The Darling Songbirds

by Rachael Herron

  ‘So. Here goes. This is called “The Lowdown on Life”.’

  A rumble of appreciation ran through the group. It had always been one of their most beloved songs. Adele hadn’t played it since the last full show. She strummed the opening chords, and something wobbled in her heart.

  She sang the first verse, soft and slow. All she could see was Dorene of the Loins nodding her head, mouthing the words before Adele even sang them, so she closed her eyes. What she saw then was harder. Their last full show had been in Nashville, at the Grand Ole Opry. Dad had still been alive. Uncle Hugh had flown out to be there. Adele had stood proudly between Molly and Lana, and her heart had been so big, her hopes so bright, her belief so damn strong.

  Funny how things changed.

  The chorus had always been hers for this song, so it wasn’t like she needed her sisters’ harmonies on it to carry the song. But Lord, how empty it sounded without them. She hadn’t predicted it. Her throat tightened, and her fingers missed the chord change, slipping for a second. She tried the next line, and – unforgivably – forgot the words.

  She forgot the words.

  She couldn’t remember the song that had been a number one hit on the country charts, the song she must have sung a million times. It was one of their father’s favourites. She’d written it, for Godsakes. How did you forget a song you wrote, a song you believed in?

  Adele didn’t want to open her eyes, didn’t want to see tension on the faces in front of her. The worst part of forgetting anything onstage was the moment you looked out and realised that everyone was pulling for you, hoping you didn’t fail.

  She tried the chord progression again. Maybe if she snuck up on it, the words would come to her.

  She felt something behind her, a movement of air. Then, appearing through the darkness was Nate, his guitar in his hands. He played the chord run perfectly, and started singing the harmony to the verse, Molly’s usual part. As soon as he sang the first word, the entire verse came back to her.

  The lowdown is the slowdown, it’s the time of your life

  Where your loved ones are your close ones, and there’s not any strife …

  Their voices wrapped around each other like stripes on a barber pole. They wound and blended and shifted and then came back to each other, both of them better by virtue of being together. His voice held a beautiful middle tone, warm and round. His harmony made the hairs on Adele’s arms stand up to hear him next to her, and she fought a shiver, although she couldn’t tell if that was from his voice or the way he was looking at her.

  Because Nate didn’t take his gaze from hers. He sang into her eyes, holding the guitar like it weighed nothing, his mouth in a sexy half-smile.

  It wasn’t like Adele hadn’t sung with hot men before. Toby Keith. Once the very young Dierks Bentley had laid a surprise kiss on her at the end of a show, a kiss so hot it had made the cover of the next Country Singing People magazine.

  It was an act. It was always an act.

  Something about the way Nate was looking at her didn’t feel like an act. It felt real, like he was singing the words right to her.

  The lowdown is the slowdown, it’s the time of your life.

  Like he’d written them himself.

  When their voices fell to silence, the last chords from their guitars stilling into quiet, there was a brief pause. Then applause rose, louder than should have been possible from such a small crowd.

  Adele laughed. Wonderful. Making music with someone like him. God, how good it felt.

  Nate, though, just smiled briefly, and lifted his guitar from around his neck.

  Her hand went out quickly, and she touched his arm. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It was nothin’.’ Then he walked back towards the bar as if it had been exactly that.

  Nothing.

  But it hadn’t been. It had been something. Adele watched him walk away, watched the way he threw a tight smile at a woman who asked him for a refill of ice-water.

  What that something was, Adele had no idea, but she wasn’t leaving Darling Bay until she found out.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Adele woke early and stretched her toes to the end of the bed. She’d kicked off the sheets sometime during the warm night, and the morning air coming through the screen was cool on her limbs. The window that looked out on the narrow porch and over the roof of the saloon stood open, and from the bed she could see part of the old rose garden that was in front of room one.

