by Hope Ramsay
“That’s two weeks from now.”
“I know. And I checked with Annie Robinson and she’s already booked for that night, so we have to find another caterer. But what do you think about the boat? I think it’s perfect. And Granny told me that you and Jim had your first date on that yacht, so it’s romantic.”
So the bad news had nothing to do with Ella leaving, thank goodness. Brenda’s smile came easy then. “Yes, Jim and I had a first date, of sorts. He pressured me into joining him on the yacht for the Festival of Lights boat parade at Christmastime. To this day, Jim insists that he cured me of my Christmas-itis on that cruise.”
“Christmas-itis?”
“Don’t ask. Jim turns into Santa’s clone at Christmastime, as you well know. He didn’t think I was sufficiently joyful, and he set about to correct that.”
“Good for him. So you have nice memories of the boat?”
“Well, if you must know, Jim kissed me for the first time during the Christmas cruise. Jim and I were checking out the stateroom, and Jude had put some mistletoe on the door of the captain’s quarters. Jim caught me unawares.”
“You mean that big stateroom at the end of the hall?” Ella asked.
Brenda nodded. “Yup. That one. I have to say the kiss was more than a peck on the cheek.”
“Mom, TMI,” Ella said, her face going bright red.
Brenda studied her daughter’s blush. Ella usually wasn’t that squeamish about sex talk. What was up with her?
Just then, the waitress came by, and they both ordered shrimp Caesar salads and unsweetened iced tea, which was a good indication that both of them had spent much of their lives living north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
“So, there is one other thing,” Ella said once the waitress left.
Brenda’s heart rocked in her chest. “What?” she asked a little too quickly.
“Well, I was wondering if you wanted to work on something to play for the guests.”
Brenda straightened in her chair. Who was this child? In the months since she’d been home, Ella hadn’t once suggested that they play a duet. But suddenly the clouds she’d imagined on this beautiful day evaporated into nothing.
“What did you have in mind?” she asked, trying not to sound too enthusiastic.
“I was thinking about Mozart’s ‘Duo for Two Violins.’ The allegro number 5. We used to play that a long time ago.”
The familiar pressure in Brenda’s chest eased, and she floated entirely free of her worries. Once, before Ella turned fifteen, they had bonded over the notes on the page. But she’d pushed too hard and driven Ella away. This was her time to get her daughter back.
“I think it would be fun to play a duet,” she said. The words were an understatement.
“Great. We’ll have to get together a few times to practice.” Ella watched the sails in the harbor for a long moment, her gaze sorrowful or something.
A frisson of worry replaced the floaty feeling. “What’s the matter, honey? Something bothering you?”
Ella shook her head, maybe a little too quickly. “No, I’m fine. Really.”
“Are you sure you’ve told me everything?” Brenda asked.
Ella gave her a long stare, hesitating as if she wanted to say something toxic. But the look faded quickly. “We’re screwed if it rains on the day of the party,” she said with a little smile.
“Do we have a rain-check plan?”
She shook her head. “No. Jude said we could still have the party on the boat, but it would have to be below decks and the boat won’t leave the pier. So I think we should alert the altar guild. All those church ladies need to put your engagement party date on their prayer list.”
Brenda laughed in spite of her worries. “I’ll make sure your grandmother knows.”
“That’s all it’ll take, I’m sure.”
Brenda couldn’t shake the feeling that the rain plan wasn’t the reason her daughter seemed tired and distracted this afternoon. She took a wild guess at the problem. “So, is Dylan okay with this plan? He seems so—”
“What?” Ella almost jumped down her throat.
Aha! Eureka. The problem was Dylan. Brenda was not surprised.
She leaned forward and patted Ella’s hand where it rested on the table. “I’m sorry you’ve had to put up with him. I think it was a huge mistake for me to suggest that you and he plan this party together. I thought…Well, it’s not important.”
“He’s not so bad,” Ella said without making eye contact.
