Dylan Russell, forty-seven, widely known as Maybe, owns a store called Good Used Stuff on Highway 211, two miles inland from the mouth of the Eel River on the far north coast of California. Quite a few locals call the store Gus, and more than a few of those locals think Maybe’s name is Gus.
Maybe started telling people his name was Maybe when he was three-years-old. He was born in a small town in British Columbia, the middle child of his mother’s five kids. His mother’s name was Sylvia Bresson. She had her first two children with a man named Alvin Stillwater. Then she married a man named Clement Russell, and almost exactly nine months after she married Clement, Maybe was born.
So one day when Maybe was three and trailing after Clement in the hardware store, the clerk asked, “That your boy, Clem?”
And Clement shrugged and said, “Maybe.”
Titus Troutcatcher, Maybe’s neighbor, calls Maybe Raven; and Leona Chan, a bartender at Gypsy’s, calls Maybe Turq because most of Maybe’s shirts are turquoise and the exterior of Maybe’s house and the wooden floor of Good Used Stuff are both painted a soothing pale turquoise.
Unbeknownst to the public—and even Maybe sometimes forgets about this until tax time—the official name of Good Used Stuff is Found Treasure. That’s the name that appears on Maybe’s business license and on his business checks, which he rarely uses. And the reason no one knows Found Treasure is the official name of the business is that the first sign Maybe put up on the south side of the building, the side facing Highway 211, on the very first day of business nineteen years ago, was GOOD USED STUFF, the words hastily scrawled with a fat black felt pen on an eight-foot-length of butcher paper.
Two days later, business booming, Maybe put up a second somewhat smaller butcher-paper sign that said Buy Sell Trade. The next day, he put up a third sign that said Local Produce & Art, his fourth sign said Exquisite Driftwood & Rocks, his fifth Chairs & Tables, his sixth Potted Plants & Wood Carvings, his seventh Tools & Furniture & Whatnot.
Six months after opening shop, when Maybe finally finished carving the letters of the large wooden sign he had intended to affix above the front door of the store—a massive plank of white cedar with ornate Gothic letters spelling Found Treasure—everybody in the county was calling his store Good Used Stuff; and Maybe had come to prefer that name, though the store carried as much new stuff as used stuff.
So he placed the finished Found Treasure sign on the biggest table in the store along with several other one-of-a-kind signs, and a wealthy couple from New York City bought the Found Treasure sign to mark the driveway of their beach house in Amagansett; and they were gleeful to get the sign for a mere three thousand dollars plus exorbitant shipping costs.
The aforementioned seven butcher-paper signs have since been replicated as handsome wooden signs that are affixed to the outside wall facing Highway 211. The largest of these wooden signs is a fourteen-foot-long, two-foot-tall rendering of GOOD USED STUFF securely bolted to the wall above the very wide red front door.
∆
Good Used Stuff occupies a high-ceilinged room seventy-feet-long and fifty-feet-wide, essentially a barn with lots of windows and no loft. Three large fans hang above the airy space, their swirling rattan blades circulating the heat rising from an enormous black woodstove that dominates the northwest corner of the vast interior.
One of the many interesting things about Good Used Stuff is that a surprisingly large percentage of tourists who stop here do the following: they get out of their cars, gaze in wonder at the surrounding giant redwoods, climb the four steps to the long front porch, enter the store through the very wide red door, give the contents of the enormous room a cursory glance, and immediately skedaddle because they perceive the store to be nothing more than a repository of useless junk. Maybe calls these people Superficialists and makes no effort to override their first impressions.
∆
Maybe’s house is not visible from the road or from Good Used Stuff unless one is standing on the roof of the store; and then one can see his house over a little rise a hundred yards to the north, a two-story turquoise building centered on a massive wooden platform suspended twenty feet off the ground in a ring of seven gargantuan redwoods.
