She studied the note, mulling just the right response, and then very neatly wrote under his rectangle.
One? I thought you said four.
Xoxo your sister Glory
Now that,thatwas funny. She grinned, picturing his face when he read that.
Her smile faded. He wasn’t going to get squat for that leaf blower. And John-Mark needed that car to get to work and the absence of an exclamation point afterhelptold her he was maybe a little scared.
Which scared her, too.
Because scared people get desperate.
Then again, bless him, John-Mark had less imagination and more patience than Jonah, he was willing to work a little harder, and he probably had less pride, too. His friends were primarily dorks, and some of them even had brains.
But that little dull headache between her eyes throbbed a little harder, and that’s because her shoulder muscles had bunched up as befit... what had Eli called her? The linchpin. As if he’d actually known this for some time, and maybe wasn’t crazy about it. As if maybe it was something that bothered him a little. Somehow she’d always thought of her family as a single heaving, entropic entity, not in terms of who played what part.
But he was right: it’s not like her mom was helpless.
But she was the one who had stepped up to hold it together. At the cost of her own dreams and her own self.
She sucked in a breath. Encroaching on her awareness again was that steep drop and murky darkness. She knew it had to do with Jonah, and she had a hunch the blackness included every emotion, the way black included every color.
One of them, and she could feel it in the band tightening across her gut, was big anger.
She didn’t want to feel it.
She headed for her jacket instead, hanging on the hook just inside the front entry. She fished in the jacket pocket and found two wilted dollars and laid them on John-Mark’s rectangle.
And then she took her “coffee,” such as it was, back to her bedroom and pulled her guitar out of its case. She pulled it into her arms for a brief little good-morning cuddle, then leaned back in her bed and sighed and strummed a C major. The vitamin B6 of chords. Big and bright. She was trying to wake herself up.
She followed that with a friskily arpeggiated G major.
She decided she’d teach Annelise those two chords. And just in case Eden decided to unclench and sent Annelise over, she’d bring her guitar with her to work today.
She played the C and the G again. And if she wanted to, she could lay an endless variety of melodies over those two chords. But they weren’t what she needed right now.
She’d have to fish around until she found the chords that both fit and would purge her complicated mood, the ones that would coax out just the right words for just the right song, because she could feel that a song wanted out.
She leaped to the opposite end of the mood spectrum and strummed an almost comically gloomy D minor add 9. Then fingerpicked it. Beautiful, dirgey little chord. Monroe Porter and his death-metal friends would have sighed in pleasure.
“That’s a pretty tune, baby doll,” her mother called, her keys jingling as she let herself into the house. “A little like ‘Greensleeves.’”
This was so patently ridiculous and wrong it cheered Glory up perversely.
She got up and closed the door to her room.
She sat down on the floor again, leaned back against the old double bed, the one she thought she would have left behind a year ago, stared out the window at that old tree she’d stood under when she’d sung “Hey Hey What Can I Do” to Eli on his birthday, and at her stuffed tiger, whose striped butt was facing her and whose face was pointed out the window in the direction of the highway.
She was just going to have to sit still for a bit andfeel, no matter how uncomfortable she currently found that prospect.
He had said such beautiful things last night. Eli had learned early on to speak with truth and economy thanks to his stutter. She knew he never believed he was eloquent. Glory knew better.
Tentatively, she laid her fingers on the strings, in the shape of a D major sus 2. And trailed her fingers down them; more of a caress than a strum. It was wistful but not dark. Portentous, in that it promised something soaring. Restrained, but could be built into something, built and built in layers like the tide coming in.
That familiar little tingle told her. Yeah,nowshe was feeling it.
She went to a G major with the added D.