A Thousand Perfect Notes(29)

‘Um,’ Beck says intelligently.

August pats his shoulder. ‘Stop thinking. It looks too painful for you.’ She holds her huge jumper out like a basket and piles in pears.

Beck peels off his own jumper and, after blasting Joey to get off the road, he gets a dozen less mangled pears. He feels self-conscious, but the two pear deliverers don’t seem to care because they’re too busy trying to coax their busted truck back to life.

August sniffs a pear. ‘Ooh, heavenly. These will make a delicious pie.’

Beck can think of a dozen ways to consume all these pears. First will be just gobbling them, skin and all. He can’t even remember the last time he had fresh fruit.

Hauling their spoils, they trudge the last block to the Keverich house. Joey keeps cackling like a deranged chicken and shrieking ‘Pears! Pears!’ at random intervals.

It’s only when they reach Beck’s driveway that he realises he has no idea if the Maestro is home yet.

‘Shall we put them in your kitchen?’ August asks.

‘Um, how about we just leave them out here and—’

‘Beck Keverich,’ August says. ‘I’ve been in your house before and it’s not a hellhole.’

‘It’s not that, it’s just – I …’ He tries desperately to remember when the Maestro said she’d be home. Late? Early? And if she is home, he’s already dead.

He can’t get deader.

‘Fine,’ he mumbles and slowly opens the front door.

Joey slips under his elbow and runs inside screaming about pears. Beck can’t see any signs of life, so he holds the door open for August. If she dumps the pears and runs then this might—

‘Oh, hi, Mummy!’ Joey says from the lounge. ‘We found pears! Can we have a pie? August says we should make pie.’

No.

His insides split apart. August is in his house, wiping her feet on the mat, oblivious to the fact he’s frozen. She strolls in like she’s been inside a hundred times, not just once when she was bleeding to death. He can’t let her go into the kitchen alone. He jumps forward, wanting to warn her, wanting to drag her out – wanting none of this to be happening.

The Maestro and August enter the kitchen at the same time.

Beck watches a chill fury wash across the Maestro’s face.

Joey chats on about pie, and August, oblivious, deposits her armful of pears on the kitchen bench. Then she wipes her hands on her shorts and, with a smile as bright as summer, she reaches out to shake hands with the Maestro.

‘Hi,’ she says. ‘I’m August. Beck’s friend.’

Beck wants to bury himself. It’s over. The Maestro will blame everything on August – this trip, the reason he’s started speaking up, even the lax way he’s been practising. And she’ll be right, of course. But this was his. He had something – he had something happy for once in his miserable life.

The Maestro shakes August’s hand and gives a tight smile. ‘How surprising,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know Beck had a new friend.’

He wants to slam his own head into a wall.

‘I’m assuming we’re friends by now,’ August says. ‘Scavenging pears seems a friend-sort-of-thing to do.’

‘Scavenging?’

Beck clears his throat, though he’d like to turn around and walk out the door and drown himself, basically. ‘Um, yeah. A truck dropped a bunch of them so we …’ He trails off. ‘Anyway, this is, yeah, um, August. She’s leaving now.’

August wrinkles her nose at him.

‘So can we have pie?’ Joey says, a pear in each hand. ‘Can we have nine pies?’

‘Hush, Sch?tzchen,’ the Maestro says, because Joey is a darling while Beck is a moron. She turns back to August, still cold – in Beck’s eyes – but acting disturbingly nice. ‘That’s very kind of you, August. How long have you been … friends?’

‘A month or so.’ August smooths her stretched jumper back against her belly. ‘We partnered for a paper in English. At first our relationship was War and Peace. Now it’s Sense and Sensibility.’

Beck looks at her like she’s grown horns.

‘I’m referring to the titles,’ August explains. ‘It’s sensible because when he sticks with me, I feed him cake and improve his grades.’

The Maestro gives a tiny laugh – how dare she – and nods. ‘Beck is not a hard worker.’ How dare she.

‘Not really,’ August confides. ‘But once you get past his serial killer vibe, he’s just an adorable puppy.’

Beck coughs. ‘Um, I’m standing right here.’

Joey has given up on being fed pie, so she drags a chair to the kitchen bench and attempts to reach the big knives. The Maestro plucks her off the chair with one strong hand and sets her down.

‘Did you arrange this afternoon’s picnic?’ the Maestro says.

Beck says, ‘No,’ at the same time August says, ‘Oh, we totally did.’

They look at each other. Beck’s eyes try desperately to convey the stop everything signal. August clearly is not used to such messages.

‘It’s come to my attention, Mrs Keverich—’ August begins.

‘Ms,’ the Maestro says.