Chapter Fifteen
Perhaps the agreement wouldn’t last long, though, if the mostly good-natured muttering was any indication.
“One more song and we’re switching it to the good station,” Thalia piped up from the stepladder above Blair.
“Yes. Thank you.” Jake ripped off a strip of painter’s tape on the other side of the room.
“This is the good station,” Makayla argued. As if to illustrate her point, Taylor Swift’s latest single came over the airwaves, and Makayla aimed a pointed finger and a triumphant grin at her naysayers. “See? I told you. Turn. It. Up.”
Jake gave a dramatic moan and clutched his chest while Thalia gave a quiet groan. “You had to agree to five songs on this station, didn’t you, Jake?” she said.
“Hey, Makayla plays hardball. It was either five songs or all Taylor Swift.”
“You’re not wrong.” Makayla cranked the volume and sang along with T. Swift at the top of her lungs.
A breakup song, of course. A song about being used, then abandoned. Unbidden memories surfaced. Memories of Derek professing his undying love. Getting down on one knee and presenting her with a rock of a diamond on that sunny July day.
Six months later, the sunshine had turned to clouds.
Had they ever truly lifted? She was over him, that much she knew. She could no longer imagine a life with him. Painful as the discovery had been, at least God had revealed her fiancé’s true colors to her before she walked down the aisle and pledged herself to him for life.
But was she over it? The pain? The betrayal? The knowledge that although she’d once thought him the love of her life, to him she’d just been a stopgap? A way station on the road to something he perceived to be better? She’d been a happy, sunshiny person once upon a time. Naive, perhaps. But happy.
Was she happy now? Legitimately, deep down? Was that sunny girl still in there, but frozen? Or was she gone forever, having seen how the world really works?
Could she ever open her heart to anyone else again? Could she trust again?
And God help her, was she really thinking this deeply about a Taylor Swift song?
Finally, mercifully, the song ended, much to the delight of Jake, who dove for the radio and changed it to an alternative rock station.
“My goodness, you’re all working so hard in here.”
Blair turned, and an elderly woman entered, her arms laden with two boxes of doughnuts. “How about a snack break?”
“Yes, please.” Thalia had already climbed halfway down the ladder.
“Mrs. Weldon, that’s so sweet of you.” Jake moved to take the doughnuts from her arms, and Makayla took advantage of the distraction to turn the radio down. Brightened by the prospect of sugar, though, the other two didn’t seem to notice.
While the kids pounced on the doughnuts, Peggy Sue Weldon glanced around the room, a wide smile creasing her cheeks. “Those kids are doing an amazing job.”
“Thank you,” Blair replied. “They’re great kids.”
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.
The place has just gone to pot since Roland died, God rest his soul.
” Peggy Sue crossed the room to the large picture window.
“Oh, honey, at least let me give you some light.” She yanked on the cord to open the blinds, flooding the room with daylight and providing a view of the sunny backyard, where Callum’s group was focusing on the exterior.
A group of girls raked leaves near the center, and four guys—two from choir, a tall and broad-shouldered one in a dark-blue T-shirt and ball cap who probably played basketball, and a football player—were repairing a broken fence.
“It’s our pleasure.” Blair picked up her paint roller and ascended Thalia’s stepladder to finish the spot the girl had been working on before the doughnuts arrived and .
. . wait. Wait a minute. That guy in the blue T-shirt.
That was not a basketball player. Wasn’t even a student.
No, that was Callum. He was the one hammering the fence, the motion pulling the shirt tight across his back.
He wasn’t just supervising. He was pitching in. For a community he didn’t belong to. Yet he worked as hard as the kids, if not harder.
Her heart warmed and softened.
He wasn’t just paying lip service before. He really did care. And he cared about more than just the music.
He cared about the community.
“Did you say something?” Peggy Sue asked.
“No,” Blair replied quickly. At least she hoped she hadn’t.
“Stupid contraption.” Peggy Sue reached beneath silvery curls and fiddled with her hearing aid. “Still can’t quite get used to this.”
Outside, Makayla appeared with the second box of doughnuts, and Callum set down his hammer, lifted his cap, and drew an arm across his forehead, and Blair could not just stand here staring at him.
