Melting ice trickled off the awning outside the RITE AID.  “I’ll tell you some things about spring time,” Serge said.  “My father was killed with a shotgun in the spring.  Twelve gauge to the face.  I got kicked out of two bands one spring.  I got arrested twice in the month of April, evicted once, wrecked a car and had my girlfriend stolen by a bouncer at a night club, a dick head who sold ecstasy.  One spring, I threw up every morning after I got out of bed.  I did Ketamine on Cinco de Mayo and saw my dead father.  He was pulling me behind a truck.  The St. Lawrence River was frozen, and I was wearing his old Super Tacks, hanging on to a rope, skating on the chipped ice.  He leaned out the window and his face was missing and he said to me very clearly, ‘You were conceived on April 15th, and you will die on April 15th.’”
   “That’s tax day,” Tamara said.  “You were on drugs.  It has no significance.”
   “You don’t know,” he said.  “There was clarity.”
   Serge was on his break, smoking a cigarette outside the store front.  The clouds shifted like jigsaw pieces trying to connect, hiding the sun a while and then letting it loose.  It was a warm day, but Serge had his hood pulled up.
   “I’ll take care of things with Ted,” she told him.  “You don’t have to quit.  I just don’t know what happened with you and Mabel.  You really frightened her.”
   He dropped his cigarette in a puddle.  “I want to make it right with her.  What can I do?  What kinds of things does she like?”
   “She asked you to teach her guitar.”
   He shook his head.  “I can’t do that.  There’s something not right about me, a loose screw or something.  She can see it.  I think she knows me better than my mother did.”
   He pulled his hood back, let it fall around his neck.  A breeze sent a chill up his arms, and Tamara offered her hand.  He turned his own palm up and let her take it.
   “She’s not that perceptive,” Tamara said.  “She’s just a little girl who has a fucked up father.  She’s angry.  She doesn’t know how to forgive yet.  She doesn’t know that people don’t really set out to hurt you.  She doesn’t know they just can’t help themselves.”
   Serge hadn’t slept since the piano lesson.  He felt as if he’d finally landed in the realm of acknowledged defectiveness.  It was a penalty box the size of Quebec and every bit as cold.
   That night, he found his old Jackson white King V guitar in his mother’s basement.  He changed the strings and dusted off his practice amp and set all of the equipment by the front door.  He remembered a hat box that his mother had kept filled with wrapping paper and bows.  He spent an hour looking for it, but the closest thing to a bow that he could find was a red cloth tassel in one of his mother’s dresser drawers.  He taped the tassel to the body of the guitar and stuck a post-it note above it: To Gabriella.
   By the time he’d gotten everything together, it was after ten.  He called Tamara and asked if he could stop by.  He told her he had something for Mabel.
   Tamara sighed.  “I’d say yes, but she’s sort of on lock down.”
   “Why’s that?”
   “She used my Visa card to order a karaoke machine off the Internet.  I told her she had to go to bed at nine every night for a week.”
   Serge laughed.  “Okay.  Maybe I could come by in the morning.  Before school.”
   Tamara told him that would be fine.  “I talked to Ted,” she said.  “He’s a bastard, but I think he’s gonna let the whole thing slide.”
  Serge thanked her for working things out, even though he already knew he wasn’t going back to the RITE AID.  The only way he’d go back was if someone forced him to do it in a dream.
   After he’d put down his cell phone, he sat in the chair for a moment watching the news.  But the house felt agitated so he went to the kitchen, straightened a dish rag hanging from the oven handle and checked the refrigerator to see if anything needed to be thrown away.  He heard a noise in the living room, and when he went to check he saw that the train calendar had fallen off the wall.  It lay on the carpet, open to the month of January.  Only one date was marked, in his mother’s neat blue Sharpie script: January 15 – Serge’s B-day!
   “What the fuck do you want?” Serge asked the wall.  “I’ll burn the goddamn house down.”