Sweet Forty-Two (28 page)

“Shoot.”

“Play for as long as you can. Don’t stop.”

I frowned slightly. “Why?”

She let out a sad chuckle. “Why is a raven like a writing desk?”

I actually did recognize that quote from
Alice in Wonderland
. But, why? “What?”

She put her hand on my forearm and looked at my mouth. Her eyebrow arched as if it were trying to pull her gaze toward mine, but failed. “Sometimes the question is as complicated as the answer.”

I settled myself on stage and looked into the moderately inhabited bar. The pit I had in my stomach had nothing on the look on her face as my bow and strings embraced, and wept as if separated by the war of emotions. The stubborn part of me wanted to stop playing right then and rush over to her and find out why she wiped under her eyes every few measures. Why she smiled through those tears. Moreover, why she requested the song in the first place.

The musician in me, though, ordered me to keep playing. To let her feel what she needed to feel. In time with the music. In the confines of the score. I couldn’t move my eyes from her. Not during that song, or the rest of the songs I played over the course of the night.

As promised by the nameless bartender, she would disappear for ten or fifteen minutes at a time through the night, returning looking a little more broken than she’d left. As far as I knew, her mother wasn’t at the facility, though I don’t know that she would have told me if she’d had to go back, given I was led to believe the woman was dead in the first place.

I got the feeling that I thought more of my relationship with Georgia than she did. I felt like she was erecting new walls as quickly as I broke through long standing ones. Maybe I wasn’t breaking through any at all. That seemed almost more likely as I watched her zip up her feelings and circle through the rest of her shift under my soundtrack.

At closing time, my fingers were sore, and my brain hurt from trying to figure out someone I thought I was getting to know. Georgia cashed out, cleaned up, and nodded to me when she was ready to leave. I followed her to the parking lot.

“Ready to go bake some hippie love?” While the words were light, her tone suggested she was psyching herself up for the night.

I shrugged. “We can wait for another day if you’re tired.”

Please don
’
t be tired. Please don
’
t be tired.

“No, I’m not tired.”

Thank you.

“Ok, then. See you at home.”

Her eyebrows pulled in a little. I immediately regretted calling it
home
, but what else was I supposed to say? I didn’t want her thinking I thought we, like, lived
together,
but, for God’s sake, we shared a roof. We gave each other tight smiles as we got into our cars and drove.

Home.

“Time’s up.” I whisked egg whites in a large stainless steel bowl, while Georgia sifted various flours that sounded like they should never go together.
Garbanzo. Sorghum.

“Huh?” She turned for the oven and back to me, looking confused.

“You need to tell me where you were tonight. You promised.”

She arched an eyebrow. “I never promised.”

“Well. You
said
.”

She softly bit the inside of her lip as she shook the last of the flours through the fine metal mesh.

“Something with your mom?” I encouraged.

Georgia took the bowl from me and poured the egg whites into her mixture. “She just got out of the hospital over the weekend. I was just checking in with her.”

I didn’t buy it for a second.

“Georgia...”

She smiled. “Look, Regan, there’s nothing grander here. I was quiet about it at work because no one knows about what’s going on with her. I can’t stand the taste of pity.”

“Why do you assume people will pity you?”

She looked startled. Her mouth stuttered open and closed a few times.

“Just because people care about what’s going on with you,” I continued, “doesn’t mean they pity you. I didn’t feel a single shred of pity from you when I read Rae’s note. I felt supported and cared for.”

Georgia sighed. Labored and through her cheeks, I watched her stubborn and self-mutilating resolve fade away.

“I’ve been thinking...” She cut herself off, grunting almost silently, like the words were too big to fit out of her throat.

“What?”

“I ... I think it would be good to open the bakery. Like ... for real.” She placed her palms on the cold steel workspace and looked at me with her indelible poker face.

My eyes widened. “Really? That’s fantastic, Georgia!”

“It’s not as easy as it seems. I know I’ve got the space here ready to go, but I need to get permits. That won’t be too hard, but, then ... I need customers.”

I playfully slapped the counter. “That will take less than a second. You’re a genius in here.”

A smile fluttered on her face for a split second before disappearing just as quickly. Like a hummingbird. “I need to spend a couple of weeks baking everything I know how to bake and delivering them to businesses. You know, like advertising. I need to get a spot at the farmer’s market, get business cards made ... I can’t think about leaving my job at the bar unless I’m making enough here. And, I can’t make enough here if people don’t know about it.”

Her hands were rolling around the air like she was listing an impossible number of obstacles. Excuses. But I stopped her.

“I’ll help you.”

Damn it if she didn’t work those facial muscles to prevent a full smile. “You will? I mean ... do you even have time?”

“I’ll make time. Look. I need something to do when I leave the studio, something so nonmusical I can forget what the violin is for a while.”

She smirked. “When you say violin ... and some other words ... you sound like you have an Irish accent. What the hell is that?”

I laughed, watching the way her eyes studied my mouth, as if the answer were written on my lips. “It’s kind of ... God, you caught me. I just like how it sounds. I’m not conscious of it all the time...”

She smacked me with a white dishtowel. “I knew it!”

I put my hands up. “To be fair, my grandparents have Irish accents as thick as fog.”

