He had hardly asked, “Will you marry me?” before Jane nodded yes and pulled him up, kissing him and running her fingers through his thick hair. She could have kissed him there forever, but the electric violin began to play, and she remembered they were not alone on the roof.
She pulled free and smoothed his hair back with her hands, feeling slightly embarrassed. Caleb smiled his charming smile, and then he held up the blue felt box and opened it to present her with the ring—the ring he had worked so hard for all those long afternoons at Mrs. Hawthorne’s place. He lifted Jane’s hand to slip it onto her finger. It fit so well that she knew he’d had it sized. She took his hand in hers, interlaced their fingers, and held them up together to look at the yellow diamond, sparkling in the candlelight. The rooftop and the city seemed to fall away, the sirens and street noise fading, until only she and Caleb were standing there among the stars, floating on the sounds of an electric violin, their entwined forms cutting from the firmament a new constellation dedicated to love.
Jane was still lost in the dream of it all when Caleb pulled out her chair. She sat, and he uncorked a bottle of sparkling cider and filled their glasses.
“I hope it’s a good year,” she joked, remembering his saying it once at dinner.
He just smiled and stepped away from the table.
“Aren’t you going to join me?” she asked.
He reappeared with a serving platter. “Yes, but I’m also your server,” he said. “The friend I had lined up couldn’t make it.”
“Well, at least the music made it.”
“Isn’t Jeremy great?”
“Yes. I’ve never heard anything like it, and I love it.”
Jeremy seemed to have heard them because his smile stretched a little wider and he played a little louder. After seeing that everything was set, Caleb joined Jane at the table and held up his flute of cider to toast.
“To love,” he said.
“Okay,” Jane replied. “To love. And to me becoming Mrs. Caleb Cummings.”
“You sure?” he asked.
“Hell yes.”
“Not about marrying me,” he clarified. “About taking my name. Because it’s fine if you want to keep yours, or even hyphenate them. McKinney-Cummings sounds nice.”
Jane laughed so hard, cider splashed out of her glass. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve been waiting to get rid of my stupid family’s name? Now, can we toast before the food gets cold?”
“I’m afraid it’s already cold,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “I was expecting you at nine.”
“Look at this,” Jane said. “We’re not even married yet and we’re already arguing. To Mr. and Mrs. Caleb Cummings, and that’s final.”
“You wanna know something?” he asked, holding back his glass. “I’m crazy in love with you.”
Jane smiled. “I’m crazy in love with you too.”
She clinked her glass against his and held his gaze as they sipped. The violin played on, the candles flickered in their crystal urns, and never before had a cold meal and warm sparkling cider tasted so great to anyone anywhere on earth.
“Ooh,” Jane said after they had finished their main course. “He even has chocolate-covered strawberries for dessert.”
“No”—Caleb shook his head—“this is pre-dessert.”
“Pre-dessert?”
“Yes, because when we finish with these, I plan to take you down to our bedroom and have my way with you.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Jane said.
“You do? Please tell.”
She pulled out the Hilton room key card. “How about I take you back to my suite at the Hilton and have my way with you?”
“Your suite at the Hilton?”
“Well, it’s a regular room, really. But it has a queen bed.”
“And why do you have a room at the Hilton?”
Jane bit into a strawberry and grinned. “I’ll explain it on the way, my sweet fiancé.”
Chapter 2
Chris Cornell, without a doubt.”
“I say Kurt Cobain.”
“No way. Not even close.”
“Get out. You know Nirvana wrote way better songs than Soundgarden ever did.”
“The question was greatest voice of all time. Not greatest song. Ask yourself this—which of them would you rather be?”
“Easy. The one who’s still alive.”
“Chris Cornell. See, I rest my case.”
“What do you say, Jane?”
Jane looked up from the camcorder she had in her lap. There was a crowded table of young faces staring at her. “What’s that?” she asked.
“Chris Cornell or Kurt Cobain?”
“Neither,” she said.
“Neither? Who’s your favorite voice of all time, then?”
She smiled. “Caleb Cummings, of course.”
There was a moment of silence; then they all nodded.
“She’s good,” one of them said.
“Hey,” another kid cut in. “Did anyone notice that they all have the initials CC?”
“No, they don’t, stupid. Kurt is spelled with a K.”
Jane just smiled and enjoyed listening to their banter. In the short time Caleb had been in Austin, he’d amassed a misfit collection of friends, and Jane loved him for it. Some were musicians; others were friends from the warehouse where he worked. But they all admired Caleb. Jane could see it in the way they looked at him, how they hung on his every word. But if he was aware, he never let on . . . And maybe his humility was why everyone fell for him the way they did.
“There’s the lights,” someone said. “He’s coming out.”
Jane checked the borrowed video camera again, making sure it was ready. She didn’t know exactly why, but she was nervous. Maybe because this was Caleb’s first major solo gig. And on a Saturday night at Sherman’s too. But if Caleb was nervous, Jane couldn’t tell. He walked out onstage and stood in the lights, smiling at the crowd. Then he plugged in his guitar and proceeded to tune it, as if he were standing in his own living room without another soul around.
