The Perfect Love Song (3 page)

—MAEVE MAHONEY TO KARA LARSON

 

 

 

 

E
xhausted, full, and sated, the band found their usual seats and dozed off as the bus headed toward Nashville.

Isabelle moaned. “I should not have had that last piece of pumpkin pie.”

Jimmy moved to the backseat and watched his childhood home fade from view. He ran his finger along the edge of his new song. His love song. Although he’d been back to Palmetto Pointe a couple times since Jack and Kara started
dating, the last time he’d seen his childhood home fade from view, he’d been in a wood-paneled station wagon with his sobbing mother driving away from a drunken man, a U-Haul trailing wobbly and unsure behind the car. The memory made him turn away from the window. It really didn’t matter what things looked like now; he only saw what was then, back then.

Jimmy is the older brother, and he’d always felt like he should have been able to protect Jack and his mama from their drunken dad. Jimmy doesn’t even like to use the word “dad,” but he doesn’t like to call him by his first name either, as if he knows this father, as if he is intimately connected enough to call his name out loud. Jimmy would prefer not to talk about or think about his dad in any way, but how can a human do that?

When Mrs. Sullivan, Jack, and Jimmy did finally escape the grip of Mr. Sullivan’s whiskey breath and callous hands, they had to leave Kara behind. In simplest terms: They ran away. They packed a U-Haul and left Palmetto Pointe, and drove until Mrs. Sullivan, God bless her heart, couldn’t drive anymore. The three of them landed in Texas, where the brothers grew up and fell in love with making music. Years later, their mother did finally make it to California, where she now lives.

Jimmy and Jack grew up not only as brothers but also as one another’s father, one taking the place when the other
needed it the most. Christmas, to Jimmy, was just another day, about as meaningful as the summer solstice or the Chinese New Year—something someone else somewhere celebrated.

One of the myriad ways these boys coped with their nomadic life and the sudden absence of a father was creating music. Now, you’d think that they’d have been thrilled to have a drunken, beat-them-up dad out of their lives, but in memory a dad is a dad, and a boy can miss the image of him more than he can miss the actual person.

Music became the thing between the brothers that a father could have been: a bond, a teacher, a feeling of something meaningful and wholesome.

Together, Jimmy and Jack wrote music, played music, talked about music. They essentially at some point began to live for the music. Their band, the Unknown Souls, is an up-and-coming sensation. Okay, I love them, so I’m exaggerating. They travel through the southern United States to get their name out there, opening for acts like Vince Gill and Martina McBride. Now, when I say “open,” I mean the opening act before the opening act, and sometimes a song before the two opening acts.

In the music and lyrics they’ve found their way in the world. It’s not how most people navigate a life, but it’s theirs.
And it’s enough. And until Jimmy met Charlotte, he believed the music would always be enough.

J
immy didn’t love her the first time he met her. It’s not that kind of story. Charlotte was merely and only his brother’s girlfriend’s best friend, like an extra in a movie, or the minor character in a novel, not a real person at all. Cute, yes, but not real; a childhood memory. Charlotte was full of smiles and laughter, a tender, quiet luminosity in every corner of every room. But this isn’t Jimmy’s way—he is boisterous, loud, and funny in a take-up-the-air-in-the-room way. His light is more a blinding strike. Yes, both of them are light, but not the kind that notices the other right away.

They remet at a PGA Tour party where the Unknown Souls had played for a championship award ceremony. The party was silly to Jimmy—all these golf athletes milling around, talking about their latest championships, about scores and putts and birdies. Kara had been preoccupied with her job and her then fiancé (a golfer who had just lost the championship with one last putt). The band had left immediately after the party, Jack insistent on getting as far away from Kara as quickly as possible. Jack’s heart was breaking,
but he didn’t want to face that fact and was flat-out angry. So Jimmy barely noticed Charlotte—he said hello, smiled. The End. Or so he thought.

Now, Charlotte might not be the first person you notice at a party, but by the end of the night, she might be the only one you remember. And this is what happened to Jimmy. Charlotte crossed his mind in the same way as a nice sunset or good meal, a gentle prodding.

Ah, but then months later, when Kara broke up with her fiancé and she and Jack reunited, Kara brought the brothers to her house for a cookout. Jimmy found himself alone on the back porch with Charlotte. Mr. Larson had been grilling steaks, and the air was resonant with spices and charcoal, as though the aroma had been embedded in the humidity like rain inside a cloud.

Charlotte stared out over the backyard where they could both see the white-shingled corner of Jimmy’s old house. She nodded her head toward the house. “So you lived there when you were little.”

“Yep,” he said. “I did. I try not to think too much about it. Sometimes when I look at the house it seems like something out of a scrapbook, not really mine at all. We left when I was sixteen.”

“I know,” she said in this tender voice, almost like she
were singing a lullaby to a tired child, and then turned and smiled at him.

Now, when she did this, Jimmy felt something shift inside him, but he dismissed the feeling, thinking it was an odd emotion passing over him because of the house and all.

