaggerating,” Clara said, “and that’s not helpful, John. You’ll be fine, you just have to ride this out.”

Susan asked, “How do you know so much about marijuana?”

“We don’t know that much,” I said.

Clara said, “We’ve been smoking for a long time.”

Jake sat on the couch and shook his head.

Was he feeling it yet?

It was strange. These parents were older than us by several years, but they had no experience with this controlled substance that when I was growing up was a rite of passage. Everyone smoked weed at some point, even if it was to try it and find out they didn’t like it.

Where the hell had these two been? Had they never in their lives gone to a party?

No, I thought. Probably not.

They looked frightened and angry. Susan sat with her hands clenched between her knees. Her eyes darted around the room like we might have on one of our walls a blacklight poster of a languid wizard holding a long pipe out of which he’s smoking some uncertain substance, with a dragon standing behind him, also smoking a pipe. Weed art, I mean, the likes of which you’d expect to see on the walls of college dorm rooms.

But we didn’t have any art on our walls. We did have a clock.

“It’s going to be all right,” I said, sitting in the chair nearest to them while Clara brought them glasses of water. “It’ll be intense, but it’s like having too much to drink. It messes with your mood, and you feel bad. Then it’s over. You’re back to normal. It’s easy to forget that once it’s over, you’ll get your life back.”

Jake looked at me like he didn’t know what to say.

“It might even be kind of fun,” I said, “before it gets bad.”

Clara said, “I can drive you home once you level off. I just don’t think you should be in a car when it hits you.”

“Why not?” asked Susan.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Clara said. “You might throw up.”

“Cars are the worst place to throw up,” I said. “I’ve done it.”

“I don’t think they need to hear details about that,” Clara said, which was smart because I was about to offer details. “The best thing is to go home and sleep through it.”

“You’ll probably wake up feeling normal,” I said, “and you’ll have had the best night’s sleep of your life.”

Then I had an idea. I asked if they’d ever watched Arrested Development.

“Of course,” said Susan. “What does that have to do with anything?” After she said that, she gazed into the middle distance, as if she could watch the words she’d spoken float across the room.

It was happening. She was beginning to be high.

It was good to learn that we all had one thing in common. We hadn’t tried the same drugs, and they might vote for all the wrong people, but at least we’d watched one of the same TV shows. I said, “It helps to have something to focus on.” I went to Netflix again, found the show again. “I mean, there’s a reason why when people get stoned, they veg out on the couch. Weed and TV are a grand combination.”

Jake was glaring at Greta. “I still don’t feel anything,” he said.

“I feel something,” Susan said, watching her own hand.

As the show began, I remembered something.

“Do we still have those CBD tablets?” I asked Clara. “The ones your sister gave you?”

She said, “I think so. Why?”

“Because CBD helps.”

“How would it help?”

“It’s one of the active chemicals in cannabis,” I told everyone, like I was giving a public service announcement. “THC makes you high, CBD makes you sleepy. It calms you, and when you add it to your system, it kind of neutralizes the THC.”

Clara said, “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

I said, “I don’t really, either. I just know that the weed strains they put in chocolates like the ones you had are all THC, and if you want to not be as high as you’re about to be, you take CBD. Or chew peppercorns.

“It’s true. Neil Young says so, anyway. If you get too high, chew peppercorns. Scientists say CBD is better, but honestly, in the world of weed wisdom, Neil Young outranks all scientists. It’s never worked for me, though. It just made me taste pepper.”

Susan said, “You mean I have to take more of this stuff if I want to feel normal?”

I said, “Oh, no. You won’t be feeling normal for a while. I just mean, take CBD if you want to be able to stand up in an hour.”

“John,” said Clara, “why don’t you go find the CBD capsules?”

I went to the basement and found the bottle of CBD capsules. When I brought it upstairs, I could feel the tension in the room. I tried to melt it with a joke. I said, “I just got off the phone with High Times. They want you two on their next cover, isn’t that crazy?”

But no one found my joke funny. I didn’t know how much CBD to give them, so I gave them each a capsule.

I think it helped. In the half hour that followed—which we all spent watching Arrested Development with less mirth than the last time we’d watched it—neither of them had a stroke or whatever happens when you take enough THC to give an elephant bloodshot eyes. They merely sat still and didn’t say anything.

Greta asked if the rest of us should get high, in solidarity with her parents.

Jake growled to indicate that he did not want her to do that.

Heather Graham was on the TV when Greta turned to me and asked, “Did you talk to Clara about her leaving you?”

Clara was sitting between me and Greta. “What did you say?” she asked.

“It’s nothing,” I said.

“It’s not nothing,” said Greta. “I think you should talk about it.”

“Greta,” I said, “what the hell has gotten into you?”

“She’s always like this,” Kristin said. “What is she talking about?”

“Yeah,” said Clara, “what is this about, John? What did you do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I did nothing.”

Greta turned to Clara and said, “He’s scared you’re going to leave him. It’s his greatest fear.”

“How do you know that?”

“He told me,” she said. “I thought you would have talked about it by now.”

“Why would we talk about it?” I said.

“Because you have to. It festers if you don’t. Like a dead animal.”

“It’s true,” said Susan, eyes glued to the screen. “You have to talk about stuff. Or it’s dead animals.”

Greta laughed. “Oh, man,” she said.

“Why are you afraid I’ll leave you?” Clara asked me. “What did you do?”

“Yeah, Dad,” Kristin said. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I did nothing. I’m just scared you’ll leave.”

“Why, though?”

“Because it’s what people do.”

Jake was looking at me. “Not everyone does it,” he said.

“I know that.”

