The Perfect Love Song (2 page)

Kara was working for the PGA Tour, not only a grand job in her father’s eyes but a vocation that allowed her to meet Peyton Ellers, who was and is a star on the tour. Peyton was all those things a girl like Kara, a good girl trying to do all the right things at the right time, would have looked for and loved. And sometimes when everything looks just right, we think it is just right when it merely looks that way. We have to search a little deeper.

About this time in Kara’s very perfect life entered this batty old lady named Maeve Mahoney. Well, to be precise, Kara entered Maeve’s life when Kara walked through the front doors of the Verandah Nursing Home and into Maeve’s room, stating, “I’m here to spend some time with you.”

You see, although Kara was “spending time” with Maeve, these times were “volunteer” hours mandated by the Service League, hours that Kara needed to fulfill in order to avoid being fined. Kara showed up with a pleasant-enough attitude, but yes, she was assigned to spend time with this woman. Maeve immediately saw that Kara was leafing through a wedding magazine, and that she was harried, hurried, and preoccupied, so Maeve began to speak about true love, narrating first-love stories. Now, let me tell you, Kara merely and only tolerated this woman’s ramblings at first, believing that Maeve was crazy and had confused life and love and Ireland and Palmetto Pointe into a mishmash of memories. But soon it became evident that Maeve was telling a love story, one that sounded a lot like the tale of the Claddagh ring, a story clouded in myth and legend with a little blarney thrown in for good measure. Is there any better kind of story?

The Claddagh ring is that common symbol we all know—two hands circling a crowned heart—worn by lovers and friends all over the world. A symbol of love and fidelity. The tale goes something like this: There was a man from
Claddagh, Ireland, Richard Joyce. In the seventeenth century he left the woman he loved and sailed to the West Indies for a job, but alas, on the way, he was kidnapped by Moorish pirates and sold into slavery. Eventually, he apprenticed to a goldsmith in Algiers, where he fashioned and crafted the first Claddagh ring of gold as a gift for the woman he loved back home, the woman he knew he would return to one day. When Richard was finally freed, he came home and discovered that his true love had waited; he gave her the ring, and they wed. Ah, the perfect love story, right?

Well, soon the myth of Richard Joyce and Maeve’s own love story about a man also named Richard began to weave into one love story until Kara was quite sure that Maeve was mixing up life and myth, confusing fact and story—Kara not yet knowing that all those can and often do combine into the most beautiful of all things: truth.

In broken fragments, Maeve told Kara of her own love, her own Richard, a man Maeve loved and lost and searched for and never found, a man who broke her heart and a man for whom she wished she’d had the tenacity and heart to have waited. This tender story opened Kara’s heart to what she had known all along: She still loved Jack Sullivan. Yet and still, Kara did not believe that Maeve’s story was “real,” as the details were far too close to the myth of the Claddagh ring.

During these days that Kara came to love Maeve and her legends and tales, she also came to realize that in many ways Maeve was also telling Kara’s story, asking Kara to look into her own heart to find the truth of her life. Soon Kara understood the lessons inside Maeve’s narrative, and it was then and only then that Kara began to listen to the hints and proddings of her own heart. And it was then that she went to look for Jack Sullivan.

Kara spent hours listening to Maeve, pondering the questions Maeve asked her, questions like: “If you knew he’d return, would you wait for him?” and “Who was your first love?” Yet Kara still did not believe Richard was a real man until she found historical documents about the man Maeve had once loved, Richard O’Leary. Only then had Kara finally believed in the truth.

Who can tell the exact moment when a woman or man believes in something? Who can tell the exact moment when someone falls in love? Same thing. Believing. Love. Same thing.

So, you see, both Maeve’s myth and truth brought Jack and Kara back together. And sometimes, oh, sometimes, it is this kind of love that also changes everything else in their world. Which this love did do.

I
’m sorry—I know I digressed. Let me get back to how Jimmy and Charlotte came together because that is what this story of the song is all about. Well, really it’s all about undeserved love, but the story of the song and undeserved love are one and the same. You’ll see.

Charlotte is Kara’s best friend and has been since second grade. Kara and Charlotte found each other during that time in life when a mother’s death leaves a hollowed-out hole in the soul. Their common interest in art drew them together, although they could not have understood at that young age what brought them together; they merely felt that their hearts called out for one another in an immediate way.

The way an author wraps words around life to explain and describe, so Kara uses her camera and Charlotte her designs, both making sense of life through artistic expressions. And except for their deep love for one another, that is where their similarities end. Kara is organized and precise, whereas Charlotte is scattered and free-spirited; Kara’s hair is a deep brown, straight and controlled, whereas Charlotte’s loose blonde curls fall free and wild no matter what she tries to do with them. Kara’s cottage is a home on the water, filled with white furniture and clean lines; Charlotte’s apartment overflows with swatches of fabric, paint chips, and poster boards, toppling with ideas. Kara’s books are in painted bookcases
lined up alphabetically by author, Charlotte’s books arranged in no order other than color and style.