The waitress interrupted the conversation, delivering their salads. Brenda used the break to collect her thoughts. She needed to make Ella understand that she would always come first, no matter what.
When the waitress left, Brenda captured her daughter’s gaze. “Honey, I want to say something important to you. Something I think you need to hear.” Brenda paused and was encouraged when Ella didn’t roll her eyes or look away.
“You know how much I want us all to become one big, happy family, but you know what? That doesn’t mean you have to let Dylan run roughshod over you. I’d rather you just be yourself, okay? And let’s face it, Dylan is not his father. He’s not easy to like.”
“You think?”
What was it in Ella’s tone? Not the usual sarcasm. Something was off.
“I want to apologize,” Brenda continued. “I’ve been guilty of pushing you in directions you never wanted to go. And I’m starting to feel as if my desire to see us all become one happy family is another example. So I’m going to stop now, okay? If you don’t want to spend time with Dylan, that’s fine. I don’t ever want Dylan to be a reason you can’t call Magnolia Harbor your home.”
* * *
Wow. There was so much to unpack in what Mom had just said.
First, was the basic question of home. Was Magnolia Harbor Ella’s home? Hardly. Mom had grown up here, and so had Granny. Dylan too. She’d visited as a child, and she was merely visiting now, when you got right down to it.
There would always be a room at Cloud Nine with her name on it, but Mom’s beach house wasn’t home either. She didn’t have a place of her own. Not now. Not ever, really.
And then there was Dylan. Oh, the irony. Dylan might be a reason to come visiting. He might be a reason to stay put. But she didn’t know for certain either way. And she couldn’t even talk to Mom about her confusion.
It was far too early to know where this thing was going, but she could see herself falling hard for Doctor Delicious. Would that be good for Mom and Jim? She didn’t know the answer to that either.
And what happened if Mom and Jim didn’t work out? Maybe that was asking for trouble, but she couldn’t help it. If Mom and Jim broke up, while she and Dylan got together, there would be misery for everyone.
She wasn’t stupid about Dylan either. What if he broke her heart? She’d have to move away, and that would hurt Mom.
The cause and effect rippled across her brain like waves on a still pond. This was complicated and fraught. A wise woman would stop now. But she knew damn well that if Dylan called her tonight, she’d gladly go spend time with him.
She needed to change the subject, so she drew Mom into a conversation about the Mozart piece and party details while her guilty conscience twinged.
An hour later, they headed toward the restaurant’s front entrance linked arm in arm, as if they’d always known harmony in their lives. But all of that came to an abrupt end when Mom stopped in her tracks and said, “Oh no,” in a voice more like a gasp than a whisper.
“What? Are you okay?” Ella turned to face her mother, suddenly concerned.
“I’m fine. But maybe you aren’t going to be when you turn around.”
Ella turned and scanned her surroundings, doing the classic double take when her gaze fixed on the poster in the restaurant’s vestibule. An expletive escaped her mouth, and Mom didn’t even seem to notice.
The flyer listed the bands that had been booked to play Rafferty’s patio during the month of April. Urban
Armadillo was listed as the patio entertainment for Saturday, May 1—a week after the engagement party.
A buzz of unexpected fury jangled in the back of Ella’s mind. For thirteen years, Cody had resisted touring the band anywhere east of the Mississippi. Now, suddenly, he’d changed his mind? This booking was not serendipity. Cody was coming for her.
“Maybe it’s not the same band,” Mom said.
Ella rolled her eyes in Mom’s direction. “You don’t believe that for a New York minute. What other band would be dumb enough to pick a name like that?”
“You’ll stay away from him, won’t you?” The pleading tone in Mom’s voice was almost heartbreaking.
“Mom, I promise that I won’t seek him out. But we both know why he’s brought Urban Armadillo here. He thinks he can sweet-talk me into joining him on the road.”
“Can he?”
“No. I don’t want to go back to Urban Armadillo.”
“But what about Cody?”
