Perfect Rhythm

by Jae

  Holly started to sweat as she tried to hold on to the cat without getting clawed to death.

  “Hey, hey,” her mother crooned. “No one’s gonna hurt you.”

  That promise seemed to be pretty one-sided. Diva flicked her tail, which at the moment looked like a bottle brush, and tried to bite.

  Holly’s mother took the cat’s neck in a gentle yet firm grip. With practiced ease, she palpated Diva’s abdomen, listened to her heartbeat and lungs, and then checked her ears. Holly struggled to hold on to the spitting cat, who sent her an unhand-me-this-instant-you-brute glare.

  Finally, her mother stepped back. “Everything looks just fine, Thelma. But Diva could stand to lose a little weight.”

  A little? That was the understatement of the century. The cat was at least twenty pounds of attitude. She wouldn’t turn into the feline version of Kate Moss anytime soon.

  “Didn’t you give her the special diet food I recommended when you brought her in for her shots last month?” Holly’s mother asked.

  “I tried, but she won’t touch it.”

  “Try again. She will once she realizes her usual food isn’t coming, no matter how much she pouts. Trust me. It worked with this one too when she was a kid and didn’t want to eat her green beans.” She nudged Holly.

  “That’s what you think,” Mrs. Mitchell said. “In the school cafeteria, she always traded her apple for Amber Young’s cookie.”

  As her cheeks heated, Holly cursed her fair complexion. At least Mrs. Mitchell didn’t seem to suspect that she and Amber had also traded their homework: Holly had done all of Amber’s science and math while Amber had written her English papers. “Hey, leave me out of this, you two.”

  Her mother and Mrs. Mitchell chuckled. Diva hissed again, and they returned their attention to the cat.

  “What if she refuses to eat?” Mrs. Mitchell directed a concerned gaze down at Diva. “Isn’t it dangerous for cats to go on a hunger strike?”

  “I don’t think that’ll happen. Let’s try another flavor of the diet food. You can mix it with her usual food and then shift the ratio a little more every day.”

  Mrs. Mitchell nodded. “I can do that.”

  “Great.” Her mother’s white coat rustled as she turned toward Holly. “You can put Diva back in her carrier now.”

  The cat had calmed down a little under her steady grip, but as soon as Holly’s mother let go and Holly lifted her off the table, Diva lashed out with one front paw.

  Holly flinched back but wasn’t fast enough. One sharp claw caught her jaw. Pain flared, making her stumble and nearly drop the cat.

  Resolutely, her mother took over, and within a few seconds, Diva was back in her carrier. “Are you okay?” Her mother’s usually steady hands trembled a little as they flew over Holly, as if she were dealing with a saber-inflicted wound.

  Since her dad’s accident, her mother tended to freak out over the smallest injury. “I’m fine, Mom. It’s just a little scratch.” Although it burned like crazy. She fished a tissue from her jeans pocket and pressed it against her jaw.

  “Let me see.”

  “It’s fine. I’ll put disinfectant on it in a second. No big deal.”

  “Let me see,” her mother repeated in her no-nonsense-mom voice.

  Sighing, Holly lowered her hand with the tissue.

  Both her mother and Mrs. Mitchell crowded closer, fussing over her.

  Holly’s cell phone rang to the tune of Aretha Franklin’s “A Natural Woman.”

  Saved by the bell. Thanks, Aretha. She gently warded off her mother’s hands and glanced at the display. The name flashing across the small screen sent her pulse racing. “It’s Sharon. I have to take this.”

  Instantly, her mother and Mrs. Mitchell backed away and started to exchange the newest town gossip about Sharon’s famous daughter, Leontyne.

  Holly didn’t listen. She quickly lifted the phone to her ear. “Sharon? Is Gil okay?”

  “Oh, yes, dear. He’s napping. I hope I didn’t worry you.”

  “No,” Holly said, but they both knew it was a lie. It took a few seconds for her heart to settle into a calmer beat.

