Everything You Are(17)

“I haven’t a clue how to do this. Do you? Have kids, I mean?” Braden asks.

Phee shakes her head. “A dog. And a family of instruments.”

“Easier to manage,” he mutters, evidence that he has never met Celestine and doesn’t understand the first thing about Phee’s relationship to the instruments under her care.

“May I see her? The cello?”

Allie has taken the fight out of him. He shrugs. “If you must.” He leads her down the hallway and stands aside to let her enter a large room that holds only a desk, a chair, and the cello. A window looks out onto a fenced backyard.

Whatever kind of speakers are wired into this house, Phee needs to get herself some. The music is as clear in this room as it was in the living room and in the dining room. An alarming suspicion grows inside her gut, the place where she sometimes knows unknowable things. It’s not a recording. It’s the cello.

Which is ridiculous, of course. The strings aren’t vibrating. Nobody is playing. No instrument, even one of her grandfather’s specials, can play itself. Whatever Phee is hearing is all in her own head, which is another problem to add to a rapidly growing list.

“How are your hands?” she blurts out, needing to say something, do something, and managing to get it exactly wrong.

“God. Not this again.”

“It’s been a long time. Healing happens.”

“Not for me.” He almost spits the words at her. “I can’t believe you are still on about this. Now, of all times. Yes, I still have nerve damage. No, I can’t play the cello. I can’t feel the strings or the bow. Can we be done with this?”

His hands are shaking again. More than anger or nerves, she thinks. There’s the wine stain on the living room carpet, still damp. The Librium. As usual, words pop out of her before she has the sense to keep them to herself.

“You look like a man who needs a drink.”

Braden flinches as if she’s struck him. His face goes dead white. “Now? I . . . can’t . . . ,” he stammers.

“Oh God. No. I wasn’t offering one. Just observing.”

“Good to know my sins are so clearly visible.”

“Been there, done that. Look. I know you think I’m an opportunistic bitch or some such, but consider this, anyway.” Phee scrabbles in her purse, not for the contract but for a scrap of paper and a pen. She scribbles an address and holds it out to him. “There’s a meeting here, tomorrow afternoon at four.”

“AA? I’ll think about it.”

“Oh, this is so not AA,” Phee protests. “All that powerlessness shit gets depressing after a while, don’t you think?”

His gaze scours her face. “What could you possibly know about AA?”

“Ten years in the trenches.”

“I don’t believe you. You don’t look like a longtimer.”

“I bounced in and out of AA like a rubber ball, always wondering what was wrong with me that it didn’t seem to take. I was drinking the last time we, um, talked.” It hadn’t been much of a conversation. She’s forgotten how much of a mess she was back then, and how horribly she’d bungled things after his accident.

“But you’re sober now?” he asks, with a tone that says this visit would be so much more understandable if she were totally soused.

“‘Sober’ is such a bleak word. Makes me think of Quakers. Or nuns. Amazed and alive, that’s what I am, five years now.”

“So what is this meeting, then, if it’s not AA?” He’s still skeptical, but also still talking. Maybe she can help him. If he trusts her, even a little, she’s likely to get further than she will beating him with the same old story she gave him the last time she saw him.

“Come and see.”

He shakes his head, takes a step back.

“I’ve sampled the church recovery groups, too. Not for me.”

Despite the sorrow in this house and the sad state her own heart is in, Phee laughs at the very idea.

“You thought I was about to turn evangelical on you? Sorry, but that’s funny right there.”

Her laughter sparks an answering emotion in Braden. A smile lights his eyes, activates an inner warmth that softens his face. “Enlighten me.”

“I’m an Adventure Angel.”

“A what?”

“An Adventure Angel.”

“And that means what, exactly?”

“Tomorrow. Four p.m. Come and see for yourself.”

He considers. “Tell you what. You stay away from Allie. No giving her any of the bullshit you laid on me about how this cello has a soul—”

Phee sighs. “It’s not Allie’s contract, Braden, it’s yours.”

“—and I’ll come to your meetings.”

This is easy to agree to, since Allie has only been the surrogate for her missing father, anyway. “Done.” She holds out her hand and Braden shakes it. Even though his is trembling, it’s warm and strong. The fingers curve as they are supposed to do.

Braden releases her and stuffs his hands in his pockets. “I see what you’re thinking. They look fine. They do what I need them to, for the most part. I just have to operate them like they’re . . . robotic. A handshake is a different skill set from, well, you know.”