Spontaneous applause broke out again, and she took another sip of water. “To that end,” she said, “I’ll be donating the proceeds of The Sessions at Blue Hollow Falls to the guild, for the purpose of creating a music venue here, expanding on what you’ve started with your love of music here at Sawyer’s place, and hopefully bringing your music, and your passion, to any and everyone who wants to come to Blue Hollow Falls and fall in love.” She looked at Seth and smiled. “Like I have.”
If she’d thought the place couldn’t get any louder, she was wrong. She laughed and covered her ears as the thundering response went on for many long minutes. Finally, Drake did a loud whistle, and slowly the room, then the rest of the building, settled down.
“Okay then,” she said. “Let’s play some music.” She turned to pick up her fiddle, and noticed it wasn’t resting by her stool where she’d put it. She looked at Drake, then at her bandmates. Drake nodded toward Jake. A hush fell over the room as Jake stepped off the stage, then climbed back on again.
Pippa knew immediately what he had in his hands. “Oh, Jake—” she began, shocked that he’d do something like this, on tonight of all nights.
Jake smiled and handed her a small folded card. “It’s okay. This is from my dad,” he told her, his voice getting picked up by the mike. “And so is this.” And he handed Pippa the case she knew held his mother’s beautiful fiddle.
Pippa immediately covered her suddenly full throat with her hand, her eyes too blurry to read the words on the card. A moment later, Seth was up on stage beside her, his hand on her back. She covered the mic. “Did you know about this?” she asked in a hoarse whisper.
“No,” he told her, then slipped the card from her hand and read it to her, and only to her. “‘As I said to you before, this was made for a woman’s hand. And you were right, it was meant to be played. I know your fiddle is special, too, but even if just for one song, Zoey would have been so honored to know her fiddle was being played by you. I admire you, Pippa, and your music, but even more, thank you for being the friend my son needed, when he most needed one. Blessings to you, and play her well. Wilson.’”
“Oh boy,” Pippa said, then fanned her face. Drake stepped over and handed her a napkin so she could dab at her eyes. “How on earth can I sing now?” she said, laughing and sniffling at the same time.
“Like you’ve never sung before,” Seth said, and kissed her, making the crowd erupt in cheers all over again. “I love you,” he whispered in her ear. “Go knock ’em dead.”
Pippa nodded, then tugged Seth back as another thought struck her. “Could you go back and slip a note under Sawyer’s office door—don’t bother Will—but let Will know I want to see him after the show, please? Or whenever he’s up to seeing me? I can’t not thank him for this. Thank you,” she whispered when he nodded and gave her a wink. She reached up, tugged his beard down, and kissed him hard and fast on the mouth.
The crowd broke into hoots and whistles. Grinning, Seth waved to them as he hopped down from the stage.
Pippa opened the case and took out the fiddle. It was a stunning piece of craftsmanship, and Pippa was both humbled and more than a little thrilled that she was going to have the chance to be the one to make her sing.
“It’s all tuned, just like yours,” Jake told her nervously. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Are you kidding?” she told him. Then she dragged his stool next to hers. “Come on up here.” She settled on her stool, and waited for him to settle on his. She leaned over and whispered to him the name of the song she wanted to play, then turned around and told her band as well. She propped the fiddle on her shoulder and picked up her bow, then looked to Jake, who did the same.
Then she looked at the audience, and at Seth, and she leaned forward, as if she was going to tell them all a secret ... and she sang.
* * *
Back in Sawyer’s office, Will watched on the monitor as Pippa played Zoey’s fiddle as if she’d been born with it in her hands. No one could have honored it, or the memory of his wife, any better. He watched his son play and didn’t even recognize the young man he’d become. Will sat, stunned, at just how good Jake truly was, and felt a rush of shame that he’d ever considered keeping his child from following his dreams, just to hide from his own pain.
Then Pippa rested her bow and leaned into the mike to sing. Her voice was so different now, haunting and rich. She didn’t sound like Zoey anymore, which should have relieved him, but instead, it caught at his gut. As if, somehow, that last tenuous connection he’d had was gone forever.