  “Listen,” Sharon said after a moment of silence. “Is there any way you could come in a little early today? Leontyne is coming home, and I’d love to make a strawberry-rhubarb pie. It’s her favorite, you know? Well, at least it was when she was growing up, but I bet she still likes it.”

  Holly barely heard the rambling about the pie, her mind still stuck on one thought. “Leontyne is coming home?”

  Behind Holly, her mother and Mrs. Mitchell fell silent. Even the cat stopped grumbling.

  “Yes,” Sharon said quietly, joy and worry mixed in her tone. “I don’t know for how long, but…yes. She’s coming.”

  “Oh, how wonderful,” Mrs. Mitchell whispered, clutching her hands together.

  Holly scrunched up her face. As much as she tried, she couldn’t share that sentiment. Leontyne should have come home much sooner—last year, when her father had suffered his first, milder stroke, or even in May, after the second stroke, when he’d spent weeks in the hospital and then in a rehabilitation facility. She should have been there when her mother had broken down and cried on Holly’s shoulder.

  But, of course, Leontyne—or rather Jenna Blake—had been too busy traipsing all over the world, enjoying the limelight, to care about what happened to her parents. She hadn’t even called, as far as Holly knew.

  “So?” Sharon said when Holly remained silent. “Can you come?”

  Holly turned a questioning gaze on her mother, knowing she had listened in on her conversation. “Do you still need me to…?”

  “Go,” her mother said. “I’ll handle things here.”

  “If you can’t, it’s fine too,” Sharon said. “I know you’re already doing much more for us than is covered in your contract.”

  “Sharon, I’m not some hospital nurse you barely know. I consider both of you friends. Heck, I’m basically living with you. So forget the contract and just ask for help whenever you need it, okay? Now, would you like me to go by the store on my way over, or do you have what you need for the pie?”

  Sharon exhaled audibly. “Holly Drummond, you’re a godsend. I hope I’m telling you that enough.”

  “It’s okay, really. I don’t mind.” Holly chuckled. “Plus I still owe you and Gil for what you had to endure when he tried to teach me how to play the piano.”

  Sharon’s laughter reverberated through the phone—a sound that had become much too rare in the past two months since Gil’s second stroke.

  Smiling, Holly jotted down the shopping list, ended the call, and said goodbye to her mother and Mrs. Mitchell.

  “What about your scratch?” her mother called after her.

  Holly waved over her shoulder. “I’ll live.” At least after handling Diva, the demon cat, dealing with a spoiled pop star should be a piece of cake, right?

  Leo sped north on Highway 169, glad to escape the airport and its crowd of people asking for autographs and pictures. Slow down. She eased her foot off the gas and set the cruise control. It wasn’t as if she was in a hurry to return to Fair Oaks, the place she had fought so hard to get away from fourteen years ago. There was nothing left in that small town for her, certainly not a great relationship with her father. Hell, he was probably glad she’d stayed away all those years, and she wasn’t so sure he’d want her around now that he was sick. Her father had never been one to show any weakness.

  She sighed and gazed through the windshield.

  The hills of northwest Missouri rolled like gentle ocean waves, and the white wind turbines dotting the landscape like masts of ships only added to the feeling of being far out at sea. The farmhouses and silos sprinkled along the highway seemed like isolated ports, their long driveways with mailboxes at the end extended toward the road
like jetties.

  She had forgotten how beautiful this part of the country could be.

  Fields stretched on both sides of the road—golden wheat almost ready to be harvested, green rows of soybeans, and stalks of corn that looked to be already taller than Leo’s five foot ten.

  It reminded her of summers, twenty years ago, when she had earned some extra money by “walking beans” on the farms in the area. Cutting out weeds in the summer heat, up to her waist in soybeans, hadn’t been her idea of a fun summer break, but her father believed in teaching her good work ethics. “If you want some spending money, Leontyne, you’ve got to earn it,” he’d said.

  Wow, she had forgotten all about that. She snorted. More like repressed it.

  Walking beans was exhausting. She’d always ended up dew-soaked up to her waist, with a sunburned neck and her hands covered in blisters and cuts.