The extra-wide front door of Maybe’s house, painted a fanciful magenta, opens onto a first floor featuring a large living room, kitchen, and bathroom, while the second floor has two small bedrooms, a large study, and a small bathroom. A wide metal stairway rises from the forest floor to the spacious deck surrounding the house, the wideness of the stairs and the extra-wide front door intended to enhance the schlepping of furniture up and down the stairs and in and out of the house—one of Maybe’s passions being the frequent changing of his home decor.
∆
Maybe is five-foot-ten, fit as a fiddle, with longish brown hair, pale blue eyes, a slender nose, kindly lips, and a broad chin. He shaves every three or four days, and now and then grows a mustache, though he never keeps his mustaches for long. A wearer of khaki trousers and the aforementioned turquoise shirts, Maybe wears brown suede loafers when working in Good Used Stuff, sturdy boots when moving heavy things or operating a chainsaw or using an axe, and otherwise goes barefoot.
Friendly and thoughtful and a preternatural money maker, Maybe has not had a steady girlfriend since he moved to the Eel River watershed from Canada twenty years ago when he was twenty-seven. His reputation among local gals is that he is relationship averse. However, when the aforementioned Leona Chan, she who calls Maybe Turq, spent the night with Maybe for the first time four years ago, she asked him if the rumors of his relationship aversion were true.
Maybe pondered Leona’s question and replied with his slight western Canadian accent, “No, I love being in relationships. I just no longer have any preconceived notions about how long they should last or what form they should take. I used to aspire to lifelong monogamy. But after being married for seven disastrous years to a woman I should have spent two happy days with and not a minute more, I find it much more satisfying to let relationships be whatever they really want to be.”
And thereby hangs this tale.
∆
A few miles inland from Good Used Stuff, at the end of a dirt track that goes unnamed on official maps of the area and is known to locals as Snake Creek Road, there stands an old farmhouse lovingly renovated by the current owners, Sharon Quincy and her sons Tober and Augie, both young men born in that farmhouse.
Sharon is thirty-nine, a New Jersey transplant, five-foot-three, strong and pretty with short brown hair and dark blue eyes. A former ballerina and grocery store clerk, Sharon is currently a violinist in the Eureka Symphony, a teacher of violin and guitar, a gardener and beekeeper, and plays guitar and violin and sings in the Snake Creek Quartet.
Tober is sixteen, six-foot-two, broad-shouldered, with long brown hair and his mother’s dark blue eyes. A home-schooled high school graduate, Tober is a gardener, carpenter, collector of stones, plays violin and sings in the Snake Creek Quartet, and recently started working at Good Used Stuff four days a week from eleven in the morning until closing time around five.
Augie is fifteen, a muscular five-eleven, with short red hair and emerald green eyes. He, too, is a gardener and carpenter, plays guitar and sings in the Snake Creek Quartet, and is attending classes two days a week at College of the Redwoods in Eureka with thoughts of becoming a chiropractor or a psychotherapist or both. Or neither.
Every Thursday afternoon for the last fifteen years, Sharon has delivered several dozen eggs and several jars of honey to Good Used Stuff, for which Maybe pays considerably less than Sharon sells her eggs and honey to the many people who buy directly from her. Maybe displays the large blue and brown and speckled eggs prominently on the Local Produce table, doubles the price he pays Sharon, and never fails to sell all the eggs by Friday afternoon and all the honey by Sunday.
He would gladly buy more eggs and honey from her every week, but because she can make so much more selling her produce to customers happy to pay twelve dollars for a dozen of her delicious eggs and twenty-two dollars for a big jar of her ambrosial honey, she does not sell Maybe more than she does.
Why, you may ask, does Sharon sell any eggs and honey to Maybe if she can make so much more money selling them otherwise? Because fifteen years ago when she was new to the area, had two babies to take care of, didn’t yet know many people, and was desperate for money, Maybe bought her eggs and honey and gave her cash she desperately needed. And until eleven years ago, when she started working as a checker at Ray’s Food Place in Fortuna, the money Maybe gave her was her only steady income.