Then Jake lowered his bow and leaned into the same mike alongside Pippa and shocked Will into utter stillness as his son opened his mouth ... and sang. There Zoey was, only this time, it was an actual flesh-and-blood, living, breathing part of her, singing with a voice so clear, so true, Will felt something break apart inside of him.
And while their bows danced across the strings, and they sang a duet about apples in springtime and the wisdom of the trees, Will laid his head on his arms and did something he hadn’t been able to do since the night his wife died. He cried. Shuddering, wracking, soul-rending sobs. And as he let out eleven long years of pain and anguish and bone-deep loneliness, he could have sworn he felt her hands on his shoulders, and her voice whispering in his ear what she always said when he told her he loved her: “I love you to the moon, my fiddle-playing man, and I always will.”
Read more about Blue Hollow Falls
in the holiday anthology A Season to Celebrate,
available now!
A BLUE HOLLOW FALLS CHRISTMAS
by Donna Kauffman
“Weddings on Christmas. There should be a law.”
“For or against?”
Moira Brogan drained the last of the Coke from her glass until the straw made a slurping sound, jiggled the ice a bit, then found one last sip. Because you need more sugar. And more caffeine. Ignoring her little voice, as she had been all day—week, month, year—she glanced up at the bartender, pondering the question with all the gravity of the attorney she was. “Against, your honor. I mean, who wants to share their anniversary with Santa’s big day? It should be all about him.”
“Unless you don’t believe in Santa,” replied the bartender.
The bartender—Sally, according to her hotel name badge—looked about five or six years older than Moira’s own twenty-seven, and eons wiser.
“Even if you don’t, it should be recognized that many people do,” Moira countered, warming to the debate. Debate she understood. Debate she knew how to win. Life outside the courtroom? Not so much with the winning there. Case in point? Sitting in a rural hotel bar drowning her sorrows in a gallon of carbonated sugar and caffeine instead of dancing the night away at her brother’s lovely and beautiful wedding reception up in Blue Hollow Falls. “Those people, the believers,” Moira went on, perhaps more doggedly than required given the judge and jury was bartender Sally, “might, and quite probably would, construe a person marrying on such a day as being ... well, sacrilegious. Or, at the very least, unimaginative. Like, said person could only improve on the most celebrated day of the year by getting married on it. Somewhat self-aggrandizing, don’t you think?”
“Point taken,” Sally said, judiciously.
Gaining momentum, Moira said, “I mean, I suppose we might include a clause for people like my wonderful and completely besotted brother, who are just so madly in love, they think what could be more festive than getting married on Christmas? Because, really, what could be?”
“Getting married in Disney World?”
“Ha,” Moira said with a grin, raising her empty glass in toast. “Point to the prosecution.” Then she caught the look on Sally’s face and set her glass down. “Oh my God. You didn’t. Did you? Was Mickey Mouse the justice of the peace?” A splutter of laughter threatened and Moira tried to frown it into submission. Firstly, because it would be rude to her new friend Sally, and secondly, because she knew she was one-too-many-insomnia-ridd
led-nights away from the kind of laughter that would quickly devolve into a run of convulsive, bordering-on-hysterical giggles. And she doubted Sally would join in, given it was her nuptials that had triggered them.
“Not me, your honor.” Sally smiled and lifted a hand, as if she was being sworn in. “Maid of honor.”
“Me, too!” Moira replied, perhaps a little too loudly. In addition to far too little sleep, she was definitely way too hopped up on wedding cake. “Well, co-maid of honor, anyway, with the bride’s sister.”
“Yeah,” Sally replied with a smile and a nod toward Moira’s outfit. “I gathered.”
