Miriam’s eyes flashed as she smiled. “I’m rather excited about seeing this film.”
“You never struck me as an action film fan, Grandma.”
“Well, I said I wanted to live life to the fullest now that I’m on the road to recovery, and I meant it,” Miriam replied, and a wicked twinkle lit up her eyes. “Although I must confess that I also have a soft spot for that handsome young man in the lead role.”
Ryan let out a soft laugh. The ‘young man’ his grandmother was referring to was about fifteen years older than he was, andwas therefore no spring chicken, but he wasn’t about to point that out to his grandmother. If she wanted to ogle the middle-aged actor playing the lead role in the ‘past his best but up for a challenge’ action flick, then who was he to judge?
“I’ll grab my car key and we’ll get going,” Ryan said.
“Hang on,” Miriam said, frowning and dropping her gaze to his shirt. “What’s that strange mark on your shirt?”
Ryan glanced down and noticed a wet smear across the front of his shirt, to which were stuck several wiry dog hairs. He wiped at the mark, dislodging the dog hair but doing nothing but smearing the wet mark further across the fabric.
“I stopped to pet a dog on the way back here,” Ryan explained. “It was a bit of a drooler, and I must’ve got slobber on my hand and not realised, and then transferred it to my shirt. I should probably change before we go out.”
“I’m sure no one will notice. We’ll only be sitting in the dark in the cinema.”
“I’ll change, anyway. The dog was, er, a bit smelly and dirty, to be honest.”
As he turned for the stairs, his grandmother laughed. “Then why did you pet it?”
“It’s a long story,” he called back down the stairs from his bedroom as he unbuttoned the shirt. “This woman I bumped into round the corner had found the dog and asked if it belonged to me. We realised it was probably a stray and she wasn’t sure what to do about it.”
“Poor dog,” Miriam said from the hallway downstairs. “So, what happened to it?”
“The woman said she’d look after it tonight and tomorrow we agreed we’d drop by the vet’s practice to get it scanned for a microchip and find out who owns it. I said I’d go with her because she has to get to work by eleven and seemed a bitalarmed at ending up responsible for the dog when it wasn’t anything to do with her.”
“So you agreed to help? That’s very nice of you, Ryan.”
“I think she was hoping I’d volunteer to look after the dog tonight, but we’re off to the cinema, so that was a non-starter. I felt bad for her, to be honest. I got the impression she might just have got home from work and was looking forward to a quiet night, and then this mucky, smelly dog appeared in front of her and wouldn’t leave her alone.”
“Poor chap. I don’t like thinking of dogs roaming around on their own. I wonder what happened to him?”
“I’m sure we’ll sort it out tomorrow once the vet scans him and checks out his microchip details.”
“Assuming he has a microchip. What if he doesn’t?”
Ryan hadn’t thought about that. “We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it. But I’m sure we won’t. The dog has probably just escaped from his garden and run off for a few hours and got himself a bit mucky by jumping into a filthy puddle or something like that.”
Having changed his shirt, Ryan went back downstairs and found his grandmother lingering in his work space at the back of the house, her gaze scanning the long desk where he composed his songs and wrote lyrics.
“It looks like you’ve been keeping very busy, Ryan,” Miriam said, taking in the notebooks and composition sheets piled up across the desk.
“You know me, Grandma. There’s always some tune or jingle rattling around inside my head. If I don’t keep these notebooks and score sheets handy to jot things down, I’d forget most of it.”
Ryan had always worked that way—scrawling ideas and snippets of songs onto paper while he tinkered at the piano or guitar before committing the music and lyrics to the dedicated composition software he used on his computer system. He’ddiscovered over the years that unless he let a new song or new idea breathe and take shape organically before attempting to structure it formally, the essence of the piece never matured quite the way he imagined, or hoped, it would.
Which was why his desk was covered with so many notebooks and stacks of composition paper, and why the desk itself was so long. Ryan needed the extensive space to work, and with so many song and musical ideas on the go at any one time, and all of them at various stages of development, the expansive desk was required in order to keep his creative system in full working order.
“When I was staying with your sister,” Miriam said, “she mentioned that a song you wrote for some big deal pop star had been nominated for a songwriting award.”
Ryan nodded. “I co-wrote the song with Eddie, actually,” he explained, referring to the skilled pop composer who Ryan enjoyed collaborating with. “We were pretty surprised when it got nominated, but I guess the judging panel must like it.”
“Good for you. When will you know if you’ve won?”
“The award ceremony is next month.”
“Well, fingers crossed. One of the things that kept me going through all that wretched cancer treatment was knowing how well you are doing in life, Ryan. You and your sister, for that matter. Seeing all this that you’ve created…” She swept a hand around the room, signifying the musical scores in progress, the scribbled pages of lyrics, the piano, and the racks of guitars lining one wall. “Knowing you’ve built a life with your creative spirit at its heart makes me very happy, Ryan.”
