Kylie Cantrall's Arc

Chapter 23 of 78

The chord's echo faded. Kylie pulled the board from under the placemat and set it flat between them. One blank line waited under the second verse. Upstairs, water ran through the pipes. Her mother would come down for lunch in under an hour, and after lunch she would call the label about a song that still had a hole in it. Arianna picked up the pen. "Read me what we have." Kylie read the verse aloud, then the chorus, then stopped at the empty line. The last line had to answer the first line of the song. The first line was a question. Arianna had written it a year ago on this same board: "Who stays when the room goes quiet?" "I keep writing 'you do,'" Kylie said. "It's true. It's also flat." "Then don't answer with a pronoun." Kylie set her elbows on the table. Through the window, the tall palms outside the kitchen moved once in the wind and settled. She tried three lines in her head and threw them all out. Every version sounded like a card you'd buy at a drugstore. Arianna slid the guitar off the chair and into her lap. The warm wood caught the light along the cutaway. She played the verse chords quietly, not singing, just letting the shape sit under the room. "Play the question again," Kylie said. Arianna played it. Kylie closed her eyes. She thought about the heart-shaped bed upstairs, still made, waiting. She thought about the key she'd given Arianna. She thought about the puppy asleep on the tile, and the scarf her dogs had learned first. "The dog knew your coat before he knew your face," Kylie said. Arianna's hand stopped on the strings. "Say that again." Kylie said it again. Arianna wrote it on the board in small careful letters. It fit the meter. It answered the question without saying anyone's name. It was a thing only the two of them knew. Kylie hit the piano chord. Arianna sang the line at half voice. It landed. "That's it," Arianna said. "That's it," Kylie said. Footsteps on the stairs. Her mother came into the kitchen dressed now, phone in her hand. "Lunch," her mother said. "Then I call." "It's done," Kylie said. She turned the board so her mother could see the last line. Her mother read it. She read it twice. She set the phone on the counter face down. "Play the whole thing after we eat," she said. "I want to hear it once through before I pick up that phone." She opened the fridge and started pulling out bread and cheese. Kylie looked at Arianna. The song was finished. In under an hour, her mother would tell the label it existed, and after that nothing about their week alone in this house would belong only to them.