Three hours later, Abby was still thinking about Nana and the Wishing Jar when a knock sounded on her office door. She looked up to see a tiny, well-dressed woman standing in the open doorway, striking a dramatic pose with her wild red hair thrown back and one arm leaning provocatively against the doorjamb.
“Birdie! What are you doing here?”
“Take the picture, quick! Here’s your next cover shot.”
Abby laughed. Carolyn Wren had been her best friend since childhood. In high school, Carolyn’s petite stature and inexhaustible energy, coupled with her unusual last name, had earned her the nickname Birdie. It didn’t matter that she was now the wife of Taylor Graham, the vice president of Western North Carolina University, or that she had built her own interior design business— she was still Birdie to all who knew her well. What she lacked in stature she made up in personality, and her effusive presence never failed to lighten Abby’s mood.
Abby shuffled through the photographs scattered across her desk and held one up. “This is Carolina Monthly, not Cosmopolitan,” she said. “Unless you can transform yourself into a hummingbird or a waterfall or a late-blooming rhododendron, we’re not interested.”
“Kill-joy.” Birdie abandoned her pose and came to sit on the edge of Abby’s desk. “Working hard?”
“Hardly working. I can’t seem to get focused today.”
“Perfect. Come have lunch with me.”
Abby gazed around the office, her eyes lingering on the proofs and photographs and blue-lined pages that occupied nearly every available horizontal surface. The offices of Carolina Monthly were on the top floor of the Flat Iron Building, and through the window between the filing cabinet and the bookcase, she could glimpse the Asheville skyline with rolling mountains behind and just a small wedge of an absolutely clear, deep, Carolina-blue sky. “Sounds tempting, but I have a deadline.”
“You always have a deadline. And you always meet it, with time to spare. Come on. It’s a beautiful day.”
Abby threw up her hands in surrender. “All right. Let’s go.” She gathered up her bag and keys and stopped by her assistant’s desk on the way out. “Ford, I’m going to lunch. If I get any calls while I’m out—” She held up her cell phone.
Birdie snatched the phone out of Abby’s hand and placed it decisively atop an overflowing file on Ford’s desk. “If she gets any calls while she’s out, take a message.”
Ford grinned, his round schoolboy face blushing in Birdie’s direction. “Yes, ma’am—as you wish, ma’am.” He gave her a snappy salute.
Abby looked from Ford to Birdie and suppressed a sigh. “I should be back by two. While I’m gone, could you sort through those photos on my desk and give me some recommendations for the piece on ‘Biking the Parkway’?”
Ford nodded. “Be glad to. Anything else?”
“Just hold down the fort. See you later.”
As they stepped through the front door of the Flat Iron Building into the September sunshine, Birdie linked her arm through Abby’s. “I think Ford Hambrick’s got a crush on me.”
“He’s fifteen years younger than you,” Abby said. “Besides, half the men in Western North Carolina have a crush on you. And besides that, you’re married.”
Birdie’s grin never wavered. “Of course I am, and very happily,” she chuckled. “But you don’t have to live on the mountain to enjoy the view.”
They stood on the sidewalk outside Café on the Square, waiting for a table to open up. Across from them in Pack Square, a small crowd gathered to listen to a street musician. The Vance Monument rose like a lance toward the sky, and as the fiddler alternated between lively mountain tunes and plaintive ballads, the wavering reflection of the obelisk in the fountain below seemed to take on a life of its own, dancing and rippling in time with his bow.
Abby watched as the man lifted his bearded face to the blue sky and closed his eyes, immersed in the music. She went to the curb for a closer look. He wore faded jeans and a threadbare plaid shirt, but nothing seemed to matter to him except the late-summer sun on his face and the music that poured from his soul into his fiddle. For a brief moment, Abby was seized by a deep-seated longing, a nameless and unfathomable sadness.
Birdie nabbed a vacant table and called to her. Reluctantly, Abby dragged her attention away from the fiddler and sat down. The waiter appeared, and they ordered iced tea and grilled chicken salads.
“What would it be like, I wonder, to live with that much passion?” Abby murmured when the waiter was gone.
Birdie set down her iced tea glass and frowned. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“That musician. Look at him. He seems perfectly content and at peace. And it’s obvious he loves what he’s doing.”
“He’s playing for quarters on a street corner,” Birdie said. “I don’t see anything so fascinating about that.” She narrowed her eyes. “You love what you’re doing, too. Don’t you?”
Abby forced her attention back to Birdie. “I guess so.”
