Chapter 20 #4
"Folks, we got a real treat for you tonight. This little gal is from over Cobbler Cove way, and her grandma Fern, God rest her, told me a while back that she had a granddaughter who could play the violin better than anybody she’d ever heard.
Well, Fern didn't lie about much in her life, and I’m bettin’ she wasn’t lying about this.
Y'all give a warm welcome to Miss Makayla Lawrence, who’s gonna fiddle a tune with me and the band. "
The audience clapped politely.
Makayla walked out into the stage lights in her pink boots and pink hat, her fiddle tucked under her arm. She stopped at the mic and squinted as she looked around. She found her mother, Dillon, and Reno and smiled slightly.
A murmur rose from the crowd as they saw the guest fiddler was just a kid.
Makayla looked over her shoulder and said something to the band members. Their eyebrows shot up, but they nodded. Reno guessed she’d asked them if they knew the song she planned to play.
Makayla tucked the fiddle under her chin, put the bow on the strings, and paused for a long moment. Reno watched her take a deep breath and let it out slowly.
And then she took off. There was no other word for how she played.
This was not the precise, well-mannered Bach Reno’d heard her practice once before.
This was pure joy taking flight in the form of a fast, raucously fun fiddle tune that burst out of Makayla’s fiddle.
She played like she couldn’t hold the music in if she tried.
The crowd was dead silent for about six measures, as if they’d been hit with something totally unexpected. Then someone hooted, someone else started clapping in time with the rollicking melody, and by the first chorus the whole place was on its feet clapping, whistling, and cheering.
Tessa swiped away tears from her cheeks as she looked around at the crowd, but she was also laughing. Dillon, grinning ear-to-ear, looped his arm around her shoulders without seeming aware of it.
Reno noticed distantly that his knee was throbbing in time to the music. He sat very still in his corner and watched his brother's family discover what it was going to feel like to be proud of this child for the rest of their lives.
The song ended and the roadhouse erupted. Even the band members applauded her. Makayla took a bow that was about ten percent stage manners and ninety percent eleven-year-old who couldn't quite believe what she'd just done. The grizzly-fighting bass player wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist.
Makayla started to leave the stage, but the crowd shouted deafeningly for more. Wallace touched Makayla’s elbow, gestured at the crowd, and said something to her. She looked startled but then broke into a smile. Reno saw them confer for a moment, and Makayla nodded.
She stepped back to the microphone. “Would you like another song?” she asked politely.
The crowd roared a yes.
“Okay.” Another quick conference with the band members, who broke into grins. She tucked the fiddle under her chin once more and said jauntily into the mic, “Let’s go, boys.”
Good grief. The child had come into her own as a confident stage performer after one song. One. As if she’d been born to do this.
"Reno." Tessa leaned across the table, eyes shining. "Did you—"
"I saw."
"Isn't she—"
"She is."
They drove home in the long blue light of a spring evening that hadn't quite given up the day. The crowd had insisted Makayla play an entire set with the band, and Reno was pretty sure she’d played just about every song she knew.
She’d chattered eagerly on the way out to the truck about how the band had given her their play list and invited her to learn whatever songs she liked and play with them any time she liked. They’d even offered to pay her a cut of the band’s earnings.
As night lowered its blanket of dark around them, Makayla fell asleep against Tessa's shoulder in the back. Kid must’ve been more nervous than she’d let on about her first real gig as a fiddler
Dillon pulled up to Tessa’s farmhouse, and Makayla woke up, sleepy but happy. She ran upstairs to put away her fiddle—he supposed they should call her expensive violin that now. Reno hobbled onto the porch one step at a time, embarrassed at how long it took him to navigate four simple steps.
A frisson of worry shivered through him. How was this knee ever going to recover enough for him to go back to distracting bulls at the rodeo?
Brown Dog met them at the front door. He actually belonged to Arlo, their elderly and feisty next door neighbor, but apparently, both dog and human were considered family at this house and came and went as they pleased.
Brown Dog put his nose under Reno's free hand and stood there waiting for a scratch. Reno obliged, pleased at the endorsement from the gray-muzzled dog.
Three rocking chairs sat in a row on the porch. He’d heard about them from Dillon. But seeing the handmade rockers together like this was a powerful statement that a family lived here.
