Page 141 of Perfect Pitch

“Or better yet, we’ll go visit him. We’ll go see Clef and all the other horses. Would you like that?” Mama crouches next to me.

I nod frantically. “I love Gramps.”

Mama stood with me in her arms. Her breath rushed out against my ear. “I know you do, baby.”

I finish telling Mitch about the memory. “My formative years were wrapped in love and so much of that love came from the Kensington Farm. Now, my thoughts are all muddled.”

“I’ll do anything to help,” he swears.

Then a thought comes to mind. “Do you think you could be spared?”

“From what?”

“From watching my father’s back?”

Mitch lifts his wrist to his lips and speaks into it. After a pause, he lifts his fingers to his ear and slides out his earpiece. “I’m yours for the afternoon. What are you thinking?”

I give his spit and shine appearance a once-over. “First, you’re going to need to change.”

His brow quirks. “Into?”

“Did you pack anything casual?”

“I’m certain I can scrounge up jeans.”

“That will work. Meet me outside in twenty.” Without another word, I leave Mitch on the lanai and race upstairs to change myself. Where I’m going, I need to be fully kitted.

* * *

“Each time I pull down this driveway, I’m assaulted with memories,” I tell him as we drive alongside the fence line toward my grandfather’s home. My home until I was seven years old.

We pull into the semi-circle and Mitch parks. “What do you want to do while we’re here?”

I slide out of the car without a word. Mitch shuts off the ignition and joins me as I stare at the home generations of Kensingtons lived in. In the distance, I can hear horses whinny and neigh. There’s a barking dog somewhere.

“I don’t know,” I admit.

“You don’t have to have all the answers at once, Beats.”

“I feel like nothing and yet everything has changed. I always assumed this house would stand for the things I’d eventually want in life.”

“What’s that?”

“Love, a family.” An expectation hangs on the wind that’s carried away by the swoop of December air.

“I notice you don’t say marriage.”

She frowns. “Maybe because I never knew Mama to be happy?”

“Are either of your uncles married?”

“Uncle Jesse was, once. Uncle E, never.”

“Well, there goes my belief you were going to become my aunt,” he teases me.

My thinking’s been so crowded with memories of Kensingtons, it takes me a second to remember how he teased me of being Charlie’s next wife. I whack him in the chest. “Oh, you”

“At least I got you to smile,” he murmurs as he pulls me close to his chest.

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