“Him either. I mean it, Mom. Relax. Cody is not a problem.” But Dylan might be. And she would have to find a band sooner or later because she couldn’t continue working part time at Howland House. Especially now. Last night, she’d all but spent the night with Dylan. She’d nearly been late to work. That couldn’t go on without Ashley noticing something.
She felt as if she were walking on a tightrope with a big arc light blinding her. The future was impossible to see, and any misstep would end with her falling hard.
They walked back to the yarn shop together, where Mom gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. “I’ll call Granny, and we’ll schedule a time to get some invitations addressed and in the mail. We can practice the Mozart at the same time.”
“Okay. Dylan and I are supposed to check out catering companies over the next few days. You want to join us?”
Mom shook her head. “No. I think Dylan and I would probably disagree. Thank you for running interference with him. Are you sure you’re okay doing this?”
“I’m fine. I just don’t want to choose—”
“Surprise me, okay?”
“Right. But I promise that if it’s possible, we’re going to have a chocolate fountain.”
Mom laughed as she headed into the yarn shop, which made Ella feel good about herself. She didn’t want to blow Mom’s trust in her. Not only with the catering, but with the whole Dylan thing.
She headed up the street to the inn, a gnawing restlessness settling over her. She didn’t have anything to do this afternoon except obsess about the men in her life. Cody, who might show up unannounced at her front door, and Dylan, who’d made her body sing last night with the sweetest kind of music.
At moments like this, it was best to take out her violin and practice until she could clear her mind. Remembering Jackie’s request (or was it the ghost’s?), she took her violin out to the lawn and sat in the shade of the old oak tree and practiced a somewhat simplified version of the second movement of “Borodin’s String Quartet no. 2.”
She couldn’t do the piece justice. It required four voices. But it suited her mood. The movement, sometimes called “This Is My Beloved” because it had been turned into a song in the musical Kismet, was hopelessly romantic. In any event, Ashley’s guests would probably recognize this classical piece because of the musical, and she wanted to perfect it before next Saturday’s tea.
She’d been working on the arrangement for about an hour when Jackie came racing across the lawn, his penny whistle clutched in his fist. She had to hand it to the kid; he’d been practicing like a champ. And even though all that practicing was driving his mother nuts, it had also improved his whistling skills.
Ella had already told Ashley that she should explore music lessons for the boy because Jackie, like so many children first exposed to music, had developed a burning desire to learn. It was a little ironic for Ella to suggest this, given the way Mom had pushed her into music. But music had always been a part of her, despite Mom’s ambitions.
In fact, music had always been the one thing she could depend on. It could lift her up when she was down. It could fill her world. It could carry her away. It could calm her down. Music had never demanded anything she wasn’t willing to give to it. Nor had it ever abandoned her or disappointed her.
“Hey,” the kid said, rushing up to where she sat in a folding chair she’d purloined from the stash Ashley used for weddings. “I heard you practicing. You wanna hear the ‘Sailor’s Hornpipe’?”
“Sure.”
Jackie put the whistle to his lips and slowly played the first musical theme of the famous sailor’s song without a single mistake, which was impressive because the song required him to use more than one octave—a difficult thing on a penny whistle. Ella clapped. “Well done, Jackie.”
“There’s more to the song though,” he said. “I listened to it on YouTube. And I tried to play faster, but the whistle squeaks, especially on that one really high note.”
“It’s okay. You’ll get faster the more you practice.”
“Will you teach me the rest of it?”
“Sure.” She spent the next hour teaching the second theme to the boy. He had a remarkable memory and a good ear, which made learning the song fun. He hadn’t yet been exposed to the drudgery of having to learn musical notation. That would come later.
“You want to play it together?” she asked.
“Only if you go real slow.”
The kid amused her. He was such a sweet boy. “I promise. But if you make a mistake, don’t stop. That’s the trick of performing. Musicians make mistakes all the time.” She only wished someone had told her that when she was eight or nine.
