Chapter 9 Hunter #2
“I’m glad you came out here. You’re in such a better place.” She was quiet for a moment, looking down at the floor, clearly lost in thought.
“What is it?” I asked.
She lifted her gaze to me. “I thought I’d lost you. Those years with Dana, you weren’t yourself. It was like she snuffed out your light. I’m glad you’re back.”
“I haven’t been able to write. It was like the voices in my head had turned off permanently. I thought I might be done. Until this song.”
“What changed?” Ivy peered at me, playing with one of her dangly earrings.
“I met someone.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Like a girl someone?”
“Yeah. A girl.”
Ivy beamed. “Tell me everything.”
“I’ve known her almost since I moved here.
She comes into the bar with her friends at least once a week.
First time I saw her, she knocked me off my feet.
I had this huge crush on her, but I didn’t know if she returned the feelings.
But then her son asked me for guitar lessons, and we started talking.
Next thing I knew, I’d actually asked her out on a date.
And she said, yes, which I still find hard to believe.
She’s way out of my league. She’s a writer. Kind of famous, actually.”
“What’s her name? I want to look her up.” Ivy was already reaching for her phone.
“Seraphina Sinclair.”
“Wait? You’re dating Seraphina Sinclair?”
“That’s right. Do you know who she is.”
“Oh heck, yeah I do. I was just reading one of her books on the plane. I love her.”
“Do not give me a hard time about this—I read her entire catalog over the last six months or so.”
“But she has a million books,” Ivy said.
I grinned, sheepish. “I know. They’re all really good too.”
“I’m happy for you. Truly. Can I meet her?”
“That’s the other thing. You’re her favorite singer. Already Gone is her favorite song. First time she heard it, she was in the car and had to pull to the side of the road because it moved her so much.”
“Oh goodness me, that’s wonderful,” Ivy said. “Is she divorced? Kids?”
“Never married, but she has a son. Fifteen. Tyler. He’s pretty great.”
“What’s the story with his father?”
“Never in the picture. She’s raised him alone. In fact, he and his friends put their single mothers on a dating site without their knowledge.” I shared what I knew of the kids’ plan, knowing Ivy would love the whole thing.
“And three of the mothers are now married?” Ivy asked. “Lord have mercy. God sure had a plan, didn’t he?”
“The lord works in mysterious ways,” I said. “Sometimes through a dating app.”
“Anyway, when can I meet her and Tyler? I’ll be on my best behavior, I promise.”
“Maybe tomorrow for dinner? You could sing the new song for her. Since she’s the one who inspired it.”
Her eyes widened. “Wait, what? Tell me more this minute.”
I laughed. “We were all out to dinner—the three of us—and she said something kind of vulnerable and then followed it up with, ‘Or something like that anyway.’”
“And it stuck with you and pretty soon you had a song.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Hunter, I’m tickled to death for you. I’ve been worried.”
“What about you? Any cowboys in your life right now?”
She shook her head. “I’ve been too busy for love. Anyway, I’m holding out for that knock me on my butt type of love. I know I’ll know him when I meet him. Until then, I can just keep writing sad songs with you.”
“Have you been writing?”
“Yeah, I have a few I want to play for you. Maybe you and Wes can help me decide if they’re worth keeping. Or help make changes if needed. I’ve got the seed of one that could be a great duet, but I need your help.”
That was Ivy. Absolutely no ego. Her only aim was about making great music.
“You got it,” I said. “You have someone in mind to sing it with?”
“Jack Wilder’s manager reached out to me a while back. I told Rhett I’d love to sing with him, but I’ve been on tour.”
“Who’s Rhett?” I asked.
“Rhett Lawson. His manager. They’ve been together since the beginning. Grew up in the same trailer park up in Washington state.”
“His voice would be a great complement to yours,” I said. “And duets are hot right now.”
“Not as hot as Jack Wilder,” Ivy said, fanning herself.
We were pulled away from our conversation by Wes announcing he was ready for us.