  She lifted her left hand off the steering wheel and glanced at it. No blisters and cuts now, just calluses on her fingertips from the strings of her guitar. Saul would kill her if she came back with mangled hands, unable to play. Not that she intended to help out the local farmers again. She would stay just long enough to make sure her father had what he needed. Mingling with the locals wasn’t on her to-do list.

  As if on cue, her cell phone rang through the rental car’s speakers, and her manager’s name flashed across the dashboard display.

  For a few seconds, she considered ignoring him, but if she did, he’d probably be on the next flight to Kansas City to hunt her down. Sighing, she pressed the phone button on the steering wheel to stop the music on the radio and accept the call.

  “Are you there yet?” Saul never bothered with a hi or how are you?

  “Not yet. It’s a ninety-minute drive from the airport.” She turned right onto the state highway that would connect her to Highway 136.

  Saul clucked his tongue. “I still can’t believe you’re doing this. Going to Bumfuck, Kansas, when you should be laying tracks on your new album.”

  “It’s Missouri, not Kansas, and trust me, it’s not my idea of a fun vacation either.”

  A tractor appeared in front of her, hauling a trailer piled high with hay bales.

  “Great,” Leo muttered. She wasn’t in a hurry to arrive in Fair Oaks, but that didn’t mean she wanted to crawl along the highway at ten miles per hour. “Welcome to small-town America.”

  “Excuse me?” Saul said.

  “Nothing.”

  The tractor driver pulled onto the shoulder of the road a little more so she could pass.

  Leo stepped on the gas and gave a grateful wave as she passed.

  “This sudden family emergency…it’s not just an excuse to get away for a while, is it?” Saul asked.

  She clutched the steering wheel as if attempting to throttle it. “Jesus, Saul! You were there when my mother called. You think I would fake something like that?”

  For several moments, only silence answered. “Well…”

  Thanks a lot, asshole! She swallowed the words before she could utter them. It already felt as if her career was teetering on the brink, so there was no use in alienating her manager.

  “It’s just that the few times you talked about your father, it sounded as if he were already dead,” Saul said.

  No. It’s more like I’m dead to him. But she didn’t feel like getting into it. “I have to go, Saul. I’ll be there soon.”

  “All right. Please try to work on a couple new songs while you’re holed up with the family, okay?”

  “I’ll try,” Leo said, even though she had a feeling she wouldn’t be in the mood for composing upbeat pop songs.

  When she ended the call, the radio came back on, playing the last notes of some country song. She pulled off the highway onto a narrow two-lane road riddled with potholes. To the right, a large, white sign announced Welcome to Fair Oaks, hometown of Jenna Blake.

  Leo snorted. Fair Oaks hadn’t been her home in many years, and no one there had ever called her Jenna.

  Next to that sign, a smaller one said City limits of Fair Oaks, population 2,378.

  City limits? Her lips twitched. That’s stretching it.

  Just as she passed the two signs, the opening lines of “Butterfly Kisses” drifted through the car’s speakers. Groaning, she turned off the radio and drove through town in silence.

  It had been five years since she had been back for her grandmother’s funeral. Fair Oaks hadn’t changed much, but somehow it felt foreign—so different from the skyscrapers and bright lights of New York City. The water tower carrying the faded high school mascot appeared on the left, while the red brick spire of the courthouse towered over the town on the right. Several buildings at the edge of town appeared to be abandoned, their windows boarded up.

  Leo halfway expected a tumbleweed to blow through. She encountered only a white pickup truck that pulled into Ruth’s Diner. The guy behind the wheel stared at her, probably because he didn’t recognize her car, which gave her away as an out-of-towner.

  Her fingers around the steering wheel grew damp as she approached her childhood home. It was right across the street from her old high school. The sight of the brick building with the brass bell displayed on the front lawn didn’t make her feel any better. She hadn’t fit in with her small class any better than she fit into town now.

  Gravel crunched as she turned into her parents’ driveway. When she turned off the engine, the sudden silence felt strangely loud.