"Sit," Tessa said, pointing at Dillon's chair. "You need to prop that leg up, and I’m willing, just this once to lend you my wicker chair."
"I can sit on the steps."
"And how will you get back up after you get down there? Sit in the chair, Reno."
"But it's Dillon's."
"Dillon will live."
Amusement flared in his chest. Elegant, ultra-polite Tessa was getting sassy in this new life she’d stepped into. It suited her. He sat in Dillon's chair.
He had nearly the same build as his brother, and the chair fit him to perfection. He stretched the braced leg out on the seat of the wicker chair Tessa set in front of him and let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding for the better part of an hour.
Tessa went inside to pull a roast chicken out of the oven and put in the dinner rolls she had rising in the pantry. Dillon was in the kitchen with Makayla, debating how many rolls they each got to eat. The sounds of the house drifted out through the screen door.
The oven door squeaked. Silverware clattered as someone set the table.
His brother said, “Two rolls, Makayla, I’m holding you to two rolls, and I get the rest.”
Makayla laughingly responded that he had it backwards,
Across the property line, in the soft last of the light, Arlo Pickett stood up out of his own rocking chair and trudged slowly across the pasture to Tessa’s house.
He came up onto the porch with a nod for Reno, sat down in Tessa's chair, and reached down to scratch Brown Dog's ears.
"Evening," Reno said.
"Evening."
"Bold move, sitting in Tessa's chair."
Arlo shrugged. "She isn't using it."
"That's a defensible position."
The old man made a noise that was half acknowledgement and half humor.
They sat together, looking out at the lake, which was smooth and black and shiny tonight.
The mountains across the water were fading from the color of bruised plums to charcoal grey.
A few stars were starting to pop out overhead.
Out in the pasture, the donkey said something rude.
"Heard the kid did all right," Arlo said.
“Who’d you hear that from?” Reno never ceased to be amazed at how news traveled around here.
“Wallace called. Said Fern would’ve been real proud.” A pause. “Also said he and boys had to work to keep up with her.”
Reno grinned. "They did. She fiddled the house down. Kid’s got a real gift."
Arlo nodded slowly. “When she’s alone in the house, she most always fiddles. I can hear it from my place.”
They sat side by side, looking out at the lake in silence. Brown Dog sighed and shifted his weight against Arlo's leg.
"Fern used to say," Arlo said, after a while, "that a man can carry a heavy thing until he either puts it down or it puts him down." He cut a sidelong look at Reno's brace. "She didn't say nothin' about knees specifically. But her metaphors were thorough."
Reno's throat closed up tight for the second time tonight.
Arlo, who thankfully didn’t seem to expect a response, rocked and Brown Dog snored.
Inside, Makayla laughed at something Dillon said.
The screen door creaked. Tessa came out drying her hands on a towel and stopped when she saw Arlo in her rocker. "Well," she said.
"Pull up a step, sweetheart," Arlo said, smirking. "Plenty of porch."
Smiling fondly, she sat down on the top step. Dillon came out a minute later balancing three plates and Makayla carried two.
They ate dinner on the porch, talking and laughing, and Reno remembered what it felt like to have several generations of family come together. He felt the continuity of life flowing down from older to younger, the way it was supposed to. This porch, this family, felt right. Solid.
Makayla brought out her violin and played something sad and haunting that drifted out across the lake. The first loons of the season had arrived, and they added their dusty, mournful song to hers.
In the days to come, he would, or would not, get back to the rodeo arena. He would, or would not, figure out what to do with the law license he still technically held. And he would, or would not, find a way to put down the heavy thing he carried.
But for tonight, he was content to sit on a porch, on a perfectly still evening, in a town he was probably going to be in for a while, and listen to Makayla and the loons serenade one another.
A sense of peace settled over him for the first time in a very long time, startling him with its quiet presence.
He knew it to be fleeting, though. The images he could not forget would return with their burden of guilt and grief, if not tonight, then tomorrow.
One thing he did know. If there was a way to make peace with this past and find a measure of lasting peace, he was most likely to find it in this place with these people. He just had to be brave enough to try.
But that was a problem for tomorrow. . .
You can read the rest of Reno and Grace’s tender, funny, heartwarming story, A Family for Reno , available June 18, 2026.