“Let’s get a perfect track so we can take the rest of the night off,” Ivy said.
“Right behind you.”
We spent the next hour recording the song. By the time Margaret called down that dinner was ready, we had a fully realized version of the song and went upstairs feeling jubilant.
After dinner, Margaret shooed Ivy and me out of the kitchen and out to the back porch. Wes turned on the outdoor heaters and told us to get to work.
I hauled Georgia out of her case and into my lap where she belonged.
Ivy took out her guitar, a Martin 000-15M, mahogany all the way through.
She’d changed into a pair of jeans and a sweater, trading her boots for cozy socks.
She settled onto one of the rocking chairs, tucking her right foot under her left thigh like she often did when we wrote together.
“Play what you got,” I said.
She dropped her eyes to the strings and played a simple chord progression of G-to-C-to-D-to-Em, nothing complicated and very traditional country.
Then she sang:
My daddy said Tennessee’s your heart
Little girl, no matter how far you go
The whispering pines still call your name
But go chase those dreams
Knowing you can always come back home
She lifted her fingers from the strings and looked up. “That’s it. I don’t even know what it means. Like what’s the story here?”
I strummed the same chord progression by ear, playing it back to her at a slower pace, the G chord voiced higher up the neck, giving it more ring.
“Tell me how this verse came to you,” I said. “Do you remember?”
“I was brushing my teeth in some hotel. I’d been on tour for months by then. I’d wake up every day not even sure what city I was in. And the lines just came to me. I rushed to write them down and found the music behind them. After that, nothing.”
“You were feeling lonely?” I asked.
“Yeah. And homesick.”
She played it again. I played underneath her, finding notes within the spaces—small phrases that echoed her melody back, bent slightly toward longing.
“I don’t really have a home these days.” She was quiet for a moment, hunched over her guitar. “Maybe home’s a person I haven’t found yet.”
“Yes, there’s something.” A vision of Seraphina’s face on the boat earlier that day flashed through my mind. “So this is a love song maybe?”
“About finding your home? A great love that feels just right?” Ivy asked.
“So we want his perspective too? If this is a duet?”
“Right.” She looked up, her cheeks flushed. “What if we start with his verse? Who is this guy?”
“Do you ever daydream about finding the right man?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Tell me about him.”
“He’d be from a humble background like me. A scrapper, you know. Who had a dream no one believed in but him.”
“All right, hang on.” I moved through the chord progression again. “Where does he start from? You’re in Tennessee. Where’s our guy?”
She closed her eyes for a moment. “If this is the one for Jack and me, maybe we go with what we know about him. He grew up in a trailer park in rainy Washington. Maybe his dreams come true, but he still feels alone.”
“That’s not too much of a stretch for either of us,” I said, picking out a few notes on Georgia and singing what came to me.
My mama said I was born with a restless soul
Always on the move, looking for more than rain on a tin roof
Ivy grabbed her notebook, scribbling down the lyrics. “I’ve got something else.” She sang my lines, then added on.
So I went out into this big old world
Hoping to soar
Playing until my fingers ached
“Oh, right on. That’s good stuff for our guy,” I said.
“His story mirrors her own yearning for home.”
I settled Georgia more firmly in my lap. “And if home’s a person, then we’ve got something.” I strummed, singing what we had so far.
“And then the two find each other. And they know it right away. This is the one.” She picked up her guitar again and played the chord progression through once, then twice.
But the moment I saw you—
She stopped and looked at me. “What does she see?”
“Everything,” I said. “She sees everything she’s been missing without knowing she was missing it.”
Ivy’s eyes went slightly bright. She looked back at the strings.
But the moment I saw you I saw everything
She played through the change. All the torn pieces— she paused. All the torn pieces of my heart—
“Stitched together,” I said.
“Like a quilt. Mama and my grandmother make quilts. All my life, Mama kept pieces of fabric she’d salvaged from old clothes.