  Reluctant to leave the sanctuary of her rental car, she stared through the windshield toward the house. Like the town, her childhood home was almost exactly the same as Leo remembered. Despite the money she had sent her parents over the years, they hadn’t added to their two-story house. It was only after a few minutes of silent staring that she detected some changes: The weathered windowsill on the dormer window jutting out from the roof had been replaced; the house had gotten a new paint job, and the trees shading the front lawn had grown taller.

  She took a deep breath, as if about to go underwater, and opened the driver’s side door. The July heat slapped her in the face, but she couldn’t hide out in the air-conditioned car for the rest of the day, so she braced herself and climbed out. The sound of the car door slamming shut was like a rifle crack, making her flinch.

  Leo opened the trunk and lifted out her suitcase and her battered guitar case.

  The porch swing creaked in the breeze as she walked up the path toward the house. The lawn she had mowed every Saturday throughout her teenage years was neatly trimmed, and she wondered who was taking care of it now.

  On the porch, she set down the suitcase but kept gripping the guitar case. She needed its familiar weight to calm her down. Ringing the doorbell felt strange, but even if she still had a key, she couldn’t imagine just walking in, especially since she had no idea what would greet her inside.

  Bleak mental images of her father being attached to beeping machines assaulted her, and she shoved them aside. If he were that bad off, the doctors wouldn’t have released him from the hospital.

  Her father had never been sick. In his forty-year career as a music professor and concert violinist, he had never missed a single day of work or a Sunday playing the organ at church. Mind over matter; that was what he always said.

  Whatever had happened, he would make a full recovery. Before she knew it, he would drive her crazy with his opinions on her songs and popular music in general, his disparaging glances at her guitar calluses that would mess up her violin playing, and his none-too-subtle nudges for her to go out with one of the Wilson boys, no matter how often she told him she was a lesbian.

  With a hand raised toward the doorbell, she hesitated. Come on. You’ve sung in the biggest arenas in the country—you can do this. Her heart beat a crazy staccato as she rang the bell. Her knuckles on the handle of the guitar case turned white while she waited for
her mother to answer.

  Footfalls approached, and the door swung open, but the woman standing before her wasn’t her mother. A stranger in her late twenties stared back at her.

  Her nerves frazzled, Leo said the first thing that came to mind. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m Holly.” At Leo’s blank stare, she added, “Holly Drummond.”

  The name sounded familiar. “Drummond? Wait, you’re Zack’s baby sister, aren’t you?”

  Holly grimaced. “He likes to tell people that, but I prefer the term younger sister.”

  Yeah, she definitely wasn’t a baby anymore. Leo remembered her as a skinny, awkward teenager. Now she was all grown up, with generous, feminine curves. Her faded T-shirt only hinted at full breasts, though, not flaunting them as the women in Leo’s world did. Over the years, Holly’s carrot-red hair had darkened to a rich auburn, which framed her pretty face in a soft pixie cut and formed a striking contrast to her pale skin.

  Leo was used to people looking her up and down, but Holly’s vibrant blue eyes never moved from her face. Definitely not a lesbian or bi or pan, she concluded.

  Instead of welcoming her home, Holly hovered in the doorway like a pit bull guarding a bone.

  Leo felt like an idiot as she stood on the porch, clutching her guitar case. Who the heck had appointed Holly guardian of the house? She hadn’t even been aware that Holly and her mother knew each other. But then again, everyone in Fair Oaks knew everyone else.

  “Um, may I?” She gestured at the house behind Holly.

  “Oh, sorry. Of course.” Holly shuffled backward, making room for her to enter.

  An avalanche of memories hailed down on Leo as she picked up her suitcase and stepped inside. The house smelled of mouthwatering pie and her mother’s lavender perfume. Classical music drifted through the main floor. After a moment, she recognized it as Pachelbel’s “Canon in D,” one of her father’s favorite pieces.

  “Your mother is in the kitchen,” Holly said.

  Leo set down her suitcase, propped the guitar case against the stairway curving up to the second floor, and moved past Holly, glancing back to see if she would follow. Maybe having someone else there would make the reunion with her mother less awkward.