She tucked the violin under her chin, and they played the first and second variations all the way through. When they got near the end, she said, “Keep going.” The kid went back to the first theme and played it again. They played like that over and over again, Ella gradually increasing the speed. In the last round, she started playing harmony to his whistle, and the hornpipe came to life along with a little light in Jackie’s eyes.
When they finished, a couple of the inn’s guests who had been sitting out on the lawn turned and applauded Jackie. He took a sweeping bow. The kid was a natural-born performer.
“That was fun,” he said. He looked off into the distance for a moment, his gaze focused on something Ella couldn’t see. “The captain says I could play whistle on his ship anytime.”
The boy’s gaze returned to Ella.
“The ghost was talking to you?” she asked. She’d felt nothing—no cold air, no shiver down her back, not one paranormal experience. Ella had to admit that Jackie’s odd fixation on the inn’s imaginary ghost was unsettling.
“Yeah. He hangs around the tree most of the time. He’s pretty lonely and sad,” Jackie said.
“Really?”
“Well, yeah. Think about it. He died trying to come back to Rose. He was in a hurry and ignored the hurricane that sank his ship. He’s responsible for all those pirates drowning in the inlet. And then the one survivor, Henri St. Pierre, fell in love with his girlfriend. That had to suck.”
“Wait…his first mate fell in love with Rose?”
“Yeah. Kind of a shocker. They had a baby together.”
“No. How do you know that?”
“We found Rose’s diary last year, and some stuff buried in the backyard.”
“Oh. Wow. Wait, does that mean all the Howlands and St. Pierres can trace their ancestry back to Rose?”
He nodded. “Yeah, Mom and Reverend St. Pierre are like seventeenth cousins or something. It was all hundreds of years ago.”
“So at least Rose had a happy ending, then?”
“I’m afraid not,” the kid said on a long sigh. “You know, Henri was black, and Rose was white, and it was 1716 or something like that.”
Oh wow. The tale was like one of those tragic Irish ballads. But really the captain’s misery, if indeed there was a captain, was entirely self-made.
“Well, now that
I know the story, I’m not exactly sorry for the captain. He deserves his misery,” she said.
“You think?”
“Yeah. The guy should have married Rose instead of running off to gain a fortune by robbing people on the high seas.”
“But—”
“I mean it, Jackie. Captain Teal wasn’t a hero. He fell in love with Rose, and then he left her to raise a kid on her own.” Ella left out the part where the famous pirate talked Rose out of her virtue, although Jackie seemed to understand all the sordid details of the story. Nevertheless, some of her irritation at Cody Callaghan managed to infect her tone. Cody had never walked out on her, exactly, although he’d been unfaithful more times than she could count. And now he was coming to her like the famous Captain William Teal, only he was sailing across the country in his land yacht.
What was he going to do when he got here? Sweep her off her feet? Hand her some line? Or try to rehire her as his fiddler? Two of the three options were possible.
But she was like Rose Howland now. Someone else had come along to sweep her off her feet. Only problem was, he might not be exactly suitable.
* * *
Dylan showed up for work on Thursday bleary eyed. He’d gotten what he wanted last night because Ella had stayed until almost dawn. He’d driven her back to the inn at 5:00 a.m. so she would be ready for breakfast service.
Heaven help them if Ashley Scott figured out what was going on and blabbed her mouth. On the other hand, maybe it would be better to get in front of the crap storm by telling the truth. Dylan hated sneaking around.
The day was exceptionally busy for him, with office hours at the free clinic, which was always slightly overwhelmed with too many patients.
As he made it through the day, Ella was always on his mind. There, just below the surface. But Dylan was a realist. Ella would never settle here in Magnolia Harbor. She wasn’t the kind who settled down. She was a lot like the fireflies he used to catch on a summer evening in the backyard. Incandescent, but free. He could hold that light for an hour or so, but he’d learned quickly as a child that no one can trap a firefly forever. If he pinned her down, she’d lose her glow.