Moreover, several times during her first few years of living on Snake Creek Road, Sharon borrowed money from Maybe to help her get through particularly difficult times, and when she would try to pay him back, he would say, “Oh just bring me cookies next time you make a batch for the boys,” or “How about a bag of veggies when your garden’s going good?”
Which is why she continues to sell eggs and honey to Maybe at a discount and will do so for as long as her chickens keep laying and her bees keep making honey.
∆
So… 52 times 15 is 780, which is the number of times Sharon has brought eggs and honey to Maybe, give or take a few times.
And every single one of those times, Maybe has looked at Sharon and thought, “God what a lovely woman, what a splendid person.”
And every single one of those times, Sharon has looked at Maybe and thought, “What a charming man, what a generous soul.”
Which is to say, they have admired each other and liked each other from the moment they met, and the thirty-three times in those fifteen years when Maybe attended parties on Snake Creek Road, fifteen of those parties at Sharon’s house, they always had a fine time talking to each other and singing together and a few times dancing.
Yet though they have both been single for all but two of the fifteen years they’ve known and admired each other, neither has ever initiated any sort of anything the other might construe as the other wanting to even see about the possibility of possibly embarking on some sort of relationship beyond the friendship they’ve had from the outset of knowing each other.
It isn’t that Maybe hasn’t fantasized about making love with Sharon—he has, many times—nor is it that Sharon hasn’t daydreamed about being lovers with Maybe—she has, many times; but something has kept them from tampering with the undeniably sweet and satisfying connection they have with each other.
Furthermore, neither of them has ever told anyone, even their closest friends, about their imaginings of a relationship with the other, and so their separate secrets are a bond they feel when they are with each other, though neither is conscious of the other’s dreaming of a deeper intimacy between them.
∆
On a warm day in early September when Tober was six and Augie was five, Sharon took them to a beach near the mouth of the Eel River, and while Sharon and Augie built a sand castle and flew a kite and threw a ball for their two dogs to chase, Tober searched for what he called special stones, his favorite thing to do whenever they visited the ocean.
Augie sometimes searched for stones, too, but he was more interested in flying kites and watching shorebirds and trying to understand why some waves were small and other were large, things like that. He appreciated the stones Tober found, but hunting for them was not his bliss as it was Tober’s.
And on that warm summer day, after several hours of culling the deposits of small stones exposed by the extremely low tide, Tober found four special stones, one jade stone as big and perfectly round as a golf ball, one radiantly blue stone the exact size and shape of a large chicken egg, one brilliant reddish orange stone the exact size and shape of a silver dollar, and one emerald green stone as big as an almond shaped like a teardrop.
At Tober’s request, Sharon made him a small black velvet pouch for these stones, and he carried the pouch of stones in his pocket whenever they went anywhere away from home. When Sharon asked him why he always took the stones with him when they’d go away from Snake Creek Road, he said the stones were protection against anything bad befalling them. When she asked him how he knew this, he said he didn’t know how he knew, but he was sure it was true.
Then six months after Tober found those four special stones, on a cold Thursday afternoon in March, Tober, now seven, and Augie, now six, went with Sharon to deliver eggs and honey to Maybe at Good Used Stuff.
The boys loved going to the gigantic store and seeing what Maybe had acquired and gotten rid of since their last visit. If Sharon wasn’t in a hurry, they might get to visit the woodshop where Diego Fernandez built tables and bookshelves and chairs, and Thomas Morningstar carved statues of animals and masks. And Diego might let them use the lathe or help them make something out of wood scraps, and Thomas might give them a carving lesson.
But on that day six months after Tober found those four special stones, after Sharon earned a brand new hundred-dollar bill for her eggs and honey, Maybe said, “Hey come see the amazing thing I got in trade for an antique sofa.”
Sharon and the boys followed Maybe to an area of the store where objects too large or too heavy to display on tables stood on the floor with enough space around them so customers could easily circumnavigate each of the objects; and here was a massive quartz crystal boulder weighing several hundred pounds, half the crystal pink quartz, half white quartz.