“You guess so? Abigail Quinn McDougall, you’re the editor of one of the most respected magazines this side of the Continental Divide. You’re a fabulous photographer and a successful writer. What else could you want?”
Abby shrugged. “I don’t know. Just . . . something. For some time now, I’ve felt that something was missing in my life. I wish I knew what.”
“What’s missing is a relationship. I wanted to talk to you about that, in fact. Taylor has a new colleague, a professor in the Business School. I met him at the dean’s cocktail party last week. He’s good-looking, single—and straight. But he’s new in town and doesn’t know many people, so I thought maybe—”
Abby shook her head. “No. Absolutely not. I told you, Birdie. No blind dates. I’m not ready.”
“When are you going to be ready, Abby? John Mac died more than two years ago. I know you miss him, but you’ve been shut up in that old house for far too long. Do you ever see anyone except your mother and Neal Grace? And speaking of your mother, how is Edith?”
“Mommie Dearest?” Abby grimaced. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have called her that. I love her, but she’s a handful. Ever since the stroke she’s been impossible, and getting worse all the time. The doctor says it’s not unusual for a stroke victim to become depressed, or even hostile. She’s lost so much—her independence, her dignity. Still, it’s hard to take on a daily basis. I don’t want to have to put her in a nursing home, but caring for her is stressful. As for my daughter—” She paused and sighed. “Neal Grace is—well, to be honest, I don’t know how she is. Strange, mostly. Something’s happened lately. She used to be so outgoing, so happy and well-adjusted. Now she keeps to herself a lot. And she seems—how do I explain this?—as if she’s barely containing some kind of explosion.”
“Do you think she might be experimenting with drugs? Sudden behavior changes can sometimes be a sign.”
“I don’t think so. We’ve talked about that in the past, and she’s always been adamant about how stupid it is to do drugs. No, there’s something else. I’ve tried to get her to talk about what’s going on, but you know teenagers.”
“Can’t say that I do,” Birdie answered, “having never known the joys of motherhood myself.”
Abby laughed. “If you want the experience, you can borrow mine anytime. At the moment I’ve had about all the joy I can stand.” She shook her head ruefully. “I should have had children in my twenties, not my midthirties. At my age, I should be planning a wedding or bouncing a grandchild on my knee, not dealing with a rebellious seventeen-year-old.”
“All the more reason you should get out a little. Now, about this new friend of Taylor’s. His name is—”
Abby held up a hand. “Birdie, I’m fifty-one years old. I am not going to get involved with dating again. Especially with a younger man. End of conversation.”
“Who said anything about being younger? He’s fifty-three, married once, has two grown kids. And he’s aging nicely, if I may say so.” She laid a hand on Abby’s arm. “Come to dinner next week. Meet him. No pressure. You never know what might happen.”
“All right. Whatever.”
“Do you mean it? How about next Thursday, at our house?”
“Sure, sure,” Abby said, but she wasn’t really listening. She was watching the fiddler again; he had seated himself on the edge of the fountain and was playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to a giggling baby in a stroller. His improvisation on the simple tune was entrancing—at least the baby seemed to think so.
Abby leaned down and rummaged in her bag.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting my camera. It just occurred to me, this guy would make a great story for the magazine. I’m going to ask him if I can take a few pictures, and try to set up an interview.”
“Can you not stop working for one hour?” Birdie sighed, then waved her off. “Go on. I’ll wait here and flag you down when our lunch arrives.”
His name was Devin Connor, and he had the most incredible eyes Abby had ever seen. A clear, deep blue, like the cloudless sky over the mountains, like the watershed up on the Parkway, like the blue topaz ring she had inherited when Nana died. His face, weathered by sun and wind to the color of toffee, was seamed with craggy lines. His hands held the fiddle as if it were alive, an infant cradled against his chest.
Abby introduced herself and briefly explained what she wanted. He caught her gaze and held it for a moment, then brushed a lock of hair away from his forehead and nodded. “Yes,” he said quietly, “yes, I suppose I would be willing to do that. There’s little in life that pleases me more than talking about my music”—he paused and grinned—“unless, of course, it’s playing my music.”
She handed him her card. “My office is in the Flat Iron Building. Could you call or come by tomorrow?”
Nodding his agreement, Devin Connor took the card, stuck it in his back pocket, and resumed playing. Abby took a few photographs— the Vance Monument in the background, some closeups of his hands on the fiddle, a nice shot of him leaning down next to the laughing baby, and one of his reflection in the fountain. Then she waved good-bye and left, dropping a ten-dollar bill into the fiddle case when he wasn’t looking.