Everything You Are(3)

“Incorrigible, that’s me.” Phee grins, talking around a mouthful of cookie. “Born in a barn and all that.” Nearly forty years of lecturing, and you’d think her mother would get the message by now that it’s pointless, but Bridgette is not the sort of woman to be easily deterred.

“Make chocolate chip for the sale,” Phee advises. “And those meringue things. Nobody really wants to eat raisins.”

“Raisins are healthy.” Bridgette slaps Phee’s hand as she reaches for another cookie. “In moderation. I have no idea how you stay so thin.”

“Hard work.” Phee stretches, indolent as a cat, then tucks both legs up in the chair beneath her. “Physical labor.”

Her mother makes a hmph sound under her breath, and Phee takes the hint. Push too far, and she’ll end up doing dishes and scrubbing floors for the rest of the afternoon. She did work hard last week. Her eyes are tired. The muscles in her neck and shoulders are tight and her feet ache. The last thing in the world she wants to do is spend her remaining free hours suffering retribution from a fiery Irish temper pushed too far.

Her phone chirps and she ignores it. Probably a text message complaining about one of the recently repaired instruments. If she doesn’t know, if she doesn’t look, then she can’t be responsible. She’s been known to fix things at one in the morning for an overwrought violinist whose instrument is suffering. Obsessive beings, musicians, the whole lot of them.

Phee doesn’t hold this against them. She is every bit as bad when it comes to the instruments in her care.

Her phone chirps again.

“Can you hush that thing?”

Bridgette disapproves of cell phones in general and Phee’s in particular. “When I was young,” she says, “we had freedom. Not at everybody’s beck and call every minute of every day.”

“When you were young, unicorns still walked the earth.”

“Respect, young lady.” Bridgette raps Phee’s knuckles with the wooden spoon, bits of dough spattering onto the countertop, and both of them break into laughter.

“Why, thank you very much,” Phee says, licking the buttery, sugary sweetness off her fingers before Celestine can beat her to it.

“You’ll get salmonella. For the love of God, Phee, please stop that noise.”

Phee rubs her hands on her jeans and picks up the offending phone. Not a text message at all. An alert blinks, baleful and ominous.

She remembers, then, the way the shooting star fell across her line of vision, right to left. The moon. The salt. What’s waiting for her is infinitely worse than an unhappy musician.

“Oh, damn it all to hell and back again.”

“What is it?”

“Heredity.”

Bridgette’s sigh could blow out a candle from fifty feet away. “Still that load of blarney from your grandfather? He was a crazy old man, Phee. Let it go.”

Maybe not so crazy as all that, Phee thinks but doesn’t say. She’s had this argument with both of her parents so many times she knows the script by heart, forward and backward and upside down.

“I promised him.”

“And he’s dead. I’m certain sure he doesn’t care about those old instruments anymore.”

Phee makes a noncommittal sound, and Bridgette flings up her hands. “There is no curse, Ophelia MacPhee.”

When Phee doesn’t answer, her mother sighs again, then asks in a world-weary tone, “Which one is it?”

“The cello.”

Phee scans the news article that triggered her app. A chill crawls up her spine, out of place in the heat of the kitchen.

“Don’t tell me. A dark robed figure carrying a scythe was seen walking down the street where the cello resides.”

“Mom, don’t,” Phee says. “It’s truly horrible.”

“I’m listening.”

Underneath her bluster, Bridgette is the most kindhearted of women, and Phee needs a little bit of kindness right now.

“The girl who plays the cello—Allie—her mother and brother were both killed in a car crash.”

Bridgette freezes in the act of dropping cookie dough onto a baking sheet. “Oh, the poor child. Has she a father?”

Oh, indeed she has a father, Phee thinks, or had one, anyway. Braden Healey, once a brilliant cellist, abandoned both his cello and his daughter and vanished off Phee’s radar almost eleven years ago. She dreams about him at night and runs internet searches for him by day. Always, at the back of her consciousness, a nagging little worry eats away at her.

Something bad is going to happen.

Has happened.

She shivers. The brightly lit kitchen darkens, and she glances up to the window, expecting storm clouds, surprised by a serene blue sky.

“Phee,” her mother says, calling her back to the present. “Tragic and terrible, but an accident has nothing to do with you and certainly nothing to do with the cello.”

“I have to go.” Phee clambers to her feet, stretching out the kinks in her back, waiting for sensation to return to her right foot, which is all pins and needles from being sat on. Celestine licks her hand, and she steadies herself against his solid bulk.

“Tell me you’re not going to dash over to the house of the bereaved and check on an instrument,” Bridgette demands.