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Dean laughed. “Still, I’d love to see something you worked on. I had a flair for the dramatic back in the day, you know. I’m actually from Chicago, and I used to work as a stagehand.”
Oh, boy. Here we go.
“I didn’t know you were a Chicago guy,” Elise said, treading around the topic at hand as best as she could.
“Sure am. Born and bred. I didn’t move out to Mackinac till the late seventies.”
“Do you ever miss Chicago? I just went there for one night for the very first time. I have to say; there’s something about that place. It’s nothing like LA. That’s for sure.”
“I can only imagine,” he said. “And to answer your question, I do miss it. Sometimes. I miss the guy I was back then, the scrappy idiot who didn’t know anything. I have to say, although it worked out, I married much too young, started having kids way too early... I didn’t know who I was, and already I was bouncing little Cindy on my knee. Then, there was Tracey, then Alex...”
Elise nodded. “I was such a kid when I had my kids, too. My mother told me I was crazy.”
“Oh, but there’s no way she didn’t have having grandkids around,” Dean said. His eyes shone with laughter. “Everyone always wants to tell everyone else what to do. But when you get right down to brass tax, more love is never a bad thing.”
“I’ve always felt this way, too,” Elise affirmed. “My mother was more of a rebel, and maybe less of a romantic. She always said we didn’t need men.”
“I would say, after knowing all the women I’ve known in my life, that’s much more true than we men would like to admit,” he said.
Elise was blown over by what a good guy her dad was.
She could see it: why her mother had loved him so much.
But why had she left him?
Why hadn’t they tried to work it out?
Did it really come down to this marriage, which he’d just said he hadn’t been ready for?
“By the way,” Elise said, stretching her finger toward the grand piano as their stomachs settled. “I was curious. Do you play?”
Dean arched his thick grey eyebrow. “I do.”
Elise hadn’t uncovered this fact yet in the diaries.
“I don’t suppose you’d like to perform something?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Would that bore you? My kids always tell me I like to show off a little too much.”
“No. My daughter, Penny, she always used to play. It drove my husband nuts because he felt like he couldn’t concentrate, but I fell in love with every single song,” Elise said. “It would make me so happy to hear something.”
Dean heaved a sigh, reached for the bottle of red wine, then poured them each another glass.
Slowly, Dean walked toward the piano. With his eyes away from her, Elise struggled to keep the tears at-bay.
This man was a genius. He was kind and considerate.
He was nothing at all like his son, Alex.
Dean sat at the piano bench and placed his fingers over the keys. He looked meditative, as though his mind was a million miles away.
Then, he began to play.
Elise recognized it.
It took her a long minute to recognize it, but it finally came to her.
It was the song that played in many scenes in the film this very man and her mother had worked on together.