  Adele’s mother had planted those roses. It was so long ago, and Adele had been so young that the memory fragment felt more like a dream, a lovely one that she’d been trying a long time to recapture. Her mother, taking the car to the nursery on Dixon Street. Adele, clinging to her hand, Molly holding the side of the baby carriage little Lana was in. Just the girls on that shopping trip. Adele remembered her mother asking what colour she liked better, yellow or red. She’d said yellow (of course yellow, who didn’t love yellow best?) and her mother had seated them in the back seat with three small rosebushes, a tight, prickly fit. Those bushes were the first to go in, and they were still out there, overgrown and top heavy – much too tall – but blooming, even though the woman who was responsible for them was long, long gone.

  A colder breeze came in through the screen, right off the water, and Adele pulled the sheet over her knees.

  She’d been a mama’s girl, that was for sure. Molly and Lana had both been more daddy’s pets, but Adele had been born devoted to her pretty singing mother. She had thought no woman on the TV came close to being as beautiful as Katie Darling. And no matter who was singing on the radio or on the record player, no one sang prettier than Adele’s mother, either.

  Katie Darling had been meant to be a star. Everyone knew that. Katie and Adele’s father, Tommy, had met in Nashville, both of them working at the same rough-edged bar. Katie was a cocktail waitress, and Tommy did the sound for the little acts that came through town, hoping to be bigger. He heard her sing one night, and that was all it took. ‘She was a little bird, singing like its heart was going to bust right open.’ He’d asked her on a date, and she’d said no. When he asked why, she said, Because I’m going to be a star.

  You don’t think I’m good-looking?

  You’re handsome, but I don’t have time for a boyfriend right now.

  Tommy had said, quick as a lightning strike, Do you have time for a husband who could double as your manager? Katie had laughed at him, but he’d stood there, waiting for her to decide. Remembering it, she’d said, ‘That’s when I knew I couldn’t let him go. The way he just stuck there, not cracking a smile, totally serious. I knew he actually wanted to marry me. To be my manager. He wanted to be there when I made it big. How was I supposed to not fall in love with him?’

  They married. Tommy, full of belief in his new bride, sold his half of the Golden Spike to his brother Hugh in order to put Katie on the road, where she finally got noticed by an indie Nashville label who thought they could make her their star of the year.

  Katie, though, got pregnant before she got famous. She couldn’t stop throwing up and, five months into the contract, she had to go on bed rest. When she told the label, they dropped her. ‘It didn’t matter, though – having my sweet Adele in my arms was better than cutting any record ever could have been.’ That had been her mother’s line, always. Motherhood was what made her a star, Katie Darling said. Having her little songbirds around her, all of them chirping with her.

  It was Adele’s earliest memory: all five of them sitting around a Christmas tree in the living room, Daddy with a guitar, Mama singing ‘O, Come All Ye Faithful’ like her heart would break. Adele sang along, mixing up the words as she went, Molly lisping as best she could, Lana still too young to speak but bouncing her legs in time.

  Adele had started crying when the song was over – she remembered the tightness in her throat and the way her mother had bundled her into her lap. ‘What’s wrong, baby bird?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Adele had said. ‘Th
e song made me so happy. Why am I crying, if I’m happy?’

  ‘Ah, that,’ said her mother, squeezing her arms around her, holding her in a tight ball in her lap. ‘That just happens. Sometimes our emotions get all mixed up, don’t they? Tears always help. You’ll smile soon, my little bluebird of happiness.’

  ‘Why is it called that?’ Adele asked her mother one morning after she’d made her mother laugh.

  ‘Because it never stops being happy. And you, my birdie, have the eyes to match that bluebird. Sing to me, why don’t you?’

  So the toddler Adele would sing tuneless songs about birds and worms and sun and leaves, and Katie would smile, and for long minutes at a time, Adele would feel the warmth of making her mother happy. She knew, of course, that it wouldn’t last. Her mother always sank back into darkened sadness (the blues, her father said, your mama has the blues again, but that didn’t make sense, since the bluebird was blue and that meant happy – why couldn’t grown-ups get these kinds of things straight?).