She slapped the paint roller onto the wall and started rolling it more aggressively than before. “You’re an alumna of Peterson High, right?” she asked Peggy Sue.
“Yes, ma’am. Class of 1961. Went away to school and came back to Peterson as soon as I graduated. I was the librarian. Would’ve stayed here forever, but Roland got transferred to Decatur, so we moved there in seventy-two. But as soon as he retired, we moved back.”
Blair turned. “Were you here in sixty-nine to seventy, by chance?”
“Sure was.” Peggy Sue snapped her fingers. “That’s right. Your father mentioned when I saw him at church last week that you were curious about Iris Wallingford.”
“We found a piece of music in the choir library we think might be hers.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t doubt it. That girl was always writing music.
Usually she ate her lunch quickly and then came to the library for the rest of the period.
She never said much more to me than hello, and she never asked for books.
She just sat at a table by the window with that notebook of hers.
At first I thought she was drawing, but once I was shelving books near her and saw the music.
Don’t know whether it was any good or not.
” Peggy Sue grinned. “That’s above my pay grade. ”
Certainty thudded in Blair’s chest at Peggy Sue’s confirmation. It was Iris’s music they’d found. Outside, Callum had popped the last of a doughnut into his mouth and reached for the hammer again. She couldn’t wait to tell him.
“One time, toward the end of her life, though . . .” Peggy Sue continued, “Iris came in with a boy.” Blair tore her gaze from the window. “A boy? Do you remember who?”
“Like it was yesterday,” Peggy Sue replied. “It was that tall boy, Victor Nelson.”
November 1969
My pencil flew across the staff paper on the table in the library.
Victor and I had met there after school to work on our theory homework together, but I’d finished mine a few minutes ago.
It was an easy assignment about secondary dominants.
Mr. Gilbert had even made up a song to help us remember that they’re chromatic, and that song had launched another thread of melody that welled up inside me, demanding to be poured into my pencil and set free on paper. Demanding to live outside me.
Ideas blossomed everywhere now, with Victor and me spending nearly all our free time together, and my brain constantly hummed with music. I’d written so many scraps of songs the last few weeks. Sometimes they were destined to remain just that—scraps—but some held the promise of much more.
I needed to finish something, though, and soon, because the application deadline for Whitehall was just two weeks away.
Yes. Like Victor, I’d decided to apply to the Whitehall Conservatory. I hadn’t told my parents yet. Not much point really, since I doubted I’d get in. And even if by some miracle I did, my parents probably wouldn’t think a music career a suitable future plan for “a woman of our social stature.”
But even if I didn’t go, just getting admitted would prove to me that I had real talent.
That I was actually good at this. Whether I became a student or not, if some faculty member saw something in my work, it might put my name out there.
Establish some connection with the world outside boring little Peterson, Illinois.
And if I wasn’t any good? If I didn’t get in?
Then I’d know a career in music wasn’t worth pursuing.
Perhaps that would give me some peace about following the path my parents planned for me.
Marrying some rich or socially prominent man—ideally both—and settling down to a vapid, meaningless, moneyed life of clinking champagne glasses, trilling laughter, and empty conversation.
If I did get into Whitehall, though, even if I couldn’t go, somehow that would reassure me that God hadn’t forgotten me.
That he saw me and knew me and loved me as I was, not as others wished I were.
That he had a plan for my music. That maybe people were meant to hear it. That maybe it didn’t exist just for me.
But first I needed to finish my audition piece.
Victor sat across the table from me. His black plastic glasses sat in a shaft of sunlight on the scarred table.
The same shaft of sunlight fell across his face—the sharp angles of his cheekbones, the little divot in his chin, the smattering of pale-brown freckles across the bridge of his nose.
He was so handsome, my Victor. And now I could call him mine.
I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.
The verse from Song of Songs popped into my head. I’d always been inspired by the book, ever since my parents told me it was too mature for me. Of course I sneaked away to read it the second I could. It was beautiful poetry, but I’d never understood it. Not really. Not until now.
I was Victor’s.
Victor was mine.
The words formed themselves into a melody, shifting and swirling in my heart until they crystallized. This melody differed from my other ideas. It felt more solid. More permanent. I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.
I am my beloved’s. The phrase came to the sopranos first. Repeated then, with altos in harmony.