Sometimes friendships form in the long flow of days, like a river carving a new path through the land, and yet other friendships are wrought together like iron to iron in a single moment. The day of Kara’s mother’s funeral, the adults, engulfed in their own grief, had left the girls alone for most of the day. Together they’d hidden under the branches and tangled roots of the old magnolia tree in the front yard. Curled into one another with ham sandwiches wrapped in flowered napkins, chocolate chip cookies melting in their pockets, they’d eaten, whispering stories of ghosts and angels, of where Margarite Larson was at that moment. Had she been able to talk to Jesus? After the devastation of chemotherapy, had all her hair grown back when they gave her a halo? They’d then fallen asleep to the lullaby of the wind, of the voices of adults wafting toward them, but never fully reaching their ears.

When the darkness settled into the crevices of the yard, and when the day they buried Kara’s mother finally ended, no one could find the best friends. Adults called their names, searched the neighbors’ homes and yards. Yet it was Jack who discovered them. It was Jack who knew where they’d gone and why. He slipped under the branches and woke them, knowing
in that way that children know that the friends would not want anyone to see where they’d been. Together the three of them walked into the dark night, where Charlotte looked up to the brightest stars and said, “Do you think she can see us through those holes in the sky?”

“Those aren’t holes, Charlotte,” Kara said in a voice that was now more grown-up than it had been even a day before, death somehow transforming a child into an adult.

Charlotte stopped, grabbed her best friend’s hand. “Tonight they can be holes in the sky, right?”

Kara stood for the longest time staring up into the sky and even past the sky, farther and deeper, until she returned her gaze to Charlotte and Jack. “Yes, well, yes, they could be holes if we wanted them to be.”

And together the three friends slipped quietly into the house where the friendships that last forever tie their first knots into the soul. You see, there are moments, small and momentary, fleeting but defining, and Kara had decided right there, in that moment, on that night, that even with her mother gone, mystery still remained; with her best friend and Jack at her side, magic yet lingered.

And Jimmy, well, he is Jack’s brother. And let me tell you something, these boys have suffered in this world. Oh, my heart aches to think of their hurt. The pain a father can
inflict on his son I think is almost the worst pain there is. And love heals even that. Yes, love heals the worst of all pain. It is why Love is here in this world, why Love came unasked and undeserved.

So Jimmy and Charlotte were, as I said, forced together by circumstance, yet their hearts came together with something altogether different from mere situation. Which brings me back to the song.

J
immy sat in the Larson living room, and if love can be overwhelming (which, of course, it can be, or it isn’t love), it was at that moment. And this is what he thought when Charlotte walked across the room:

Lyrics began to form in his mind as Jimmy grabbed a notepad and pen from the kitchen, and then slipped away quietly to the footbridge at the end of the road. He glanced
backward at the house next door to the Larsons’, the house where he had grown up and left at sixteen years old. Yes, Jack and Jimmy grew up next door to Kara. The tangled memories often left Jimmy dizzy. How should he feel about a place where he had once had a mother as loving as his, a place that had allowed him to live in this quaint, coastal town, and yet a home where an abusive and drunk father hung like a noxious, poisonous cloud over their lives?

Only a woman like Charlotte could get him to return to this land and world to celebrate a holiday. Jimmy sat in the damp, quiet afternoon, the cicadas clicking the notes of the music, the river carrying lyrics, the air itself drenched with the song for Charlotte, the song about undeserved love entering a heart to change it forever. When he’d finished, he slipped the song into his back pocket and returned to the house, to Charlotte.

Now, Jimmy didn’t want to sing this song to Charlotte until Christmas Day (it would be the only present he could afford). He wanted to polish and fix the words, make it perfect, although it had arrived complete as it was—the song, his secret.

When he returned to the house Charlotte stood in the kitchen washing dishes with Kara. There Charlotte stood with her blonde curls loose and tangled, the smell of soap
and spice mixed into the warm kitchen, her voice soft and full. He came up behind her, kissed her ear.

She turned to his smile. “Where have you been?”

“I just needed some fresh air.”

“We are all just too, too much sometimes, aren’t we?” she asked, lifting her gloved and soapy hand.

“Yes,” he said. “Sometimes.” He laughed. I love when this man laughs because for so many years he was unable.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know holidays are . . . not your favorite.”

“No, not my favorite,” he said. “But you are.”

She shook her head. “Oh, Jimmy.” She rested her head on his shoulder and sighed.

It is a blessed thing when a woman loves a man this way. It is where healing begins in a heart. Ah, but more must happen, because this was only the beginning.