  But for those few minutes while Adele was singing silly songs, Katie’s eyes would dance, and her whole being seemed lighter. Adele would make the song sillier – peanut butter and lightning bugs and a tree that sang like Daddy’s guitar – and Mama would clap and laugh.

  ‘You fix me, birdie.’

  It was what Adele was best at, even if it never quite lasted. The depression always came back, sending their mother to a dark bedroom and long days of heavy sleep. Molly could make their mother laugh, and Lana could make their mother spitting mad, another way of bringing her out of the dark. The three of them singing together made something like hope spark in their mother’s eyes, even from behind the blankets.

  But Adele was the one who could make the light come back into their mother. For Adele, her mother would sometimes dance, swaying in the window, the prettiest smile in the whole world on her face. You fix me.

  Adele could fix Mama, and if she could do that, she could fix just about anything (after all, it was her conception that had broken their mother, knocking Katie off her trajectory to stardom). Adele owed her. She just had to try hard enough.

  The breeze made the curtain flap loudly, and Adele jumped, jerked out of the memory and back into the hotel bed. Emotions. That’s all they were.

  Were they what had made her feel like crying last night while onstage? She’d thought it was because her sisters weren’t with her, because she had sung her song all by herself, not the right way at all. But she’d still felt the tightness in her throat even when Nate had started singing with her. Happy tears, caught in her chest like congestion from a cold.

  Her phone rang.

  ‘And?’ said Molly, without any intro, as if they’d been speaking just seconds before.

  ‘And what?’

  ‘The open mike! Come on, I’ve only got like ten minutes before the next shuffleboard competition ends and I get an influx of people who want to know how many calories are in the pomegranate margaritas.’

  ‘Do they really do that? Play shuffleboard? Like on The Love Boat?’

  ‘Yeah. Except on The Love Boat, people were attractive, right?’

  ‘In a late seventies kind of caftan way, sure.’

  ‘This boat is full of people who have spent all their considerable assets purchasing food that isn’t working well for their health.’

  ‘I don’t even know why they have a dietician on the boat. Isn’t everyone on board just there for the lobster and free cake?’

  ‘And the alcohol. Don’t forget the booze. I’m on the boat because they can give me a tiny office and then advertise that I’m there. I make the boat healthier just by being on board. I don’t have to do anything.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Adele, rolling onto her back.

  ‘So, how did it go? Did you revitalise the entire community? Please tell me the whole town was there. That’s what I’m imagining. I’m seeing a line down the block, and people jumping up and down at the big window in the front, trying to look over the stage to see inside.’

  ‘Oh, it was exactly like that.’ If by that she meant exactly the opposite.

  ‘Really?’ A horn’s blast sounded over the cell phone.

  ‘What was that? Are you leaving port?’

  ‘Just getting in. Dude loves to hit that damn horn every chance he gets.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I have no idea. I think it’s some place with rum, because that’s what the stairways smell like after the puke gets cleaned up by the service staff. Now tell me about last night!’

  ‘There were about twenty people there.’

  ‘Oh, crap.’

  ‘And most of them were over the age of ninety.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  Adele flexed her toes and then pointed them again. ‘Would I kid about this? The senior citizens, for the most part, weren’t drinking. There were a few cowboys from a local ranch, and they drank, but they weren’t there for the open mike – they would have been there anyway. Same with a few waitresses from Caprese.’

  ‘So it was a bust.’

  If you could call singing with a man whose counterpoint voice tangled with hers like her legs were tangled in the sheets, then yeah, it was. ‘I sang.’

  ‘You did? I thought you said you weren’t going to.’

  ‘They made me. I did “The Lowdown on Life”. And the bartender sang with me.’

  ‘The hot one?’

  Adele looked out the window to make sure Nate wasn’t in the garden. ‘I never said he was hot.’