“Wow,” said Sharon, dazzled by the crystal boulder. “Wouldn’t that go good in my garden? How much are you asking for that Maybe?”
“Hard to say.” He shrugged. “The worth of things, you know. A mystical conundrum. What is the price of something beyond compare? Two thousand dollars?”
Augie looked up at Maybe and asked, “May we touch it?”
“Sure,” said Maybe, winking at Augie. “Thanks for asking.”
The boys placed their hands on the crystal, and after a long moment of silence Tober said, “It’s very beautiful, but it doesn’t have a lot of energy. Maybe it wants to be outside.”
“What do you mean by energy?” asked Maybe, frowning curiously at Tober.
“I mean like this one,” said Tober, getting his pouch of stones out of his pocket and handing Maybe the radiant blue stone that looked exactly like a chicken egg if a chicken egg turned to stone.
“That is one beautiful rock,” said Maybe, feeling nothing from the stone except coolness and smoothness.
“Can you feel the energy?” asked Tober, watching Maybe expectantly.
“No, but it feels good,” said Maybe, handing the stone back to Tober. “And it’s very beautiful. Where did you find it?”
“About a half-mile north of the mouth of the Eel,” said Tober, returning the stone to his pouch and wondering why Maybe couldn’t feel the energy coming from the stone.
“You have others like that?” asked Maybe, smiling hopefully at Tober.
“Not like that one,” said Tober, shaking his head. “But they all have energy.”
“Do you know Titus Troutcatcher?” asked Maybe, looking at Sharon. “He lives about a mile from here with his wife Tina.”
“We’ve heard of him,” said Sharon, wishing they could stay longer but needing to get home to herd their forty chickens into the coop and milk their two goats before dark. “He helped Fiona Marsh with her migraines. She hasn’t had one in two years since she went to see him.”
“Titus would be very interested in those stones,” said Maybe, wishing they could stay longer but sensing they needed to go. “He could tell Tober a lot about them. I’ll invite him to come by next Thursday to meet you.”
“That would be great,” said Sharon, telling her sons with a nod in the direction of the door that it was time to go. “I’ll set aside an extra hour for next Thursday.”
“In the meantime,” said Maybe, escorting them out to their truck, “if you ever want to sell me any stones you find, Tober, please keep me in mind.”
“I will,” said Tober, knowing his mother was always in need of money.
Then the following Thursday, Titus Troutcatcher, an elderly Wailaki man, was there to meet them when Tober and Augie and Sharon arrived at Good Used Stuff.
Big and thick chested, with long gray hair in a ponytail, his nose reminiscent of the beak of an eagle, Titus felt an immediate affinity for Tober and Augie and Sharon, and they felt similarly about him.
“You have the biggest hands I’ve ever seen,” said Augie, after shaking Titus’s hand.
“I’m seventy-three,” said Titus, chuckling. “You’re six, August. When you’re seventy-three, you’ll have big hands, too.”
“How did you know my name is August?” asked Augie, looking at Sharon. “Did you tell him, Mom?”
“No,” she said, smiling at Titus. “But what else would Augie be short for?”
“My whole name is October,” said Tober, who thought Titus was the most beautiful person he’d ever seen. “I was born in October and so was Augie, but there couldn’t be two of us named October.”
“Well there could have been,” said Titus, nodding, “but it’s better you have different names. Less confusing.” He nods graciously at Sharon. “These are fine boys. You’re a good mother to them.”
“Thank you,” said Sharon, her eyes filling with tears, for she had never before felt so strongly acknowledged for her devotion to her children.
“If they want to learn the ways of the animals and the plants and the nature spirits around here, I’d be happy to teach them.” Titus looked down at the boys. “You like the forest and the creeks and the rivers and the ocean and the tide pools, don’t you? I’ll teach you how to catch trout, too. That’s my name, after all. Troutcatcher.”
“Okay,” said Tober, nodding eagerly.
