Better Than Nothing: Part 3 of On the Edge Series

Chapter 9

I was excited to have plans with Tess, but when I told Mary, she almost burst. I knew what she was thinking. Her mind was whirling around ways to get me to stay longer.

"Mary, why do you want me to stay so long? You've got to be getting sick of me!" I laughed over dinner.

"Never. This has been wonderful. I love having life in this house."

"I'm sure that if I weren't here, you'd have friends coming and going. And Billy would probably stop by." He hadn't been over to see her since the first morning.

"He has been noticeably absent this week." I could see the cogs in her mind hatching a plan.

"Mary, let Billy and me be. We're both in a good place. Let's not rock the boat."

"Of course. And he has called me every day, just hasn't stopped by."

"Well, why don't you let him know I'm going out tomorrow with Tess so he can stop by and check in on you? I'm sure he worries."

"Oh, he does." Her smile faded, and her voice dropped low as she added, "have you told him about your father?"

"No, I don't think I should. I thought that maybe he'd take it better from you; maybe you could tell him if you see him tomorrow."

"He was very close to your father," she reminded.

"I like that they were friends. I regret not sharing Billy's music with my dad. I'm sure he loved it."

"Oh, he may have really been Billy's biggest fan and critic. Billy heavily valued his thoughts."

I sighed and felt the familiar welling of tears, but this time it wasn't for me losing my dad; it was for Billy losing him.

"I know he'd listen to you if you were to tell him. Your father would want it to come from you. And, I happen to know that Billy doesn't have the kids this weekend, which means he's probably just up in his studio fiddling away as he does."

She slid a sticky note with his address across the table to me. I stared down at it for a moment. My body recoiled a bit as though it might bite me.

"Fiddling, is that what they call what Billy does in the studio now?" I absently teased.

"Mmhmm, that number at the bottom is the gate code."

"Mary, are you trying to get me arrested?"

She let out a laugh. "Well, that'd be quite the story." She got up and began to clear the plates. "Oh, and Lily, Billy hasn't just been calling to check in on me this week."

The path to Billy's house felt familiar, even though it had been years. I expected my mind to slip to all the reasons I should turn around, but instead, all I could fixate on was how everything was the same, as though time had been frozen, just like I had been. The gravel and snow crunched beneath the tires of my rental car.

As Mary had suspected, the house was dark, but the studio light above the barn was glowing yellow, casting long ghostly shadows across the driveway. My mind slipped to those last moments here, in that studio: the anger and the sadness surrounded the place. I stifled it down and trudged towards the barndoor, once again with a wreath hanging above it.

The familiar buzz in my chest started up as I neared Billy. I had never asked him if he felt it; it always seemed too silly to ask. The piano greeted me before I got to the top of the stairs. After listening to his voice nearly every night for the past week, a melancholy feeling filled me when he didn't even murmur a lyric. I paused in the doorway, hoping he'd slip into one of his songs from the tinkering he was doing, but it was clear that his mind wasn't on music.