Moira looked down to the strapless, silk and organza, emerald green formal she was wearing. She probably should have changed when she’d first gotten back to the hotel. She’d left the reception right after Seth and Pippa had taken off for their honeymoon in Ireland. She’d done her due diligence, smiled and laughed her way through all of her sworn duties. But once her brother and brand-new sister-in-law were gone, Moira had wanted nothing more than to be alone with her stupid, self-pitying misery. She was not proud of herself, of her apparent inability to get over her latest life disaster. Either of them. But the romantic disaster had been last spring, for God’s sake.
Only when she’d gotten back to the hotel in Turtle Springs, itself a tiny town tucked into a curve of the Hawksbill River, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, she’d realized the very last thing she wanted was to be alone.
She just hadn’t wanted to be with people who knew her. People who would expect her to be overcome with joy and happiness for her brother, Seth, and his new bride, whom Moira adored almost as much as she adored her older brother. And she was quite sincerely thrilled for them. She was. It was just the host of painful memories watching them say their I Do’s had rousted up, coupled with the recent collapse of all her future career plans, that had her escaping the family-clogged reception like Cinderella from the ball.
She didn’t know which had made her more miserable, the tough love “oh, come now, Mouse, get on over yourself, lass” looks from her oldest brother and sister, Aiden and Kathleen, the “you poor, wee thing” pats on the shoulder from her dear Aunt Margery, or the endless variations of “don’t you worry, you’ll get married, too ... someday” comments from what felt like every last one of the rest of her relatives and family friends. And given she was the youngest of six, as were both of her parents, their collective clan was a small army. And that was just the Brogan side.
Pippa’s family, straight over from Ireland, was just as prolific when it came to propagating the family tree. And they brought those lovely, awful accents with them. Lovely because that beautiful lilt was still music to her ears, and her heart. Awful because she still missed that particular lilt and the man it had belonged to, and hearing it all around her, in conjunction with a wedding no less, had doomed any chance she might have had to avoid reliving every moment of their whirlwind love affair. All the good parts, which had been every moment of it, and the very, very sad parts ... which had only been right at the end of it. Because it had been the end of it.
And no one in her family even knew that her big, bold career plans of being a trial attorney in Silicon Valley had suffered an equally swift and demoralizing demise when she’d learned she’d flunked the bar exam. Yeah, won’t that be a fun reveal.
So, she’d fled back to the small hotel she’d booked herself into, claiming she’d be fine there as all the lodgings in Blue Hollow Springs were fully taken by her family and the equally extensive MacMillan clan. In truth, she’d been relieved for the excuse. She’d liked knowing she had an escape route, a bolt hole, somewhere to hide, if needed.
Upon her return, the small hotel lounge had been packed to the gills with reporters from all over the globe, along with a fair number of the less-than-savory paparazzi, who’d all rushed to the rural mountain region—in most cases, judging by the bevy of accents in the room, from far, far away—in hopes of getting photos or footage of Moira’s new sister-in-law, Pippa MacMillan. Well, Pippa Brogan now, she presumed. It just so happened, Pippa was a very famous Irish folk singer. The reporters hadn’t been successful, though. Blue Hollow Falls had well and truly adopted Pippa, and they protected their own. The ranks had been locked up tight, and not so much as a single long-range lens had intruded upon the happy couple’s special day.
From the raucous noise level inside the hotel bar, Moira presumed the collective journalist horde had apparently decided to drown their defeat as well, only in something far stronger than her Coke.
Moira took another long sip of her soda, the fizzy bubbles tickling her nose, absently realizing that while she’d slipped back into her melancholy, Sally had refreshed her drink. Moira continued to sip while she watched Sally deftly handle the gaggle pressed up against the bar. Moira shifted away, into the shadows where she had tucked herself at the very end of the bar.
The only reason she had a stool at all was because Sally had spied Moira edging her way around the periphery of the dimly lit place and had slid one under the exit gap at the end of the bar. Sally probably kept one on her side of the bar specifically for forlorn-looking creatures such as herself. Sally had even taken Moira’s long, winter coat and tucked it back in the office, making Moira initially wonder if perhaps the bartender was angling for some kind of wedding scoop herself. But, even sleep-deprived and on a cake frosting high, Moira was pretty good at reading people. Bartender Sally was a good egg. She’d bet her one and still only law license on it.