One by one, the crowd fell silent.
His quiet nonchalance onstage drew every eye and ear in the place. They were all waiting to see what this kid could do. His tuning somehow worked itself into a mini riff, and the riff somehow worked itself into a full-on guitar solo, and before Jane even knew what was happening, his fingers were running on the strings and the amps were wailing, and the entire place lit up with a kind of electricity that raised the hairs on Jane’s neck.
Caleb’s head hung, his hair dangling, and Jane was struck by how unaffected he was by the stage and the lights and the people. She could almost picture him as a boy, playing away by himself in some garage somewhere. He was an artist with something to say, a man baring his soul without fear, and the absolute absence of any fake showmanship was a huge turn-on to Jane.
Caleb played on—one minute, two minutes, three.
The crowd was so mesmerized by the sound of his guitar that Jane heard a surprised cheer erupt when he finally leaned in to the microphone and began to sing.
Baby, baby, baby. Baby, yeah, you know I’m singin’ to you.
Then Caleb lifted his head and looked right at Jane. The crowd dissolved away and she sat in the spotlight of his green-eyed stare, listening to the voice she so loved.
Maybe I’ll lay down this pen
Never write a song again
Baby, if only you ask me to
Maybe I’ll smash this old guitar
Get me a job sellin’ cars
Baby, if that’s what real men do
And maybe I’ll rise before the sun
Be home when the workday’s done
Oh, baby, if it proves my love is true
But if you’ll have me as I am
&n
bsp; The moody poet, the broken man
Then, baby, I’ll write every song for you
Because baby, baby, baby
I don’t care nothin’ ’bout no maybes
And I can’t wait to fuckin’ marry you
Fortunately for Jane, her shriek of delight was muted by the outrageous guitar riff Caleb unleashed to punctuate his engagement announcement. The boys at the table all turned their heads toward Jane to see if it was true. She grinned and held up the ring on her finger for them to see.
“Holy bling,” one of them shouted. “You could signal the space station with that thing.”
Jane blushed, saying, “It isn’t that big,” but her comment was covered up by another wave of guitar music from the stage.
She suddenly realized that the camcorder was still in her lap and that she had forgotten to start recording. She picked it up and turned it on, then settled back into her seat to record the rest of Caleb’s performance.
This is twice now that I’ve been caught off guard by him, she thought, smiling from behind the viewfinder.
But Caleb wasn’t the only one who could pull off a surprise. At least, she hoped not.
Caleb was still sleeping the following Monday when Jane sat down with her morning cup of coffee and her stack of parking tickets, then logged on to the Austin Municipal Court website to pay them. At least there was one good thing about getting up early to go job hunting, she thought. She wouldn’t have to worry about paying the meter.
As Jane entered the citation numbers and paid each ticket, annoying announcement banners kept flashing on the screen with various boring bits of city business that only a civics buff would care about or even read. New deferred disposition rules. Warrant roundup warnings. City vision and values. She had just paid the last ticket and was about to close the laptop when one of these banners caught her eye. Under the heading City Jobs, the notice read: Parking Enforcement Officer opening. Click to apply.
Jane clicked it just for kicks. A new window opened with a brief online application.
Oh, what the hell, she thought. At least she’d be able to hit the streets with her first job application of the day out of the way. Her résumé sure didn’t seem to be drawing any interest.
She typed her future name into the application just to see how it would look: Jane Cummings. She liked it. But they had been engaged for only a week now, she reminded herself, and it wasn’t officially her name yet. She reluctantly changed it back to McKinney. Then she entered her birth date: January 21, 1973.
“Nineteen seventy-three.”
When she said it aloud, it seemed so damn long ago already. Another era even. A time you’d tell today’s youth about as they sat slack-jawed with dumbfounded disbelief at all the things you had had to get by without. Like iPhones and Snapchat. But who needs any of that crap anyway? Jane wondered. Give her real letters to keep in a box, not an e-mail on some hard drive. Give her back the excitement of a dial tone, the kitchen cord stretched around the corner and under the bedroom door as she fell asleep on the phone with her first true love, whose name she couldn’t even remember now. It was sometimes strange to think that she had had a driving permit by the time Caleb was born in 1988. Although from this side of the millennium, both those dates seemed equally ancient. And if he didn’t care about the age difference, why in hell should she?
Jane finished the application, pressed Submit, closed her laptop, and tossed the paid tickets into the kitchen trash. She doubted she’d hear anything back about the job, and that was just fine with her. If she never saw another parking ticket, it would be too soon.
Jane spent the day walking the streets of downtown Austin, at a loss for what to do.
