Two Rivers

By the time Thanksgiving had faded into memory and the last leaves surrendered to winter, campus had settled into its familiar rhythm again. Students hurried between brick buildings with scarves wrapped high against the wind, carrying coffee from one class to another while conversations continued across icy sidewalks. Every afternoon the bell tower marked the passing hours with a certainty that seemed immune to exams, relationships, and the countless private questions being carried from building to building.

Laura found comfort in the routine. Mornings belonged mostly to classes. Afternoons disappeared into the practice rooms of the music building or the library overlooking the river. Evenings were divided among homework, rehearsals, friends, and the ordinary negotiations of college life. By now she knew where she was going when she crossed campus and recognized enough people that a walk rarely passed without someone calling her name. The place that had seemed enormous when her parents left her there was becoming a place she knew.

From the upper floors of the business building she could see the river curving beyond the edge of campus. During autumn it had reflected reds and golds from the trees along its banks. Now it carried the gray light of winter skies. Laura sometimes stopped at the window before going to her next class, although she couldn't have said exactly what she was looking for. The river was rarely dramatic. It moved steadily through whatever season arrived, occasionally collecting branches or leaves along its edges and then carrying them away again.

One afternoon she watched small patches of ice circling in an eddy near the bank. For a while they seemed caught there, turning slowly while the main current passed. Then one piece escaped the circle and disappeared downstream, followed eventually by another.

Laura watched longer than she intended.

She had been thinking too much lately about direction.

Music had always been the clearest part of her life. Long before she understood careers or college majors, she understood what happened when she sat at a piano. There had been years when she resented practicing, particularly when horses or friends or good weather waited outside, but even then she had never seriously imagined music disappearing from her life. By college the resistance was gone. Practice no longer felt like something imposed on her. She liked the discipline of it, the gradual transformation of a passage that seemed impossible on Monday into something her hands understood by Friday. She liked discovering that music she had played dozens of times could still reveal something she hadn't heard before.

In the practice room, the work made sense. There was always something to improve, but there was also a recognizable relationship between attention and result. If a passage wasn't right, she slowed it down. If the phrasing felt wrong, she tried it another way. Improvement rarely came suddenly. More often she noticed one afternoon that something requiring concentration a week earlier had become part of the music.

She could imagine continuing that work for the rest of her life.

What she had not expected was to become equally interested in what was happening across campus in the business building.

She had chosen business partly because it seemed practical, a word that had always carried considerable authority in her family. She expected useful courses, useful knowledge, and eventually, she hoped, useful employment. She had not expected to become fascinated by the questions underneath the numbers.

A financial statement, she discovered, was not merely a collection of figures. It was evidence of decisions someone had made. A company spent money in one place rather than another because someone had decided what mattered. People hired other people, borrowed money, took risks, misjudged markets, recovered from mistakes, and occasionally succeeded for reasons that were not nearly as clear afterward as textbooks suggested. Organizations that looked orderly on paper were filled with human beings who disagreed, misunderstood one another, competed, cooperated, and sometimes managed to accomplish something none of them could have done alone.

Laura liked trying to understand why.

That surprised her more than the numbers themselves.

She had assumed music would be the creative part of her education and business the practical part. College was making the distinction increasingly difficult to defend. There was creativity in solving a problem whose answer wasn't obvious, just as there was discipline in music. A pianist couldn't simply feel deeply and expect the right notes to appear. A business couldn't simply organize itself perfectly and expect people to behave according to the organization chart.

The more Laura learned about both, the less willing they seemed to remain in the categories she had assigned them.

For several weeks she carried that uncertainty around without talking much about it. It followed her into the practice room, where she sometimes caught herself thinking about a case discussed in class while her fingers continued through familiar measures. It appeared in the library while she worked through financial statements and suddenly remembered a piece she wanted to practice. She wasn't unhappy with either choice. That was the difficulty.

It would have been easier if she had stopped loving music.

It would also have been easier if business bored her.

Neither happened.

When Christmas break arrived, Laura drove home carrying more books than she intended to open and several pieces of music she fully intended to practice. The ranch had settled into winter. The pasture had lost most of its color, and the cottonwoods stood bare against a pale sky. The horses had thicker coats, and the barn smelled the way it always did in cold weather—a mixture of hay, leather, animals, and damp earth that made college seem farther away than the drive suggested.

Her father noticed her preoccupation before she mentioned it.

They were repairing a section of fence that winter weather had loosened, the sort of job that allowed conversation without requiring it. Laura held a board in place while her father worked, and for a while the sound of the hammer was the only interruption to the wind moving through the dry grass.