Moira really didn’t want to think about that second law license, the one she didn’t have. The lack of which had crushed all her future plans. Instead, she tilted up her glass, intent on crunching a few pieces of ice, only the full cluster slid down and splashed her in the face. Sally appeared like the magical genie Moira was beginning to suspect she was, and proffered a clean napkin to Moira while quickly mopping up the spill. “Thanks,” Moira said, checking the front of her gown, relieved to see she hadn’t stained the fabric.
She caught Sally checking out the dress, and held her arms out slightly. “I thought the bride did a pretty good job picking these out,” Moira said. “I mean, they’re tasteful, and they don’t make me look like I’m playing dress-up as a Grecian goddess or anything.” She looked back at Sally and sighed. “It still has bridesmaid written all over it, though, doesn’t it?” Lifting a hand to her short mop of auburn curls, she said, “At least I don’t have the teased and lacquered beehive up-do to go with it. It could be so much worse.”
“Actually, you look great. Amazing even,” Sally said, appearing quite sincere. “The green dress, with your red hair, and fair skin? And don’t get me started on the green eyes, which I’m just going to pretend are colored contacts, because, honestly, so not fair.”
Moira blushed and laughed at the same time. “If you’re angling for a bigger tip, done. I’ll just be emptying my wallet on the bar right now.”
Sally laughed, waved her hand. “Just being honest. But I’d have known it was a bridesmaid dress no matter what it looked like. This is Turtle Springs, Virginia,” Sally added dryly. “Out here, we don’t have much call for formal anything.” She pulled another two beers from the tap, put them on a tray and handed them to one of the waitresses, while taking three more orders from the other waitress, which she’d already started filling with her free hand. People jammed up against the bar shouted their orders non-stop and somehow Sally managed to pull their drinks, smile and joke with them, all while continuing the conversation with Moira as if they were seated at a café table alone together, dishing over wedding gossip.
“You’re very good at your job,” Moira told her, vaguely wondering what kind of money a bartender made. Maybe she needed to completely rethink her life. And maybe you need to steer clear of the caffeine and sugar and get more than a catnap at night. She prudently pushed her once again empty glass away.
“Besides, it’s not like your brother’s wedding was flying under the radar,” Sally cont
inued, taking the compliment in stride. “It’s been front-page news pretty much everywhere since the moment they got engaged.” She nodded to the throng. “Hence this insanity.”
“Well, they did initially try and keep the wedding date under wraps,” Moira said. “In truth, I think Seth thought that having it today would kind of throw everybody off. Like, who would get married on Christmas? Because he’d never want to compete with Santa, either.”
“Who would?” Sally offered.
“Right? But there was no way to keep it from getting out. I mean, you know all about it, everyone knows all about it.” She waved at the crowded lounge. “The whole world knows about it, because, you know—”
“Pippa MacMillan,” Sally finished for her, nodding, as if nothing else needed to be said. And it didn’t.
“It’s such a happily-ever-after story, too.” Sally, who had seemed so pragmatic and seen-it-all, clearly wasn’t immune to the Christmas fairytale wedding, either. “I mean, Pippa finally returns to the music scene just when speculation reached the point that everyone was convinced she’d never come back from her injury, and then she’s getting engaged after a whirlwind romance during her secret hideaway trip to the States? And they’re getting married on Christmas? Even Mickey Mouse has to bow to that.” Sally let out a self-deprecating chuckle. “Listen to me, getting all sappy.” She wiped down the bar and went to refill Moira’s glass but Moira waved her away. “But, you know what, a gorgeous holiday wedding up in the mountains here? What could be more romantic than that?”
Falling in love while you’re on a whirlwind trip to Ireland, was Moira’s immediate thought. Finally allowing yourself to consider having a personal life after years of studying, and studying, and more studying. Maybe even picturing your own wedding day for the first time.
Bluestone & Vine Page 31