When he didn’t smile in return, Charlotte put her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to sound like a know-it-all. I just meant that Kara loved your mama. She loved when y’all lived there. I’ve been told so many stories—like about the time you rode your bike through the kitchen saying the brakes didn’t work and you needed to hit something soft, which I believe was the couch. She says hanging out at your house was part of her best childhood years, what with her mama still being alive and you boys next door. She said you made her laugh all the time. That you were and are the funniest boy she’s ever met.”

Charlotte took a deep breath, and inside that small space—like the space between heartbeats—Jimmy let loose this gorgeous laugh. Charlotte thought he was making fun of her, and she turned away. He touched her arm. She looked over her shoulder. “I wasn’t laughing at you,” Jimmy said. “I was laughing with you.”

“I was babbling. I do that sometimes. I wasn’t laughing,” she said, “so technically you weren’t laughing with me.”

“No, I wasn’t. But the way you talk sounds exactly like you’re laughing.”

She smiled in that shy way.

Jimmy continued. “The brakes, of course, weren’t broken. I just wanted to ride the bike through the house, and the back door was open, and . . . I did a wheelie over the top step, and then there I was coasting through the kitchen and into the living room.”

What Jimmy didn’t tell her was that his father then proceeded to smack him with a belt for getting mud on the living room carpet, for being an insolent boy who never had a lick of sense in his miserable head.

“Wow,” Jimmy said staring off toward the house. “The bike story. I’d forgotten.”

“We do that, don’t we?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“Forget the good parts because we are so busy forgetting the bad parts.”

And that was the end of that: Jimmy’s heart opened wide, as if an earthquake had slipped the tectonic plates of his dismal childhood and moved them aside to let Charlotte’s love inside.

Mr. Larson came outside and hollered for everyone to come inside for dinner. Charlotte walked away and left Jimmy standing there alone on the porch. It was then that he realized
his hands were shaking and that he had this desperate need to run after her, after her joy.

We often don’t know we’ve fallen in love until we look back and say, “Ah, that was the moment.” This is how it was for Jimmy. He didn’t know until he knew.

—OLD IRISH PROVERB

 

 

 

 

T
he weeks between Thanksgiving when Jimmy wrote the song and Christmas passed in the hectic way of the world today. Times have changed. What was once meant to be a slow and calm remembrance of blessings, of our Lord’s birth, of joy and family, has become a chaotic jumble of parties, overspending, kinfolk drama, and obligatory giving. Oh, there I go, giving my opinion when I was just meant to tell this story.

For Charlotte, an interior designer, this is the busiest time of the year, what with everyone wanting to outdo everyone else
with the most perfectly perfect Christmas decorations, as if it’s about the lights, garlands, and yard art.

Some people know right away what they are supposed to do in life—others wander and stumble until they find their vocation and say, “Wow, I should have been doing this all along.” Charlotte is the first kind. She knew when she was five years old that all she wanted to do was make the spaces in and around her life more beautiful. She made her mama crazy moving furniture and repainting her room every six months. She knew this town, the houses, and the women’s tastes better than anyone ever had. This was her gift.

Now, if anyone can have two opposite experiences with Christmas, with life itself, it is Jimmy Sullivan and Charlotte Carrington. If you made a checklist and placed their lives one against the other, you would laugh and say that these two—Jimmy and Charlotte—would never even meet as adults, much less talk, much less fall in love.

Ahya, that right there is the absolute beauty of love: It just is what it is and shows up when it wants to show up. Unseen and unpredictable.

The week before Christmas, Charlotte and Kara stood in the Larson kitchen, baking their yearly Christmas cookies, which they put in tins and gave as gifts. This year they were also making shortbread in honor of Maeve Mahoney, adding
it to the gift boxes they would give to friends and then distribute at the nursing home. Although Kara had moved out of the family home last year, this kitchen was much better equipped for so much baking.

Kara leaned against the counter. “So how are you doing with Jimmy being gone so much over the holidays? It’s awful, isn’t it?”

Charlotte wiped flour from her hands and picked up her mug of hot tea. “Yes, ‘awful’ would describe it. I don’t know—I guess because I’ve never felt like this about anyone, it’s awful and wonderful.” She turned back to the cookies, plopped a silver ball onto a Christmas tree. “Missing someone you love is like nothing I’ve felt before. Everyone I’ve loved has always been here with me.”

“I know,” Kara said. “There is something comforting knowing that the man you love is doing what he loves, but it still . . . stinks.”

Charlotte just nodded; she thought if she spoke, she’d cry.

The holiday season sometimes fills our hearts with unrealistic expectations, and the romantic visions of Jimmy sitting by the fire and telling Charlotte how much he loved her were in stark contrast to the quick and infrequent visits. Charlotte wanted him there to decorate the tree, to hang the
lights, to go to all the parties and events. But he wasn’t. He couldn’t be.

Both Jack and Jimmy had promised to be home on Christmas Day, which Charlotte wanted to arrive much faster than it was.

“Only one more week,” Kara said, filling her own heart with the reminder just as she filled Charlotte’s.

“One week. And I have so much to do, hopefully it will make time go faster, but for some reason, I don’t believe it will.”