“About finding your home? A great love that feels just right?” Ivy asked.
“So we want his perspective too? If this is a duet?”
“Right.” She looked up, her cheeks flushed. “What if we start with his verse? Who is this guy?”
“Do you ever daydream about finding the right man?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Tell me about him.”
“He’d be from a humble background like me. A scrapper, you know. Who had a dream no one believed in but him.”
“All right, hang on.” I moved through the chord progression again. “Where does he start from? You’re in Tennessee. Where’s our guy?”
She closed her eyes for a moment. “If this is the one for Jack and me, maybe we go with what we know about him. He grew up in a trailer park in rainy Washington. Maybe his dreams come true, but he still feels alone.”
“That’s not too much of a stretch for either of us,” I said, picking out a few notes on Georgia and singing what came to me.
My mama said I was born with a restless soul
Always on the move, looking for more than rain on a tin roof
Ivy grabbed her notebook, scribbling down the lyrics. “I’ve got something else.” She sang my lines, then added on.
So I went out into this big old world
Hoping to soar
Playing until my fingers ached
“Oh, right on. That’s good stuff for our guy,” I said.
“His story mirrors her own yearning for home.”
I settled Georgia more firmly in my lap. “And if home’s a person, then we’ve got something.” I strummed, singing what we had so far.
“And then the two find each other. And they know it right away. This is the one.” She picked up her guitar again and played the chord progression through once, then twice.
But the moment I saw you?—
She stopped and looked at me. “What does she see?”
“Everything,” I said. “She sees everything she’s been missing without knowing she was missing it.”
Ivy’s eyes went slightly bright. She looked back at the strings.
But the moment I saw youI saw everything
She played through the change.All the torn pieces—she paused.All the torn pieces of my heart?—
“Stitched together,” I said.
“Like a quilt. Mama and my grandmother make quilts. All my life, Mama kept pieces of fabric she’d salvaged from old clothes. I’m talkingeverypiece. Then she’d make something beautiful from them.” Ivy played the chord under it, finding the resolution.Stitched into a patchwork quilt like my mama made.
“Oh, that’s good,” I said.
We worked through it like that for the better part of an hour, one of us offering a line, the other catching it or redirecting it. Georgia and Ivy’s guitar finding the arrangement together.
