Meg hugged me. “Love you more.”
“Love you best,” Jo said.
“Jeez, does everything in this family have to be a competition?” Amy’s nose wrinkled. “Not that I don’t love you, too.”
I was still a little shaky when I pulled up to the house a few hours later. I sucked at confrontation. Expressing myself, Jo called it. I pulled a face. I’d never been any good at opening my mouth.
Except when I sang.
I sat a moment in the car, trying to summon the strength to go inside. The lights were on in the kitchen. Momma, fixing dinner.
The shadow coiled inside me. I could go for a run, I thought. Or...
I dragged my guitar from the backseat.
The feed room was quiet, with a musty, mineral smell from a dozen bins of organic alfalfa pellets, organic dairy pellets, supplements, kelp, and salt. Plastic totes full of baby bottles, towels, and little goat sweaters filled the wooden shelves. The sling for the baby scale hung on the back of the door. I opened the guitar case and sat on a stack of feed bags piled on the floor, cradling the Hummingbird.
Three chords and a chorus to tell my truth. Or somebody’s truth, real and raw and honest. Could I do it? Was I brave enough?
I thought of the patients at rehab: Brenda Richards, struggling with balance after a mortar blast. Of Ray Jones, adjusting to his prosthetic arm. Of Jessica and Carlos Cruz, taking cautious steps forward in their new life together. Not victims, but survivors, every one.
Life is change, Meg had said.
For better or for worse.
The calico cat stuck her head above the flap of the carton. I took a deep breath and began to play.
I don’t know what pulled me out of the song. A sound. A rise in the temperature of the air. I felt the weight on my bent head and when I looked up, Dan was propped in the feed room door, motionless as a barn beam. Like he’d stood there awhile.
My hands stilled on the strings. My heart raced. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think anyone could hear me.”
“Got an audience right there.” He nodded toward the carton in the corner.
The kittens. I smiled. “They’re not very critical.”
“You got the goats.”
“Harder to please.”
“You got me.”
Something about the way he said it, low, scraped my nerves and set them humming like guitar strings.
I was dying to know what he thought. “I hope I didn’t bother you.”
“Haven’t heard that one before.”
“The song? It’s not finished.”
He scratched his beard. “Reckon it’s your music. Your call.”
He didn’t like it. I bent over my guitar, hiding my disappointment. Not a fan of country music, he’d told Colt.
“It sounded pretty perfect to me,” he added.
My head jerked up. “You didn’t think it was too... sad?”
“Nope. Honest. You write what you know. What you feel. People get married, move on. Sometimes they don’t move on together.”