“When?” asked Augie, nodding eagerly, too.
“We’ll start one of these days,” said Titus, turning to Sharon. “With your permission.”
“Yes, fine,” said Sharon, wanting to hug him, but restraining herself. “I’ll give you our phone number.”
“And I’ll give you mine,” said Titus, looking at Tober again. “Now what about these stone people you found?”
“They’re not people,” said Tober, giggling. “They’re just ocean rocks.”
“Hmm,” said Titus, considering this. “When my people talk about trees, we call them standing people, and when we talk about trout and salmon, we call them fish people. My people are the Wailaki. We’ve been around here for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Since long before Christopher Columbus and anybody from Europe got over here. We call those stones you picked up stone people because we think all things are related to us and to each other and are part of our community. But you’re right, October, stones are not human beings. But they aren’t just stones. We think they’re alive, just like you and me and your brother and your mother and Raven are alive. That’s how those stones you found could call to you, because they have power. And they have power because they’re alive.”
Tober nodded humbly and offered Titus his pouch of stones.
Titus gently placed his enormous hand on Tober’s shoulder. “Let’s bring those stone people to the table over there by the stove and we’ll see what they have to say to us.”
So they sat down at a low round table near the crackling woodstove, Titus with his back to the stove, Augie to Titus’s right, Tober to Titus’s left, Maybe and Sharon across the table from Titus; and Tober gave Titus his pouch of stones.
Titus set the pouch on the table in front of him and undid his ponytail. “So…” he said, scratching his head, “what I like to do is invite Great Spirit to be with us, if that’s okay with everybody, because Great Spirit knows everything and we want to know what he knows about these stones.”
“Who is Great Spirit?” asked Augie, wrinkling his nose. “Is he the same as God?”
“We don’t use the word God,” said Titus, shaking his head. “We say Great Spirit.”
“Who is he?” asked Tober, imagining a giant gray cloud in the sky.
“You guys ask good questions,” said Titus, grinning at Tober and Augie. “Great Spirit is all there has ever been, all that is, and all that will ever be.” He shrugs. “My grandson calls Great Spirit the Great All Everything.”
“Is he a man?” asks Tober, doubting that everything there has ever been could be contained in a single person.
“No,” said Titus, chuckling. “We just say He because that’s how we were taught, but you can call him she if you want. Great Spirit doesn’t care.”
Tober nods. “So how do you call on Great Spirit’s power?”
“In many ways,” said Titus, holding out his hands palms up. “For now we’ll just say, ‘Oh Great Spirit. Come to us. Be with us. Please tell us what you know about these stone people October found near the mouth of the Eel.’”
Then Titus opened the pouch and poured the four stones onto the table.
The radiantly blue stone the shape and size of a large chicken egg stopped nearest to Maybe.
The brilliant reddish orange stone the shape and size of a silver dollar stopped nearest to Sharon.
The emerald green stone shaped like a teardrop landed near Augie.
And the jade stone as big and perfectly round as a golf ball rolled over to Tober and bumped his hand.
Titus took a deep breath, looked at each of the stones, and said, “These are powerful stones, October. You’ve been given the gift of seeing their power. Tell us how you found them.”
“I was just walking along, looking down,” said Tober, remembering that sunny day of the very low tide, “and when I saw one I liked the shape of or the color, I picked it up.”
Titus nods. “But why did you keep these four and not a hundred others?”
“Because these have lots more energy,” said Tober, nodding. “Lots.”
Titus picked up the stone nearest to Maybe and asked Tober, “Do you feel a strong vibration in your hand when you hold the stone?”
“Yes,” said Tober, pleased that Titus understands. “Stronger than from just a regular stone.”
“That’s wonderful, October,” said Titus, closing his fingers around the radiant blue stone. “What you’re calling energy, we call power.” He opens his fingers and gazes at the stone. “For instance, this stone has the power to quell fevers and anger and is good for sleep.” He looked at Maybe. “You need this stone, Raven.” He handed the stone to Maybe. “You should trade October something very valuable for this stone.”
