“The ones I volunteer with, yes.”
“Oh.” He sulked, pushing food around his plate. “I was hoping to be a kept man by now, but I suppose I’ll just continue delivering mail.”
“Yes, I suppose you will.” She leaned down and kissed him. “My prodigy thanks you for your sacrifice.”
“Prodigy?” Quinn perked up. “Who are you training?”
“A very talented kid in my music program.”
My interest was piqued. “One of your foster kids?”
“Yes. A drummer. I have a feeling about him.”
I straightened up in my chair, my eyes now fixed on my mother as my pulse quickened. A drummer, she said? I knew a drummer like that.
“What’s the feeling?” I asked, not daring to dream that the same drummer had crossed both our paths.
“He’s got that something special that can’t be taught, you know? I’m just building off that. Working with him on his timing and technique. He learns so fast. It’s amazing no one has ever really worked with him before me.”
Dots were connecting everywhere, but it couldn’t be. It couldn’t.
“Does the kid know who you are? That he’s getting trained—for free—by the famous Michelle McKallister?”
Mom rolled her eyes. “Hardly, Scott, and he’s an eighteen-year-old foster kid who’s barely getting by. Do you really want me to charge him while you eat your dinner in a seven-thousand-square-foot home?”
“Please don’t ruin my dinner.”
Quinn laughed. I would have too had my heart not been racing so fast.
“Wait,” I said. “You have older foster kids in your program? You never told me that. I thought they were all young. Kids and teens.”
“I started two different programs, one for the younger kids and one for the older ones over at Camden Place, the housing co-op for foster kids who’ve aged out of the system.”
What in the living hell? How had I not known this? I’d assumed Beats was too old to benefit from my mother’s music class. Had I known, I would’ve… what? What would I have done? I wasn’t sure, but it felt like I’d wasted a whole lot of time not knowing this pertinent information.
I actually whimpered my displeasure. “I wish you’d told me.”
“Why?”
“I… I just like to know what you’re doing.”
“Really?” She quirked her brows. “Since when?”
“Since always.”
“O…kay. I was under the impression you barely listened to anything I said. But I tell you what, Grace, when I get home, I’ll give you a full report.”
She was mocking me, of course, and I surely deserved it. She had spoken of the program occasionally, but there had never been anything to catch my attention until her drummer boy foster kid paralleled my own. What were the chances it was the same guy we were both talking about? There had to be plenty of prodigy drummers in the dream capital of the world. Although how many of them were eighteen-year-olds in foster care?
Wait. Was it really such a coincidence? I was the one who’d encouraged my mother to start her music program in the first place—because of Beats. I’d thought maybe she might be able to help heal talented musicians like him, like she’d healed Jake. I’d just never thought it would be Beats himself. It had never occurred to me that programs existed to house fosters who aged out of the system. Beats had never mentioned it to me, although a lot had been left unsaid, considering we’d only had twenty-four hours together. So, if I really thought about it, her happening upon him wasn’t that much of a coincidence after all.
“If he’s that good, ask him if he wants to join my new band,” Quinn said, only half joking.
“You already have a band. Are you abandoning the Dude Pack?”
“Grace, don’t make me feel bad. They can’t hang, and you know it.”
I did, but I was still sad for them all the same. Music was what they lived for, and Quinn was the only one who could take them to that place, and now he never would.