I’m talking every piece. Then she’d make something beautiful from them.
” Ivy played the chord under it, finding the resolution.
Stitched into a patchwork quilt like my mama made.
“Oh, that’s good,” I said.
We worked through it like that for the better part of an hour, one of us offering a line, the other catching it or redirecting it. Georgia and Ivy’s guitar finding the arrangement together.
By eleven, we had a full song. We played it through one more time.
The restless soul and the Tennessee girl, both of them searching.
The blinding lights. The beautiful and lonely life they'd almost accepted.
And then the chorus—the torn pieces stitching themselves together, the patchwork quilt, the rain on the tin roof.
The last chord faded.
“This isn’t bad,” Ivy said. “I’ll call Rhett and tell him we might have something for Jack and me.”
I knew in my gut we had something special. Jack Wilder was going to want to record it. I had no doubts.
“Do it,” I said.
She strummed softly, staring down at her guitar. “Do you think I’ll ever find my sweetheart?”
“Is that what you want?” I was surprised. She’d always been focused on her career, saying there was no time for the hassles of romantic love. Maybe she was lonelier than I’d thought.
“I’m thirty-five,” Ivy said. “I really want a family. A baby or two. A lid to my pot.”
“There’s a lid for every pot. According to your mother anyway.”
“I think the poor woman’s given up on me ever marrying.”
“But you haven’t?”
She smiled, looking up at me. “Not yet. What about you? Are you ready to give it another go?”
“I never thought I’d be ready, but yeah.”
“Maybe a certain redhead has you rethinking what you’d thought you knew?” Ivy asked.
“Yeah, or something like that anyway.”
We shared a smile before Ivy yawned and reminded us we weren’t as young as we used to be and suggested we head to bed.
“We earned a good night’s sleep,” I said, rising to my feet and placing Georgia back into her case.
Ivy did the same, then straightened, tossing her hair behind her shoulders as she peered out at the dark night. A cloud cover had moved in, obscuring the sky.
Ivy drew a breath in through her nose. “It smells really good here. I can see why you’ve stayed.”
“I never thought I’d live in California.” I turned off the outdoor heaters. “Or be divorced. Or let myself fall in love again.”
“Well, as Mama always says, ‘The creek don't always run straight.’”
“It sure the heck doesn’t.”
We said goodnight and I headed down the steps to my cabin, our song still playing between my ears.
It was past eleven when I finally walked back across the dark lawn to the cottage.
A layer of fog had come in off the water, bringing a damp chill to the air.
I buttoned up my jacket and sat on the porch steps, giving myself a chance to think about the day.
What a perfect morning it had been with Seraphina and Tyler on the whale watching adventure.
Then to have Ivy here, tugging me back into the work I loved so much—it all felt like my life was starting to turn back around.
My phone buzzed.
Seraphina
Hey! Just wanted to say hi. Did you have a good evening?
I smiled at the screen.
Hunter
Yeah. Really good. Ivy says hi.
Seraphina
She knows about me?
Hunter
She’s a fan of your books. Was reading one on the plane on the way out here.
Three dots.
Seraphina
Oh my stars! I might need a moment.
Hunter
Take your time.
Seraphina
I don’t think I’ll be able to speak when you introduce me to her. How’s the recording going?
Hunter
We got a good take tonight of the new song. And we wrote a new one together.
Seraphina
That’s wonderful. Are you feeling like yourself again?
Hunter
Yes, I am. It’s about time.
Seraphina
I can’t wait to hear your new song.
Hunter
Margaret wants you and Tyler to come to dinner tomorrow night. Are you available? She wants to meet you. And so does Ivy.
Seraphina
Um … YES!!
Hunter
You’ll love them all. Have a good rest. See you tomorrow.
Seraphina
Good night and sweet dreams.
I put the phone in my pocket, listening to the waves crash to shore below. Somewhere in the depths of those waters a whale moved through the dark, singing his ancient song, seeking love.
Just like me.