Page 6 of Sweet Music
“Oh, I’ll wait until you’re done,” he said.
“I’m not really hungry for this,” she said,not wanting to miss her window with him. “I’ll clean up while you grab your guitar.”
“Really?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, happy at the excitement written all over his face.
“Okay,” he said, already out of his seat and darting off to the living room.
Normally, Cody helped out with dinner cleanup. He had done it without being asked, not exactly cheerfully, but with an air of definite determination, ever since the day she moved him in.
She wasn’t sure if he had been on clean-up duty at home, or if it was something he had promised his mother he would help out with.
I guess we both made her some deathbed promises we might be wanting to rethink by now…
The sound of strumming in the living room stopped those negative thoughts and had her hurrying out to see what he had to show her.
Bella’s only real experience with children was the crew at the library, which tended to be on the younger side compared to her nephew. It was such a blessing that Cody loved music. Their shared obsession had been a much-needed bridge between them when he first came to her.
Bella had visited Harper and Cody in Burlington as he was growing up, of course. But as he got older, it was usually just on special occasions, with a clear beginning and end point to the visit. None of them had ever thought she would one day be fulfilling her godmother duties. Of course she’d loved him since the day he was born, but therelationship they’d had before he came to live here had been very different from the one they were carefully building now.
When she stepped into the living room, he was sitting on the wooden chair opposite the sofa, so she curled up on the sofa to watch.
Moments like this, he looked so much like his father. It was in his posture, the tilt of his head, the way his hand curved around the neck of the guitar, with a gentle possessiveness. She wondered how no one else saw what she could see so clearly.
Though today in the library someone did see something in him…
She put it out of her mind, and instead listened as the scales and chords of tuning melted right into the rhythmic strumming of an upbeat rockabilly tune she didn’t recognize.
Cody’s foot was tapping and his head was nodding as his fingers danced on the strings with all the expression he hid from his face. Bella couldn’t help smiling and nodding along.
When he started singing, her mouth dropped open.
“Down a Vermont road, past the maple trees, lived a boy who was surprised by the early freeze,”Cody sang.
He might be a dead ringer for his dad when he played, but Cody had a voice that was all his own. Bella listened, amazed.
“I got the city boy blues, I got the city boy blues,”he sang on.“No lights, no trains, nothing to do. I got the city boy, city boy, city boy blues.”
By the time he got to the chorus again, shesang along with him, taking a risk and hoping that it wouldn’t make him uncomfortable.
But his eyes lit up and he nodded to her, finishing the song with a sweet little guitar riff and a final strum.
Bella jumped to her feet and applauded him.
Cody laughed and pretended to wave to the crowd.
It occurred to her that maybe the song wasn’t his after all. It was just so simple and so catchy that it didn’t really feel like a fifteen-year-old had written it.
“I don’t know that one,” she said lightly, sitting down again. “Was it a cover?”
“No,” he said. “No, that’s mine. That’s the one I’ve been working on.”
“Cody, it’s… it’s…” She shook her head, trying to think of what she could possibly say that wouldn’t embarrass him. “It’s amazing. It sounds like it could be a standard.”
Embarrassment or not, she wasn’t going to lie.
“Really?” he asked.
