A Wedding on Lilac Lane by Hope Ramsay (best book clubs .txt) 📕

up the stairs to her small room under the eaves. In addition to the tray disaster, she’d been through a difficult training session trying to grasp the inn’s reservation system and webpage. She wasn’t a Luddite exactly, but she’d never been great with technology.

This might be an entry-level job, but that didn’t make it an easy one.

She just wanted to go back to sleep even if the clock said noon. She wasn’t cut out for getting up so early. For most of her life, she’d stayed up late performing and slept into the afternoon. This early riser thing was for the birds. Literally.

She collapsed onto the bed and buried her head under the pillow. She had almost drifted off when her phone jolted her back to consciousness. Groggy and disoriented, she pressed the connect button before checking the caller ID.

“Finally.” Cody’s voice came over the line. “What the hell, Ella? You walk out and then you refuse to talk to me. What kind of way is that to act?”

She should disconnect the line, but for some pathetic reason, the sound of Cody’s voice trickled into the deep well of loneliness at her core. He’d never really filled that well, but he could give her a taste of something good from time to time.

His need was seductive.  Who else needed her the way Cody did?

“Are you not going to talk to me?” Cody asked.

She thought about his question for a moment, and then, finding courage from some inner source, she said, “I’ll talk to you. But I already know what you want. You want me to come back because you can’t find another decent fiddler.”

“Look, babe, that’s not it, and you know it. I love you.”

Wow. Like she hadn’t heard this before. Cody loved her because she could play the fiddle. That was the beginning and end of his love. But hearing the words out loud still left an unmistakable warm, fuzzy feeling in their wake.

“Please come back,” he said in a wheedling tone that made the fuzzy feeling evaporate.

“No.”

“C’mon, babe. I’m sorry for whatever it is I did that got you riled up.”

What? Did he think she would accept an apology like that? The list of his shortcomings was so long it would take days to enumerate them all.

“I mean it,” Cody said. “I want you to come back home.”

So this was just about what he wanted. What else was new? She took a deep breath and spoke her mind. “Where is home exactly, Cody? An RV filled with a bunch of band boys always on the road?”

“I guess I could work on the house in El Paso.”

He guessed? Boy, she had heard these promises before.

“I’m sorry. I’ve got a job here and—”

“You got a gig?” For the first time, he sounded worried.

“Not a gig. A job.”

“Doing what? Waitressing?” He said the word with such scorn that hot anger boiled through her.

“I am a waitress.” Her voice sounded hard and brittle.

“No, you’re not. You’re a musician. The same as me. Come on, we need you in the band. It’s not the same without you.”

He could go screw himself.

“Stop calling me, Cody,” she said, then pressed the disconnect button. As she took a couple of deep breaths, her anger ebbed away, leaving a certain clarity in its wake. Cody was right. She could be more than a waitress. But that didn’t mean she had to go back to being a fiddler for an unremarkable warm-up band. Once, a long time ago, she’d been ambitious. What had happened to that Ella?

She didn’t know much about her future, except that music needed to be a part of it. And she’d been neglecting her fiddle recently. She needed to practice.

So she grabbed her fiddle case and headed down the stairs and out the back door. Howland House had a long, broad lawn with Adirondack chairs scattered around, a fire pit, and a small swimming beach with access to Moonlight Bay. At one end of this expanse stood an ancient live oak that had to be three hundred years old at least. Its trunk was massive, and its low-hanging branches made it easy to climb.

Ella had no intention of climbing. But she settled herself on a low branch, took out her fiddle, rosined up her bow, and started playing the “Sailors Hornpipe,” in order to appease any restless nautical spirits. She didn’t truly believe in Jackie’s ghost, but she had promised the boy to come out here and play a few jigs. And after his help this morning, it seemed like the right thing to do.

Besides, playing the fiddle always altered her mental state. The music was her drug of choice, and it never failed to adjust her attitude.

After performing the well-known sailor’s dance, she moved on, playing one reel and jig after the other, most of them Irish. She’d loved playing these tunes from the time she’d first learned them as a young violinist in grade school. Jigs and reels were the student pieces that had helped her master the fiddle.

Mom had always regarded these pieces as trivial learning songs. From the time Ella could remember, Mom had pushed her toward classical music, always hoping that Ella would one day gain a place at one of the nation’s premier music colleges and maybe become a concert master with a big-city orchestra.

But that had been Mom’s dream.

Ella had rejected that dream by the time she turned fourteen. She could still remember the day she’d seen Martie Maguire play fiddle on the country music video channel. It made a huge impression on her to see a woman with chops like that. And Martie was beautiful too. She wanted to become Martie Maguire.

So while Mom was watching, she practiced her classical music, but on the sly, she played along with the country music station every minute she could spare.

By the time she was seventeen, she had learned a lot by listening and playing along with the likes of Maguire, Natalie MacMaster, and Alison Krauss. She’d also discovered