“You've got something on your mind,” he said eventually.

Laura looked at him. “Is it that obvious?”

“Not especially.”

“Then how do you know?”

He adjusted the board before driving another nail. “I've watched you think for twenty years.”

Laura smiled. “That sounds exhausting.”

“It has its moments.”

They worked a little longer before she said, “I don't know what I'm supposed to become.”

Her father stopped hammering.

The sentence sounded larger once it was outside her head. Laura had meant to say something about choosing between music and business, perhaps about majors or careers, but what came out seemed to contain all of those things and several others she hadn't intended to discuss.

Her father rested the hammer against the fence. “Become?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I might. I'm waiting to see if you do.”

Laura gave him the look that deserved.

“That's very helpful.”

“I try.”

She leaned against the fence. “I love music.”

“I know.”

“But I like business too.”

“I know that too.”

“How?”

“You talk about it.”

“I talk about music.”

“Not the same way.”

Laura waited for him to explain.

“When you talk about music, you usually tell us what you're playing. When you talk about your business classes, you tell us what you were arguing about.”

“We don't argue.”

Her father looked at her.

“We discuss.”

“All right.”

Laura laughed despite herself.

He picked up the hammer again but didn't immediately return to work. “What's wrong with liking both?”

“Eventually I have to choose something.”

“Eventually you have to do something. I'm not sure that's the same thing.”

Laura thought about that. “It feels like it is.”

Her father nodded, conceding the point without agreeing with it. “When I started engineering, I thought I'd made a choice about what my life was going to be. Mostly I'd made a choice about what I was going to study next.”

“But you stayed an engineer.”

“Yes.”

“So you were right.”

“I was lucky enough to like the work. But the work changed. I changed. Half the problems I spent my career solving didn't exist when I was in college.” He looked across the pasture for a moment. “At your age I thought the important thing was making the right choice early enough.”

“And now?”

“Now I think the important thing is becoming somebody who can make another choice when the first one stops making sense.”

Laura was quiet.

It was not the answer she had expected, and it certainly wasn't an answer to the question she had been asking herself. Her father had not told her whether to choose music or business. He had not even seemed especially concerned that she might choose incorrectly.

“So I don't have to know?”

“Oh, you'll have to know eventually.”

She laughed. “There it is.”

“I didn't say you had to know today.”

He picked up another nail. “Hold that straight.”

Laura returned her hands to the board.

They finished the fence as the afternoon light began to fade. The repair wasn't beautiful. Several of the boards were older than others, and the new section was obvious if anyone cared to look closely. But the fence stood straight enough and would keep the horses where they belonged.

Her father gathered the tools.

“Good enough,” he said.

Laura looked at the fence. “That's not usually something you say.”

“I'm getting older.”

“I'll tell Mom.”

“Don't.”

They carried the tools back toward the barn.

That evening Laura sat at the piano for nearly an hour. She had intended to practice something she had brought home from school, but after a while she stopped working on the difficult passages and simply played pieces she knew well. Her mother moved through the kitchen nearby, occasionally humming along when she recognized something. Nothing about being home suggested that music belonged less to Laura because she was interested in something else too.

Later she opened one of the business books she had brought with her and read for a while at the kitchen table. Her father passed through on his way to bed, glanced at the book, and said nothing.

Laura smiled after he left.

She had spent weeks treating music and business as two directions that would eventually force her to choose between them. Perhaps that was because choices were easier to imagine when they looked like roads on a map: take one and necessarily leave the other behind. But her life had not worked that way so far. The girl who had left the ranch for college had not stopped belonging to the ranch. The pianist had not disappeared when Laura entered the business building. Even the independence she had found at school had somehow made coming home more meaningful rather than less.

The next afternoon she went for a walk before dinner. Beyond the pasture, the river moved through the winter landscape, darker now beneath the bare trees. At one point the current divided around a low gravel bar. From where Laura stood, it looked briefly like two rivers, each taking its own route around the obstruction. A little farther downstream the channels came together again.

She watched them for a while.

There was no revelation in it. The river did not know she was standing there and had no advice to offer about majors, music, careers, or anything else. It was only water finding its way around something in the middle.

Still, Laura liked the sight of the two channels traveling separately without becoming two different rivers.

She turned back toward the house before the cold could persuade her more forcefully. Tomorrow there would be music to practice and, eventually, another semester of business classes waiting for her. What either of those things would become was still beyond her ability to see.

For once, she was willing to leave it that way.