  ‘You didn’t say he wasn’t, remember?’

  ‘I missed you two last night so much it hurt.’

  Silence filled the space between them, a white static buzz. Then Molly’s voice scrambled over the line like sandalled feet on tide pools. ‘Anyway, I should go. I have a mother–daughter combo that if I don’t separate, they’re going to pull the whole boat down around our ears, and I don’t feel like drowning today –’

  ‘I’m sorry, Molly. I shouldn’t have said that. Don’t go. Hey, what else do you think I could do? To get people into the saloon?’

  Her sister already sounded distracted, halfway out of the conversation. ‘No, leave that there, I’ll be off in a minute. Sorry.’ The phone made a shifting sound. ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘How do I make the saloon a place people want to go to?’

  ‘Hey, love you. Talk soon?’ Molly clicked off.

  Adele lay on the bed for another minute or two, staring out the window at the roses their mother had planted. The ones their mother had never seen bloom.

  Nate. She had to find Nate and do something. There were approximately one million things to be done on the property, and the obvious first place to start was Hugh’s apartment over the saloon. She could give Nate his room back and figure out what to do next.

  An image of him flashed into her mind, Nate standing next to her on the small stage, his body turned to hers. That half-smile that had played at his mouth – oh, those lips. They were as wide and strong-looking as the rest of him. For three seconds (and three seconds only – she timed herself strictly because she couldn’t take much more than that) she closed her eyes and imagined kissing him. The feel of those lips on hers. The heat of his hand on her cheek. The strength of his arm pulling her tight against his body … and her three seconds were up and then some.

  Adele blinked and threw herself off the bed towards the shower. Maybe she’d make it a cold one. She wasn’t sure if that actually worked but it was worth a try.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The drainpipe for the bar’s dishwasher was clogged. Again. For the hundredth time, it felt like. There were a lot of unpleasant tasks at the saloon, and most of them Nate did with patience. He loved the place as though it were a person. And no one was perfect. He had no problem accepting that. He thought about his mother. He’d loved her completely, and he would have done anything in the whole world for her. That didn’t change the fact that she’d been a pretty shitty mom, overall.


  You just kept working with what you had.

  Like the damn dishwasher. It was old enough that it was practically impossible to get any parts that fit it anymore. The Y-branch tailpiece kept clogging because he invariably missed a cherry or a piece of a lime when he threw glasses into it – the darkness of the saloon when it was busy guaranteed that. And that in turn guaranteed that he would spend part of a day every few months underneath the sink, up to his elbows in slime, swearing at a piece of machinery that hated him as much as he hated it.

  ‘Come on.’ The wrench slipped out of his hand and whacked him on the brow. Again. ‘Goddammit.’ He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. His other arm was so far into the machine it reminded him of the time he’d seen Travis Dorman pull a stuck calf out of a straining cow. The difference was that the rancher got a cute little baby cow out of the deal. The only thing Nate was going to get was a black clog that would make him swallow hard when it slopped out.

  ‘Whatcha doing?’

  The too-sweet, too-chirpy voice could only belong to Adele. Nate tried to yank his arm out so he could sit up but he misjudged the angle and yanked too soon. Pain sliced up the back of his hand.

  ‘Goddammit.’ He shoved himself sideways on the floor, slamming his legs left, doing his best to avoid kicking over the lower row of overstock bourbon.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Peachy.’ He stood, holding up his arm, now dripping blood and grease trap slime to his elbow.

  ‘Oh, Reba!’

  Nate twisted towards the sink and hit the faucet before he remembered he’d shut off the water main to the building. ‘Fuck.’ The wound was long, from the back of his wrist halfway to his elbow. He must have hit it on the check valve.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Does it matter?’ He was an idiot – that’s what happened. He’d done nothing but try to fix the machine he had to fix every damn month of his damn life. He should be able to do it in his sleep. Instead, he was going to get the black plague or something worse from the germs he’d just injected into his bloodstream.