The Perfect Love Song

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.

Jimmy 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.”

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.

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.