“Okay,” said Maybe, clasping the stone. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Titus picked up the stone nearest Sharon. “This red stone is a heart healer. Heals old wounds and recent wounds, too. Makes your heart stronger. I don’t just mean the heart muscle, but your heart’s spirit. You might want to borrow this stone from your son, Sharon, and hold it on your heart before you go to sleep and when you wake up in the morning.”
“Okay,” said Sharon, her tears flowing again. “I will.”
Then Titus took up the emerald green stone. “You see how this one is the color of your eyes, August? This stone is very powerful and will help you be brave, not that you aren’t already brave, you are, but this will give you even more courage and strength if you carry it with you.”
“Can I?” asked Augie, whispering to Tober.
“Yes,” whispered Tober, nodding emphatically.
Lastly, Titus picked up the perfectly round jade stone and turned it over and over in his hand. “This stone is a most powerful healer. Heals everything.” He gazed intently at Tober. “I could use this stone to help people who come to me for guidance and healing. May I keep this stone for three years from this day? I promise to take good care of her.”
“Of course,” said Tober, smiling brightly at Titus.
“Why of course?” asked Titus, touched by Tober’s generosity.
“Because you’re going to teach us the ways of the animals and plants and nature spirits of this place,” said Tober, his eyes wide with delight.
“And how to catch trout,” said Augie, picking up the emerald green stone and kissing it before he puts it in his pocket.
∆
Nine years have gone by since Augie and Tober and Sharon first met Titus, and now they can’t imagine life without Titus and his wife Tina.
Titus taught them 10,000 things, at least, and then he initiated them into manhood when Tober was twelve and Augie was eleven. He taught them how to make fires without flint or matches, how to make spears and bows and arrows and snares, how to fish, how to hunt, and which mushrooms and wild plants are safe to eat, which are poisonous. He taught them many songs, told them hundreds of stories about animals and people and nature spirits, taught them how to predict the weather, and then he taught them ten thousand more things, at least.
In those nine years, Tober found hundreds of powerful stones and gave some of them to Titus, gave some to his friends, and sold many more to Maybe who sold them for great profit at Good Used Stuff.
Tober has been working for Maybe for six months, ever since he got his driver’s license and he and Augie bought a good used electric pickup truck. So now it is Tober who brings the weekly allotment of eggs and honey to Good Used Stuff, which means…
“How’s your mother doing these days?” asks Maybe, a few minutes before closing time on a Friday evening in April. “Been a couple months of Thursdays since I last saw her. She okay?”
Tober looks up from tallying the cash in the till, one of the many jobs Maybe prefers someone else do. “She’s well,” he says, his voice a deep baritone now. “And quel coincidence, she asked about you this morning.”
“She did?” says Maybe, trying not to sound too happy about that. “Well… say hi for me.”
“I’m glad you reminded me,” says Tober, putting a rubber band around thirty-seven twenty-dollar bills. “Because I was supposed to invite you to the potluck tonight. We’ve got a gig in Arcata tomorrow night and we want to rehearse in front of an audience. There’s gonna be tons of food, so you don’t have to bring anything.”
“What time?” asks Maybe, hoping to sound nonchalant.
“Six,” says Tober, putting the cash and coins in a metal box and handing the box to Maybe to put in his safe in the tree house. “You don’t have to let us know if you’re coming. Just come if you want to.”
∆
Maybe locks up the store, locks up the woodshop, and hurries home to feed his cats before he showers and shaves and gets ready to go.
As he’s shaving, he laughs at himself for being nervous about going to a potluck at Sharon’s house where there will be lots of other people and…
“I’m not nervous about going to the potluck,” he says to his reflection. “I’m nervous about seeing Sharon after two months of not seeing her and she’ll know how much I missed her.”
