Chapter 19 #2
“Quick question. Would it be possible for me to get a copy of the video of the talent show? I have a friend who was really hoping to make it here today but couldn’t come.”
“Of course. I’ll load it on the school website after the show. When it’s up, and I’ll send you the link.”
The lights dimmed, and as Tessa slid back into her seat, she became aware of someone just taking a seat on the other side of the aisle.
She felt him more than saw him.
She turned her head and spotted Dillon sitting four rows back from her. He wore a clean white shirt and the dark sport coat he’d worn to Fern’s funeral.
He looked at her.
She looked at him.
The world contracted to a dozen feet of wooden basketball floor between them and the bright stage lights warming his face.
Neither of them looked away until the music teacher walked on stage and welcomed everyone. She introduced the first act, a fourth-grader named Caleb playing piano. Tessa heard none of it.
He was here. He’d come.
Eventually, somewhere around the third act, a second grader tap dancing terribly to something with too much bass in it, she started breathing again.
Makayla was the final act of the show, which Tessa counted as a kindness to the other kids. Makayla’s talent was in a whole different class than most kid’s.
The music teacher walked out and read the introduction Tessa had helped Makayla write a week ago. Makayla Lawrence will be performing the Allemande from Bach’s Partita in E Major. There was polite applause. The stage lights dimmed except for a single spotlight at the center of the stage.
Makayla walked out.
She’d changed into her long, navy recital skirt to go with her white blouse. But from where the audience sat, roughly eye level with the stage floor, very visible under the hem of her skirt with every step she took, were Makayla’s her pink cowboy boots.
A small audible huh rolled through the audience.
Tessa could not have been any prouder of her daughter in that moment.
Makayla had finally blossomed into the person she was supposed to be.
Fern was right all along about her. Fern was also right to twist Tessa arm and force her to move out to the farm with Makayla.
It had been exactly what both of them needed.
Sitting there in the dark with her daughter calmly making a last minute adjustment to her bow and putting her violin under her chin, Tessa sent up a silent thank you to her mother-in-law, who was surely looking down on Makayla today and smiling.
Makayla began to play.
The Bach piece’s notes rose up and floated through the auditorium, filling it with Bach’s timeless elegance, its complex melodies intricately interwoven with mathematical precision.
Tessa had heard Makayla practicing it for weeks, but this was the best she’d ever played it.
She imbued it with a profoundly uplifting seriousness and technical rigor that would have made the music professors at Whitmore weep with joy.
She played it the way Tessa had raised her to play.
And Tessa, listening, felt her shoulders drop. There she is. The daughter she had spent eleven years molding and shaping in the image of her own childhood. There was the discipline, accomplishment, and control she’d instilled in her daughter. There was the prodigy.
It was beautiful. Technically pristine. It was, in its way, a goodbye to the child who’d been emerging at the farm—a happy, carefree kid who wore pink boots.
Around the sixty-second mark Makayla landed on a held note that acted as a breath in the piece, a bridge to the next and even more complex section of the piece when a whole new set of variations were introduced.
Then the note bent, sliding a half-step into the minor key version of itself.
Tessa sat up straighter.
The hair on her arms rose.
Makayla’s bow lifted slightly off the strings, and her foot — her foot, in its pink boot — came down on the stage in a loud, deliberate stomp.
Everyone in the auditorium froze as it became clear something was happening.
And then Makayla took off.
Fiddling.
It was still the Bach partita, but not played in any way Tessa’d ever heard before.
The tempo doubled, then almost doubled again.
The bow bounced and skidded across the strings as if it had a life of its own.
Bach’s melody snapped sideways into a Montana fiddle tune that was the kind of thing Tessa had heard drifting out of Dillon’s truck radio on Friday afternoons when he brought Makayla home.
And it made something break loose in her chest.
For one stunned beat, the audience did nothing.
Then they erupted.
They erupted. Hoots. Clapping. Someone behind Tessa let out a wolf whistle. Beside her, Charlotte clapped a hand over her mouth and made a noise that was laughing and crying at the same time. The WoWS were on their feet. The whole place was on its feet.
Tessa stood up as well, tears streaming down her face.
Makayla was just a good fiddler. She was a great one.
Tessa didn’t even try to fighting her tears. She let them roll as she watched her structured, careful, perfectionist daughter — stand on a stage in pink cowboy boots, fiddling like she had been born to it.
The whole school and half the town were cheering and Makayla was grinning as she played. Tessa had never seen her so happy. Not when they’d moved to the farm, not even when Dillon had given her Murphy.
Tessa looked across the aisle.
Dillon was on his feet.
He was clapping along with tears on his cheeks, too. He did not, when he caught Tessa’s eye, try to hide it.
Their gazes held.
For a second Tessa could not have measured, the rest of the auditorium ceased to exist. There were only Dillon’s wet eyes and her own, and the sound of Makayla’s fiddle filling the space between them with pure joy, and the absolute clear understanding—flowing in both directions—that the two of them, and only the two of them recognized this moment for exactly what it was.
A child had become herself in front of God, her classmates, a several hundred elementary school parents. Their child.
