Page 35 of Sounds Like Love

In my head, Sasha said,“Oh this is new, I hear you … meddling?”

I’m not meddling.

“You are very much meddling.”

Finally, Gigi said, tilting her head in thought, “Remember when we were kids, and we’d dress up in your mom’s clothes from the eighties and paint our nails black and pretend we were on some sort of world tour? Traveling everywhere, seeing the world, singing in a band—remember?”

“Sure, and then Mitch got so jealous that he begged us to take him on our world tour.”

She grinned at the memory. “I miss those kids sometimes.”

“Well, it’s a good thing they’re all still friends,” I replied. “Which is a miracle since two of them are siblings and two of them are dating—not the same two, obviously.”

She snorted a laugh. “I think our appetizers are coming out,” she added, nudging her chin behind me, and then after that the main course, and by the time the waiter surprised Gigi with a lemon pie and a note—It’s not that sweet xx Iwan—it was almost impossible to bring the engagement back up again.

Chapter153AM (I Must Be Lonely)

THE REVELRY NEVERhad concerts on Wednesdays.

But that rarely meant that it wasclosed. Growing up, Wednesdays were peppered with bingo tournaments and town halls and high school decathlon trials, but I hadn’t heard about anything scheduled for tonight—usually my parents had a calendar hanging in the box office, but they must have forgotten to put one up this year with everything happening with Mom—so I felt safe enough to pull out the Steinway piano and sit down on the stage with it.

The piano had been a part of my earliest memories of the Revelry. It was scratched and scuffed from years of hard love, the keys a little yellowed with time, but it was the only one like it in the world. Sometimes growing up, I caught Mom at this piano, finding the notes like they were her old friends. Music transformed my mother every time she played—all the other times, she was just Wynona Lark, just my mom, just the half owner of an old and storied music venue in a no-name town on the Outer Banks. But when there wasmusic? Her spine straightened,her shoulders relaxed, and in those moments, she was someone else—someone I barely recognized. Her messy hair glamorous, the gap between her front teeth iconic, her chipped nails dramatic, her voice the color of autumn. She was someone new, someone different, a glimmer of the life she would have lived, if she had stayed with the Boulevard.

And I loved that glimpse of her. I always had. In the rain at the festival, and here at the piano.

That was the part of her that I wanted to be.

I wanted to know why some notes sang while others screamed, why some melodies made you weep, why choruses made you fall in love.

Of course, later I learned that none of it was magic or mysticism—it was theory, and craft, and luck.

I placed my fingers on the keys, greeting them after years away, and played a G chord. Then I moved down to D, then E major, then C. One of the most popular chord progressions in Western music, but it was my favorite anyway. It felt like a gateway, and with it I could spirit myself away to any number of songs. They were all at my fingertips.

Figuring out songs felt a lot like painting with only cool colors, throwing in splashes of yellows and oranges to surprise.

“When I Come Around” by Green Day morphed into “Don’t Stop Believin’” by Journey, bleeding into “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz, into “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver, into Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well,” into the Beatles’ “Let It Be,” into “Wherever” by Roman Fell and the Boulevard, and finally “If You Stayed,” and by then I was smiling so hard because there were so many songs that were so different and so similar, and while it was theory and craft and luck—

It was magic, too.

I laughed at myself, not remembering the last time I’d played just to play. I … didn’t feel so empty.

There was a soft warmth in the back of my head, and then—

“It’s rude to eavesdrop,” I said in greeting, tongue in cheek.

“I was going to tell you I was here,”Sasha insisted.“I just didn’t want to interrupt.”

“Well, that’s very nice of you, then.”

“I heard humming, and I realized it was you.”

Well,thatwas mortifying. “Oh. I—I was just sitting down at the piano.”

That seemed to intrigue him.“What’re you playing?”

I danced my fingers across the keys, playing a few chords. “Depends on my mood, I guess.”

“Then what are you feeling right now?”

---