Roxy. Whom she’d snuck onto the plane…
She bent down to the soft tote just enough to peek inside. “Shh,” she whispered. “You’re a stowaway, remember?” She handed her dog a biscuit from the outside pocket, and Roxy greedily gobbled it up.
Passengers craned their necks, a few smiling, some shaking their heads, but Eleanor was already kneeling in the aisle. She opened the guitar case and ran her hand along the smooth wood—mahogany darkened by age, the scent of worn lacquer and tobacco still clinging faintly to the grain. Her fingers lingered over the delicate inlay of the name carved into the headstock:Euterpe. She’d named the guitar decades ago, after the Greek goddess of music, back when she believed naming things gave them power.
“What do you want to hear?” she asked, tuning the Gibson with deft, practiced fingers.
“‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’!” shouted a child from a few rows back.
Eleanor laughed, nodding. “All right, maestra.”
She plucked the familiar notes, slow and sweet, giving the nursery rhyme a gentle blues twist. The cabin filled with giggles and scattered applause. A chorus of other requests followed—“Old MacDonald,” “The Itsy Bitsy Spider”—and she played each with theatrical flair.
Then someone called out, “Something classical!”
Eleanor smiled with pride, her mind percolating for a second, and then she easily shifted into the opening bars of Beethoven’s “Für Elise”—Henry’s favorite. Her fingers danced along the strings. The melody rang out crisp and bright, her years of playing whisperingthrough every note, every night of playing in the twilight with lightning bugs dancing around. The contrast between the playful children’s songs and the structured elegance of Beethoven lifted her heart along with the memory she wished to freeze in front of her like a picture.
And then—without thinking, without asking—she eased into something more modern.
“Piece of My Heart,” originally recorded by Erma Franklin, and recently covered by Janis Joplin. The chords emerged, fierce and electric. The song had been a regular companion on the radio lately, Janis and Erma both having the kind of voices that made you feel like your ribs were cracking open just to make room. Eleanor didn’t have sheet music; she didn’t need it. She’d played this one alone, countless nights in the dark, until the shape of it lived in her bones.
Someone in the back of the plane stood and belted out the chorus:
“Take another little piece of my heart, baby!”
Another voice joined. Then another. Before long, the entire back half of the plane was humming and clapping along. Eleanor kept strumming, her heart soaring with every note, the whole cabin echoing with a chorus of strangers who suddenly felt like a band, like the audiences she missed playing for.
By the time they touched down, she had half a dozen new friends, three promises to find her at the festival, and one woman who asked for her autograph—“just in case.”
All that was left now was figuring out how to get onstage.
That part, Eleanor suspected, might take a little more magic.
Chapter Five
It had been Dean’s idea to take the Lincoln Continental.
Leanne had assumed they’d hop on a plane and chase her mother to California with tickets booked and bags checked, like reasonable people. But Dean, ever the strategist, had offered something different.
“If your mother drove cross-country, you might run into her along the way. Besides, this is the perfect chance to get Nora alone,” he’d contended. “Talk to her. Really talk. About her future.”
An unexpected suggestion from a man who spent most of his life behind glass walls in Manhattan. Dean was distant on the best days—home in body, absent in almost every other way. But he wasn’t wrong.
There had been a growing silence between Leanne and Nora for months. A cold draft of emotional distance neither of them seemed willing to name. At the end of the summer, Nora would leave for Yale, beginning her launch into life. The part where she peeled away. The part where she figured out who she was and wanted to become. The part where she might find a reason never to come home again.
Leanne wasn’t ready for that.
She was proud that Nora would be among Yale’s first class ofwomen—making history just by unpacking her books. But that pride wouldn’t keep Leanne warm at night. Pride wouldn’t replace the sound of her daughter’s footsteps overhead or the giggles as she gossiped with her girlfriends on the telephone.
Leanne carried her suitcase down the stairs, the worn handle warm in her trembling palm. A trace of Aqua Net and pressed linen lingered in the hallway, the scent of them setting off into the unknown. The more time that passed without knowing what had happened to her mother, the less Leanne was able to quell the shaking of her hands.
Dean was waiting at the door—buttoned-up, unreadable. He took the suitcase from her without a word and carried it to the trunk of the cherry-red Continental, the chrome grille catching the early morning light like a sneer.
“Remember,” he said, closing the trunk with a solid thunk. “This is a great opportunity.”
Leanne nodded. What she really wanted to do was ask:When willyoutake the opportunity to get to know your daughter?
Or better yet:When will you make time to know me again?