∆
He almost doesn’t go to the potluck. He almost stops at Gypsy’s and has a few beers and plays darts and asks Leona to sleep with him, though he doesn’t love Leona and she doesn’t love him, but they like each other and they’re both lonely and…
He speeds past Gypsy’s, and a mile further along makes the turn onto Snake Creek Road.
∆
Ellen Nakamoto, twenty-eight, a bassist in the Eureka Symphony and the bassist of the Snake Creek Quartet, a statuesque redhead, her father half-Swedish and half-Japanese, her mother entirely Irish, is in the kitchen with Sharon when Maybe arrives bearing two bottles of good red wine.
“I’m so glad you came,” says Sharon, blushing a little as she takes the bottles of wine from Maybe and sets them on the counter. “I’ve missed you.”
“Me, too,” says Maybe, laughing nervously. “Missed you. Too.”
They both move to hug each other, both stop themselves, shake hands instead, and when their handshaking would usually end, Sharon changes her grip so she’s holding hands with Maybe and leads him into the dining room where a mob of people are serving themselves from a great many dishes of food on the big rectangular table.
Sharon gives Maybe’s hand a squeeze and says, “Help yourself. Shall I bring you a glass of that red you brought?”
“Yeah,” he says, nodding eagerly. “That would be great.”
∆
After supper and before dessert, the quartet assembles at one end of the living room—Augie and Sharon with their guitars, Tober with his violin, and Ellen with her big reddish brown string bass.
“Thanks so much for coming,” says Tober, gazing at the thirty or so people crammed into the living room. “This is an excellent simulation of the electric atmosphere of a gig. As you know, we’re opening for Eliot Williams and the Skydivers at the Arcata Playhouse tomorrow night, the show is sold out, and we’re all very nervous except for Ellen who never gets nervous.”
“Not true,” says Ellen, shaking her head and laughing. “I just hide it better.”
“Anyway,” says Tober, continuing, “they want us to play for forty-five minutes, and our plan is to open with a tune you’ll want to dance to, and finish with a quartet Sharon composed called After the Rain. So… with no further ado, here we go.”
Augie begins by strumming a series of catchy chords with a fast samba rhythm, his playing excellent, and Sharon plays jazzy accompanying chords on the second iteration, her playing superb. Now Ellen adds a groovacious bass line for the third iteration, and lastly Tober plays a lovely violin solo atop the rollicking rhythm as preface to Sharon and Augie singing a tight harmony on the first verse, their conjoined voices a rare delight.
∆
Pie and ice cream follow the rehearsal, everyone high from the fabulous music, and Maybe finds himself sitting at the kitchen counter with Titus and Tina.
“Seems like just the other day they were little boys just starting to play their instruments,” says Tina, her long white hair in a braid plaited with little yellow flowers, “and now they’re big men playing and singing like angels.”
“Remember the day, Raven, when I came to meet Sharon and October and August for the first time?” says Titus, sipping his coffee. “You wanted October to show me those four stones, and he gave me that round jade stone I used for seven years until I gave it back to him, and then he returned it to the ocean.”
“They’re gonna steal the show tomorrow night,” says Tina, enjoying her pie. “I know they are.”
“Hard act to follow,” says Maybe, no longer nervous about being around Sharon, their former comfort with each other restored. “Wish I’d bought a ticket.”
At which moment, Sharon comes in from outside, having escorted Ellen to her car; and though neither she nor Maybe has ever done anything like this before, he holds out his arms to her and she walks into his embrace and they hold each other for a long sweet moment, and Maybe says, “I was just saying I wish I had a ticket for tomorrow night.”
“I’ll put you on the guest list,” says Sharon, kissing his cheek. “We had one seat left.”
Now she gently pulls away and saunters into the dining room.
“That was nice to see,” says Tina, bouncing her eyebrows at Maybe. “Are you two…”
“No, no, no,” says Maybe, ardently shaking his head. “We’re just good friends.”
“A good friend makes the best wife,” says Titus, gazing fondly at Maybe. “Be brave, Raven. Trust your heart.”
fin
