Excerpt from This Is How It Really Sounds by Stuart Archer Cohen, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

1
The House at Wilksbury

The bus had broken down somewhere outside Wilksbury, Pennsylvania, after a gig in Cleveland. Pete Harrington remembered that because, when he was a teenager, his grandfather had told him that as a young man drifting through Wilksbury he'd met the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen, and that if he'd had half a chance to win her, he would have stayed on there the rest of his life. That was 1932, and a pretty girl didn't have much interest in a twenty-year-old hobo offering to do chores for food. Pete never understood why the old man was still telling the story fifty years later: he thought maybe Gramps had run out of things to talk about. Then, between a gig in Cleveland and another in Philadelphia, he'd been drifting off to sleep when he saw a green highway sign for Wilksbury, and he remembered his grandfather and the girl. The next thing he knew he woke up and the bus was silent and stationary. Everyone else in the band was sleeping.

The gas station sat far from the highway. An old one, with white clapboard sheathing and a solid wooden garage door that swung up on springs. Christmas-tree air fresheners in little packets. A glass-doored vending machine with pale white-bread sandwiches in it. It had nothing interesting about it, but at the same time its antiquated presence buzzed with mysterious lives whose contours he could almost imagine. It was five a.m. They were wrapping up the Wreckage tour, so it must have been autumn. It had been raining around there; it seemed like it would start raining again any minute. Behind them, the highway cars were hissing into the bleached-out dawn sky, and big trucks groaned and gunned their engines to climb the grade, bouncing their machine voices off the rock cuts.

The owner of the station had just arrived wearing a pair of blue coveralls with a little white oval on the breast that said les, and he dumped some coffee into a frilly filter and set it gurgling. Les and the driver and Bobby talked over how long it would take to get parts from Pittsburgh, and could he find them transportation to Charleston? Pete wandered away to the edge of the parking lot to take a leak and looked out over the fields that floated through the mist down below him. A red barn sat at the bottom of the slope, and, far off on the other side, he could see a farmhouse with a wide porch and a tree in the front yard. For some reason he thought about Gramps again and his half-century-old story about the house and the girl, and he realized that this must be that house. He scrambled down through the litter and the wet bushes to check it out.

The barn was open at the sides, and there were big yellow leaves hanging all around from the rafters, which he realized, to his amazement, was tobacco. Bales of hay formed a little fortress in one corner; some had been broken down into a big soft pile that smelled so sweet and grassy that it went to his head, the best thing he'd ever smelled. He saw a pitchfork, a tractor attachment of some sort. There was a faint odor of diesel and lubricants. He was startled when something moved. Then he heard the snuffling and dense breathing of a horse. He felt uneasy all of a sudden, and he stepped out again, into the field.

The house sat some two hundred yards away from him, and he could see that a light was on in one corner of the ground floor, probably the kitchen. Someone was making breakfast; he was sure of that. Supermarket coffee percolating on the stove in an aluminum pot. There'd be oatmeal. Bacon. Three fried eggs, like the "truckers' breakfast" in the truck stop, except this was the "home" of all the promised "home cooking" at every highway restaurant he'd ever been to. Who lived there, at home? He dreamed a middle-aged couple, maybe with a few kids. The mother was the first one up, with an apron on, presiding over the salty smell of morning. Maybe they had a daughter, a beautiful eighteen-year-old daughter, the most beautiful girl in western Pennsylvania, fairy-tale beautiful. He'd knock on their door, and they'd open it and look him over. He'd say, Hi, I'm Pete Harrington and my bus broke down on the highway out there. They'd invite him in and offer him something to eat, not knowing who he was, and the beautiful daughter would come downstairs to stare at him and he'd stay around for a few days in the guest room, doing some chores around the place, helping in the fields, chopping wood, and before he knew it, it would be home, and she'd be his, and they'd be living this gorgeous green life of hot black coffee and waking up on autumn mornings in a world that was antique and crisp and uncluttered and luminous. That whole life transpired in a moment as he stood there, from lying naked with his new wife to walking with his grandchildren, just a feeling, but so strong and possible that he felt he could make it real, just by reaching out and touching it.

Excerpted from This Is How It Really Sounds by Stuart Archer Cohen. Copyright © 2015 by Stuart Archer Cohen. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.