She had been with the same Pacific Northwest insurance company selling individual and supplemental health insurance policies for almost twenty years, but her company had no affiliate in Texas. So here she was, forty years old and in a strange town, looking for work for the first time in two decades. She kept hearing her late sponsor’s voice in her head, telling her that sometimes what seemed like lousy luck might just be a blessing in disguise, the universe doing for her what she couldn’t do for herself. And hadn’t she always found the insurance business to be boring anyway? But she had been good at it. And it had allowed her to pay her mortgage all those years. She’d even earned enough to save a little extra each month in her IRA, all while raising her daughter alone. Her daughter. Just the sound of it in her head brought up a world of pain. It already seemed so long ago—that day when everything in her life had forever changed, that day the phone call came.
She walked for several hours, killing time and thinking about her daughter. She’d catch her own reflection in a building as she passed, and for just the briefest moment, she’d see Melody instead of herself there in the glass. A stab of grief, perhaps even of guilt, would pierce her belly and she’d tell herself that it was just the heat, then silently say the Serenity Prayer and keep on walking, mother and daughter shadowing each other in the hot Austin streets. Once, the likeness was so striking that she stopped and stared at her reflection for a long time, but when she raised her hand to the window to touch her daughter’s cheek, a tapping on the glass shattered the illusion, and a man in a necktie was looking out at her from a conference room full of suits, waving her away as if she were some insane street woman interrupting their business.
She finally worked up enough courage to stop outside the Jackson McFey Insurance Annex building. This time she paused and intentionally looked into the mirrored doors to ask Melody to wish her luck. But it was only her reflection that she saw now, once again alone. Her blouse had come untucked and a strand of hair was hanging in her face. She tucked them both back and entered the cool, dim lobby.
The only sounds inside were the whoosh of air-conditioning and the gentle clack of her ballet flats on the worn marble floors. It seemed to be a place long abandoned. She looked at the directory, found the floor number, and entered the elevator. When it stopped, she stepped off and followed the sound of laughter to a reception desk on an otherwise empty floor, where a young man was talking on his mobile phone. As Jane approached, he glanced at her with an annoyed expression, swiveled in his chair to face away from her, and kept on talking. Jane stood there for several minutes, feeling uncomfortable, before she finally crossed to the small seating area to wait.
“Hello. Excuse me. Can I help you?”
Jane looked up. She’d drifted off for a moment. She stood and approached the reception desk again and handed the young man her résumé.
“I hope so, yes. I’m Jane McKinney. I recently relocated from Washington State and my company said you might have a sales territory opening up. I’ve sent a few messages, but I’m not sure if I even have the right e-mail address.”
He took her résumé and set it on top of a stack of other papers without even looking at it. “I’ll pass it on to human resources,” he said. “But we’re actually closing the office here in another two weeks, so things are a little, you know, crazy right now. Maybe you could check back in a couple months with the main office in Houston.”
“Houston,” Jane repeated, sighing.
“Tell me about it. They offered me a position, but there’s no way I’m dealing with that humidity. Austin’s bad enough.”
“Howdy, Jane!” the familiar voice called.
Jane stopped midway across the parking lot and looked up at Mr. Zigler. He was sitting on a lawn chair set atop one of the beer delivery trucks, wearing sunglasses and no shirt, the thick hair on his oiled chest glistening in the sun.
“How about this weather?” he asked.
“I do believe I miss the rain,” Jane said, feeling the heat waft up from the blacktop.
“Nonsense,” he said. “This is paradise.”
“Yeah, right,” Jane replied. “If it gets any hotter, maybe this blacktop’ll melt and you can dive off that silly
truck and go swimming in it.”
Mr. Zigler laughed. “It’s asphalt.”
“What’s that?” Jane asked.
“You ain’t far from right. Used to be blacktopped, but the trucks kept sinking into it. Asphalt’s better. People think they’re the same, but they’re not.”
Jane smiled and was about to walk on when he pointed to the deli box in her hand.
“That for me?”
“No,” she said. “You know it isn’t.”
“Shit,” he said. “You can’t blame a man for wishin’.” Then he thumbed his glasses up on his nose and sat back in his chair. “If you’re looking for that boyfriend of yours,” he called as Jane walked away, “I fired him for drinkin’ on the job.”
Jane just laughed and kept on walking.
She found Caleb in the warehouse, off-loading cases of beer from a pallet. He didn’t notice her right away, and she stood watching him work. He wore a simple white T-shirt that he had sweat through and it was clinging to his back. She could see his lean muscles working beneath the wet cotton as he hefted the heavy cases onto the stack. She noticed how his jeans hung low on his waist, and she worried that all this laboring in the heat was causing him to lose weight.
When he saw her, he froze and smiled at her over the case of beer cradled in his arms. “Well, aren’t you a cool drink of something to look at.”
“That’s funny,” she replied, “because I was actually just getting all hot and steamy standing here watching you.”
Caleb set the case down and wiped the sweat from his brow with his forearm. “How’d you get past old Mr. Zigler?”
“I told him I was in love with him, even though I’m marrying you.”
Caleb laughed and stripped off his gloves. “Get over here and let me kiss you.”
Jane's Harmony (Jane's Melody #2) Page 2
