Page 144 of Playing By Ear

“Very.” He silenced the string as a weight settled within his stomach. “I miss all the music he’ll never make.”

She glanced back at the house, then whispered, “It’s like how I miss Grandda, even though he’s still here.”

Oh. Had Belinda told her Martin was dying? If the lass was merely guessing, Jamie had no doubt just confirmed it with his own face.

“Are you thinking about things he might not be around for?” he asked her.

Lucy nodded. “Like Christmas. Last year he took us to Switzerland. I went snowboarding.”

“Wow. How did that go?”

“I fell down a lot, and I wanted to stop. I was crying so hard, like the biggest baby.” Her eyes bugged out. “But Grandda said I had to keep trying until I got it right.”

“And did you?”

“Yes. Then I was amazing.”

He grinned at her. “Guess what your grandda gave me for my sixth Christmas?”

Lucy’s lips moved as she pondered the possibilities. “A beach?”

“Naw, he didnae give me a beach. He’s not that rich.”

She laughed, her head tilting back just like her mum’s did. “I meant a holiday on a beach, ya doughnut.”

“Ohhh. No, he gave me something much better.” He held up Wendy. “I’d been begging for a guitar since I first seen Prince on TV. My hands weren’t big enough for Wendy, but just like you with the snowboard, I kept trying until I made it work.” He remembered the bloodstains on the guitar’s neck from pressing steel strings with uncalloused fingers, and how he’d switched from rugby to football to protect his hands.

They started with the differences between ukulele and guitar, and he learned almost as much from her as vice versa.

“Teach me a song now,” she said, swinging her legs in the chair, impatient with the basics.

“How do you usually learn to play a song?” he asked her.

“From YouTube, or I find tabs on the internet. But sometimes I can’t find the songs I want for free, and Mummy says we don’t buy things online.”

Another security protocol, no doubt. “You can learn to play those songs by ear. Like, figure out the notes by listening to them.”

Her eyes popped wide, as though he’d suggested crossing the Channel in a bathtub. “You can do that?”

“Anyone can. When you sing along to your favorite songs, you’re not looking at sheet music for the notes, right?”

“Right.”

“If you can do that for your voice, you can do it for guitar. It takes loads of practice, and you’ve got to really listen. Hear what’s actually there, not what you expect to hear or want to hear.”

“Why would I want to hear something that’s not there?”

“Och, doll, that’s a question for the ages.” He took out his phone—his real one, not the family one—and brought up his music app. “We start with the melody. We’re gonnae identify the first note of each song, then you’ll find it for us on the guitar.”

They chose a few songs together, and Jamie found her ear as sharp as his own. Then they took a break to admire the flowers along the perimeter of the garden—mostly pansies, according to Lucy—as well as an array of lilies that she’d helped Martin plant the previous autumn.

As she smoothed the soil around the base of a bright-yellow lily, Lucy abruptly asked, “Were you far away?”

“Sorry?”

“I asked Mummy why I never met you before, and she said you weren’t around.”

“Oh. Well.” How much could he share? How much would Lucy understand? “I’ve always lived in Glasgow, I just wasn’t around the family. Your grandda and I had a falling-out, see, and we…needed time away from each other.”