Along Came Trouble(109)

When Ellen and Henry had come over with some clean clothes and a toothbrush, he hadn’t had the heart to send them back to the house to fetch more of his crap. Ellen wasn’t looking her best. Something had gone down with Caleb, but she wouldn’t talk about it, and anyway Henry had been jumping up and down on the couch and insisting Jamie help him search for the Couch Monster, so it wasn’t as if he and Ellen had much of a chance for a heart-to-heart.

He sat down at the piano and let his fingers pick out an aimless line of notes. The Short family’s Steinway was too grand for a hack pianist like him, and he felt almost guilty touching it, but it wasn’t getting a lot of exercise. Carly had told him Nana’s longest-lasting partner had been a concert pianist. He’d died ten years ago.

Someone had kept the piano in tune, though.

His hands settled in and found the lullaby he’d written for Carly’s baby, a melody he’d had in his head since the first time he’d made love to her properly, in a bed, a few weeks after they met. She’d only been three months pregnant then, and she’d told him the baby was no bigger than a shrimp. With his hand low on her stomach over the tight, hard shape of her womb, he’d lain there with her, and by all rights he should have been thinking, What kind of * has an affair with a pregnant woman? Or How do I get out of this thing before I end up saddled with some other guy’s baby?

He’d had all those thoughts later, when he was back in L.A. He’d had plenty of thoughts he wasn’t too proud of. But at the time, he’d been perfectly content to hold Carly and imagine her baby as a delicate pink shrimp floating in a calm sea, surrounded by her voice and warmed from the heat of his hand. He’d felt fond of the little thing. So he’d done what he always did. He wrote it a song.

The Shrimp Song didn’t have any words, but it was a pretty tune. Kinda long. He’d kept adding to it as the baby got bigger and Carly got bigger and more beautiful and he fell deeper and deeper in love with her. Not that he’d understood what was happening. No, he’d been in the denial pit, happily shoveling shit over his own head.

He finished the song and sat back, wondering whether he ought to go in the kitchen and grovel a little for Nana in the hope of getting more tips on winning over his woman, when he heard Carly’s voice float out from underneath her bedroom door. “Play it again.”

He did.

She’d always liked to hear him play. The first time he tooled around on the Steinway, Carly stood behind him and commanded him to perform all her favorite songs, one after another. She hopped up on the lid, crossed her legs, leaned back on her hands, and belted out show tunes in a husky alto until he was so turned on he couldn’t take it anymore. He’d spread her legs and had her right on top of the piano.

Man, did he ever miss her.

Now, when he got to the end, he waited, and she said, “Play the one with the bird in it.”

With a smile, he found the opening notes and adapted the melody on the fly. She’d been listening to him play outside last night after all, or she wouldn’t know he had a song with a bird in it. He sang the lyrics for her, but quieter and slower than the way he’d delivered them before. He made it a love song. They were all love songs anyway, the new ones, though some were subtler than others.

When he finished, he walked up the stairs to her room and opened the door just wide enough to lean against the jamb and look at her in bed. She had her face turned toward the window, but she seemed softer than she’d been when he brought her lunch. Almost soft enough to touch. The need to touch her was burning him up.

“Play the one about me,” she said quietly.

“They’re all about you.”

“Not the first one.”

“You’re right, that one’s about the Shrimp. But the Shrimp’s still part of you.”

She looked over at him then, her blue eyes troubled, and sighed. “I’m scared, Jamie. The music helps. Go play me another song.”

So he played her another song. But he walked over to the bed and kissed her first, gentle and undemanding, with his fingers resting on her wild coppery curls.

She let him.



“Caleb, sweetie, you look like hell,” Nana said with her customary good cheer. “Get in here. A chocolate chip cookie will fix you right up.”

He appreciated the thought, but it was going to take more than a chocolate chip cookie. Especially one of Nana’s.

Lifting the casserole dish he held in his right hand, he said, “I’m just dropping this off.”