“Oh, god,” he said. “Oh, god.”

I said, “What?”

“Does my voice always sound this way? Am I like this all the time?”

“No,” Clara said. “Well, yes. But you’re going to be fine.” To me, she said, “John, I’m not going to leave you. Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Things are changing all the time. Kristin is growing up. She’s going to leave soon. People split up when that happens. And I’m scared.”

“Well, I’m scared, too,” she said, and she reached across Greta and held my hand. “We’re scared together, like always. I don’t want that to change. Kristin can leave or stay; it won’t affect how I feel about you.”

I nodded. “Okay,” I said and felt something welling up in me.

“See?” said Greta, patting my shoulder. “It helps to talk about things.”

“Greta,” I said, sweeping a hand through my hair in frustration.

“You really need to learn boundaries,” said Clara.

“Maybe I do,” Greta said, “but I got you two talking, didn’t I?”

The episode ended. Only Susan had been paying attention. It was time for us to drive these people home.

Jake and Susan had eyes as red as stop signs, and when they stood, they did it slowly. The CBD must have helped, because they weren’t lying on the floor, drooling, speaking in tongues, or doing all three at once.

Clara would drive them back in their car. I would follow in my car and bring Clara home. Clara, I was certain, would apologize to them all the way that they’d had to go through this. She might help them into their house. If they let her, she’d help them into their bed, where they’d sink into the mattress and leave behind their waking nightmare for a series of literal nightmares that would play out behind their eyes until they awoke together, groggy but otherwise okay.

Kristin said she’d ride in the car with me.

“Why?” I said. “You hate my car.”

“Because,” she said, “it’s Wednesday night.”

“Far out, Krissy. Just stay here.”

“It’s Song Night, Dad.”

“You want to have Song Night in the car?”

“I don’t know. Yeah.”

I shrugged. “All right,” I said. It was good enough for me.

We got in my 2008 Honda Accord—it’s really an awful car; I don’t blame Kristin for how she feels about it—and she plugged the aux cable into her phone.

A few seconds later, as we pulled away, I heard fuzzy white noise—then a drum, a guitar, a keyboard, and someone going, “Bu-bu-da-dum” over and over again.

It was, I learned later, “I Am the River” by Lael Neale. I hadn’t heard it before.

She sang that she was the river. She sang some other things. And the song was like the fastest, saddest, most desperate anthem of all time. She cried out that like a river, we were all moving.

I wasn’t high, but the music moved through me as if I were. And the car was moving, too, so the song was moving with the car, and everything was moving.

By the third verse, I had a feeling I have had but which I almost never have. It was the feeling of knowing you’re hearing a song that’s telling you about the time you’re living in, that shows you where you are on the map of your unfinished life. It sticks a pin in the world and says, “Look. Pay attention.”

Lael Neale reminded me of something: that people are not the same right now as they were five minutes ago or five seconds ago. There’s no such thing as static electricity. There’s no such thing as a static person. Everyone is changing every moment of every day. They’re hearing songs that make their minds turn on a dime. They’re getting dosed with recreational drugs by young women who only exist because of them.

People leave each other. They stay together. No matter what they do, they’re never the same as they were. They are always moving downstream.

Would I have preferred it if none of this had happened? Would I have liked it more if Kristin didn’t smoke weed? If she’d never taken up the habit?

Of course I would have preferred that. The whole situation was weird. Everything was strange. I would have liked for my little girl to never touch the stuff I smoked. I would have preferred that she get into fitness and nutrition. But I’m nothing like that, myself. I hate fitness and nutrition. Why would she be into that stuff? Being into that stuff sucks ass.

And wishing Kristin could go back to not smoking weed is like how I wish she could be a baby again, for just a few minutes sometimes. I would hold her like I did when she was three months old and on the day she was born. I would feed her mushy peas and press my thumb against the bridge of her nose. But there’s no going back to that. It’s all gone.

Kristin was gone, even though she was right beside me.

She cried so hard when she entered the living world. I stood by as she was born, one of the first to lay eyes on the crown of her little bald head. Starting that instant, I wanted to spend all the time I had left reassuring her that life would be okay, even when it wasn’t, even if she would have to keep moving all the time and never stop, like the woman who insists she is a river and has written a song that proves it.

“What do you think?” asked Kristin. “Wait. Shit. Why are you crying, Dad?”

I shook my head. “A lot of things are too much. All the time.”

“What?”

“It’s a good song.”

“It’s not that good.”

“Do you know how I used to go out a lot? Like, to have coffee and read books? I don’t do that anymore. I can’t anymore.”

“Like, as of right now?”

“No. Never mind.”

I didn’t even know what I was talking about.

I hadn’t gone to read in a coffee shop in a long time. I used to love to have coffee among people I didn’t know and read books I liked. But I hadn’t done it lately, I hadn’t wanted to, and I understood that little change to be a sign of how I’m always changing, despite how I stay mostly the same, across the years, plus or minus some extra pounds I’ve gained and the lines that have crept across my face.

Now I had to play a song for Kristin. That was the deal.

I didn’t have one prepared, and I couldn’t think. So I held the phone up to my mouth and told it to play “Stars and Stripes Forever” by John Philip Sousa.

I turned the volume up loud. Kristin looked at me like I’d lost my mind. And somehow, despite everything that was wrong and could never be fixed, I felt great. I was great. I was a river, one that could never be dammed or contained.

***

Robert Long Foreman wrote the novel Weird Pig and the short story collection I Am Here to Make Friends. His work has been in AGNI, Electric Literature, Cincinnati Review, and other magazines. He lives in Kansas City and at www.robertlongforeman.com.