“Just your grandparents? Not CJ’s?” Georgia went back to her mixing.

“Other side of the family. My mom’s parents. I’m nearly one hundred percent Irish.” I pointed to the reddish and unruly hair on my head.

“So you just ... like it?”

“Well, I spent a lot of time with my mom’s parents when I was in high school. They lived closer to the boarding school than my parents did. They’re the reason I decided to teach in Ireland when I was done with college. Being a musician, my ears are always training me to match pitch, so when I’m around lots of thick accents I just kind of ... adopt them.”

“Ah,” she nodded, “so if we stuck you in Texas for a while—”

“My head would explode. I don’t ...
do
the south.”

She snorted, a sound so perfectly unguarded it made me laugh louder than I had in a long time. And it felt good. She didn’t know it, and I had a feeling I couldn’t tell her—at least not yet—but Georgia had the captivating ability to make me feel better. Not by forgetting anything, because everything was at the forefront of my mind. Rae. The loneliness. But Georgia had this way of making it bearable. I knew she wouldn’t try to throw loads of inspirational quotes at me, because she’d been there. The bottom of the barrel. She knew that those quotes were designed more for the talker than the listener. A tool to help people feel useful.

I had no idea why a guarded, spiky-skinned Georgia would ask me with help on something so personal as her bakery. Maybe those prickles were just origami spines, after all. It was clear that she trusted me, but what was clearer was that she didn’t want me to vocalize it. To make real the trust she so rarely doled out. I didn’t even want to call CJ about this. It felt like a perverted thought on its own. No, this would be just us.

I would take her up on her offer to help get this nameless bakery off the ground. I needed time. Around her. To see if a rewiring my insides was, in fact, what I was feeling, or if it was just the hopeless romantic in me.

She felt anything but hopeless, though, and that scared the hell out of me.

In my mind I pictured Georgia standing on the rock wall. Her face lifted to the sky and her palms forward in a peaceful second before she jumped.

I wanted to jump. I didn’t know how far down the bottom was, but as I poured cupcake batter into the twelve perfect circles of the tin, I found myself hoping Georgia would be waiting for me down there.

Our eyes met as she closed the oven door and set the timer.

“Are you feeling okay?” She didn’t make a move to put a comforting hand on my arm like Ember would have. Georgia knew her words were enough and didn’t ever try to suffocate me with more than the situation called for.

I put my hand over my mouth, a throat clearing effort to cover a pending sob with a laugh. “No. Not at all.” I shrugged and smiled.

And she did too.

So, Regan said he’d help me. I can’t say I was surprised by his reaction—it was the one I’d hoped for—but there was still an overexposure at his words. He really wanted to be here, with me. And I had no idea why. Or, really, why I
wanted
him to want to be here.

That’s a lie. I wanted him to want to be here. I needed him to want to be in the bakery. With me. After long nights and days of sitting by my sobbing mother’s side, I needed an escape. I needed to be able to make someone feel better. Customers with my food. Regan by helping me. He seemed to need to be needed.

Oh, the sobbing mother? That’s just a fun side effect of the ECT. I haven’t teased out if it’s a direct side effect, or if it’s residual from some of the other ones, but during the several hours following her release from her first two treatments, she cried. Just cried and sobbed, and sniffed, and cried some more. There were no words or acknowledgements of my presence. It was such a heavy sob I almost felt bad for not joining her.

I don’t know if she was having regrets about the procedure because she didn’t want to talk about it during the days in between appointments. Maybe she wept over memories she thought she lost, or hours or days in the vortex of
potential memory loss
.

Yeah, last week was a goddamned doozy. I was able to distract myself in the bakery with Regan, and I was back for more distraction tonight. We were doing a late-night session. Him because of some rearranging of the recording schedule, and me? Well, I told him I switched days off with Lissa. That wasn’t a lie. What I wasn’t doing was talking about the ECT. I wasn’t talking about it with my mother, and I certainly wasn’t talking about it right now with Regan. I needed to see him smile. I needed to get lost. Forget.

“I have to be honest with you, Georgia. I was afraid that after a few days of this, I would get bored, or something. I was thinking,
Okay what
’
s the big deal? There are muffins, breads, cupcakes, just different flavors. How exciting can that be?
” Regan rambled as he flipped through my recipe book.

“That’s ... honest of you.” I was trying to search his face for further information, to see if there was a
but
coming.

“But,” there it was, “what I realized is ... it’s just like music. There are only twelve notes on a musical scale. Period. That’s it. Sure there are octaves and other minutely measurable frequencies. But, the point is ... all the music you’ve ever heard is based on twelve notes. Twelve!” His eyes lit up as he held out his hands, like he was presenting me with this gift of
twelve
.

“Right ... twelve...” I smirked as he slid the book back to me. I thumbed through the pages to find my chocolate chip cookie recipe.

“People search for variety everywhere. With everything. In music and in here, in your bakery, we
make
variety. We are the masters of variety.” He seemed quite pleased with himself, leaning back against the painted cinderblock wall and folding his arms across this chest.

“It’s like colors,” he continued. Dear God, he continued. “Primary colors. Red. Blue. Yellow. Boom.”