The fiddle rollicked her bow frayed, Makayla stomped her foot and her braid bounced in time with tune. She added slide and trills, held a drone string under the melody while the audience shouted its approval.
And then — Tessa saw it coming, because she saw her daughter’s smile narrow into a focused expression— the minor key snapped back.
The tempo slowed. The fiddle softened. Makayla landed, with the precision of the prodigy she also was, on the closing measures of the Bach partita exactly where she had left them.
The final note hung in the air for a long, suspended second.
Then she lowered the violin and bowed slightly, the way she would at the end of one of her competition recitals.
The crowd leapt back to its feet for a standing ovation. Programs were being waved. There were whistles. Cheers. The students backstage poured out of the wings to clap and congratulate Makayla. The music teacher wiped her eyes with a handkerchief and beamed with pride.
Makayla curtsied again. And again. And then, before she walked off, she did the one thing Tessa had not been prepared for.
She looked into the audience, found Tessa, and grinned at her — a wide, unguarded, pink-boots grin, that said do you see me?
— and Tessa, weeping, nodded back as hard as her neck would allow.
Then Makayla looked across the aisle, found Dillon, and grinned at him, too.
Tessa looked back in time to see him raise his hand and tip an invisible hat to her. Tess turned back to the stage and saw Makayla lift her free hand and blow him a little kiss.
The lights came up, and when Tessa stood, her legs felt strange.
She turned toward the aisle.
Dillon was already standing. The four rows between them might as well have been four miles.
He didn’t move toward her. He waited.
Of course he did. He was Dillon, who showed up. Showing up meant being there. It didn’t mean closing the gap before the gap was hers to close.
She tried to walk to Dillon, but she promptly got mobbed by people congratulating her for Makayla’s spectacular performance. She was forced to spend several minutes being gracious and pleasant. She appreciated everyone’s enthusiasm, she really did. But she had somewhere else to be right now.
Finally, the other WoWS ran strategic interference and formed a wall between her and the well-wishers that let her escape and walk over to Dillon, standing patiently in his clean shirt and sport coat with his cowboy hat in his hands.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, her voice unsteady.
“I promised Makayla I’d come.”
She nodded, not surprised to find out her daughter had engineered him being here today.
“I would have come anyway, though.”
She smiled. “I know.”
He looked at her like a man surrendering. Not to her. To himself. “Tessa. Can we— Can I—” He stopped.
She waited.
“Can I follow you home?”
She drew a long breath. The auditorium was full of parents chatting and collecting children. Arlo was standing at the back, not approaching them, but watching their exchange with deep satisfaction.
“Yes, Dillon. Follow me home.”
Makayla flew out of the backstage door and across the auditorium, which was starting to look like a gym again as some dads started stacking chairs off to one side of the space.
Tessa watched her daughter throw herself into Dillon’s arms with such force he had to take a step back to regain his balance.
Laughing, he set her on her feet and grinned down at her. He said, in a voice rough with feeling, “Makayla Lawrence, you are the best fiddler in Montana.”
“Did you see the tempo change?”
“I felt it in my teeth.”
“I had a hard time getting it just right, but Professor Cohen said I could do it.”
“He was right.”
Suddenly shy, and looked at Tessa and asked cautiously, “What did you think of my performance?”
“That was the most amazing thing I have ever seen in my life,” Tessa said, and her voice broke on the word life in a way she did not try to disguise.
Makayla burst into tears.
So did Tessa. Again.
Dillon, with one hand on Makayla’s shoulder and the other at the small of Tessa’s back, pulled them both into group hug that was very nearly the best moment of Tessa’s life.
Around them, coats were collected. Goldfish crackers were demanded.
The music teacher, passing on her way out, paused long enough to touch Tessa lightly on the elbow and murmur, “She’s a remarkable child, Mrs. Lawrence.
Also — for the record — she has been driving me crazy for months, coming into my room at lunch to practice fiddling.
I’m very glad it’s finally out in the open and she can practice at home, now. ”
Tessa laughed wetly. “Thank you so much for helping her.”
The teacher smiled warmly and left.
“Let’s go home,” Tessa told Dillon and Makayla.
Makayla rode shotgun in pink her boots, the navy skirt hiked up over her knees.
The surface of the lake was the color of old gold. The trees along the shore were almost unnaturally bright green as the sun slid behind the mountains, which had turned a deep plum color.
“Mom?”
“Mm-hm?”
“Is Dillon coming over for a long time?”
Tessa glanced in the rearview at the truck behind them. Dillon’s hat was just visible above the steering wheel.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. “We’re going to have a conversation, and after that I’ll know better.”
“Is the conversation a good one?”
She thought about the chair on her porch. “I hope so.”
“Okay.” Makayla looked out the window. “Can I ride Murphy after dinner?”
“You can ride Murphy until dark if you’d like.”
“Can I—”
“Whatever it is, yes. You earned it. Stop while you’re ahead.”
Makayla grinned and went back to looking at the lake.
Tessa drove on with her finished rocking chair waiting for her on her porch, and a man in a dark sport coat following her home in his truck, and her daughter in the seat beside her humming absently, the closing eight measures of the Bach’s Partita in E Major.