Heather came in with Harper, now sleeping too, and laid her down in her crib.
Brit and Flora were gone when we emerged. August was asleep on the couch, his brow smooth, his mouth parted slightly. All the worry was smoothed from his brow. He looked like a fairy-tale prince you could awaken with a kiss, breaking some centuries-old spell. My fingers itched to smooth his hair back.
I didn’t. Just stood in the doorway for a moment, before Heather came up and drew me into a long hug.
“Thank you,” she said, slightly muffled. “I thought Cady would never sleep.” She gave me a squeeze and then pulled away. “Also, thanks for the other thing.” She looked at August. “The main thing.”
I smiled a little. “No problem.”
forty-nine
We all went to the Conlins’, late the next afternoon. I wasn’t sure how up for hanging out August would be, but he had texted: Everyone should come over, so we all went.
August thanked us for saving his life. Dash shifted back and forth, looking uncomfortable, but Terrance smiled dazzlingly.
“Anytime. My pleasure. Always here for a lifesaving moment.”
“You didn’t even do anything!” Brit said.
“Don’t underestimate moral support,” he answered loftily.
“I mean it,” August said, meeting my eyes. “I’d probably still be down there. If it weren’t for you.”
I glanced away. “Brit was the one who said to look there.”
“No, I wasn’t,” she replied. “Why would I want to save him? Dash’s car only seats five.”
“Thank you. Seriously,” August said.
Brit looked flustered by the sincerity. “Yeah, okay, no big deal. You don’t have to throw a parade or anything.”
“You do,” Terrance said. “And I expect to be grand marshal.”
Eventually, we ended up sitting in the backyard, watching Dash and Brit throw a ball for Shepherd.
“I always wanted a dog,” Flora said as Shepherd bound happily back to them, the tennis ball in his jaws. “I asked my parents for one when I was little, but they got me a stuffed one instead.”
“Stuffed like plush or stuffed like taxidermy?” August asked, and Terrance snorted.
“How amazing would that be? Hey, little Flora, Merry Christmas, here’s a dog corpse that we preserved for you. Enjoy!”
“You’d never have to walk it,” I offered.
“Stuffed like plush,” Flora said. “Obviously.”
“I had a stuffed dog when I was little too,” August said. “It was my favorite.”
“What was its name?”
“I don’t remember.”
“August,” Flora wheedled.
He let out a sigh, and then, begrudgingly: “Auggie-doggie.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Brit said as she pried the ball away from Shepherd.
“I was little!”
“What happened to Auggie-doggie?” Flora asked.
“I don’t know. Got lost somewhere, I guess.”
It was quiet for a bit, just Shepherd’s happy panting and Brit’s encouragement as he went back and forth for the ball—“The best dog there ever was! The smartest! The squishiest!”
“I had a teddy bear, you know,” Terrance said eventually.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. His name was … Terrance-bearance.”
“I will fight you,” August said.
“I’m dead serious right now.”
“Wait, really?”
That thousand-watt grin took Terrance’s face. “Of course not.”
Brit’s bark of a laugh sounded out over Flora’s giggles and Dash’s low rumble.
“I’ll fight all of you!” August roared, but he was grinning too.
fifty
I called August as I walked home from work a few days later. He had been back to Saint Anthony’s that morning to have a cast put on his ankle.
“Are you home?” I asked.
“I’m at Terrance and Dash’s house,” he replied, and then there was a rustling.
“Hi, Sophie,” Terrance called, slightly muffled.
“How was work?” August said.
“Good. How’s the cast?”
“Pretty good. Cady started decorating already. She’s got big plans.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, a major art installation. I think once she’s run out of cast, she’s just going to keep going. I’m going to be fully decorated.”
“She’s good at it. She colors in Kyle’s tattoo all the time.” He had a big one on his forearm. “That weird elk thing?”
“Oh yeah. And the playing card.”
“Hm?”
“On his back? Ace of hearts. Said he liked it ’cause aces could be high or low, and that’s how love could be.” A pause. “He also said he was super drunk when he got it.”
I stopped short.
* * *
I didn’t go home after work. I went straight to the Conlins’ back door and knocked.
Heather and Kyle were in the kitchen, Kyle sitting at the little table, Heather standing with her back against the sink, both with plates of pie. Heather waved to me through the screen door, gestured me inside.
“Hey, Soph.” She set her dish down on the counter. “Want pie?”
“You knew her,” I said.
They both just blinked at me.
“Yes, of course I want pie,” I added, and sat down at the table across from Kyle.
“Sorry, what’s up?” Heather turned to scoop up a piece out of an aluminum pie tin.
“You knew Megan Pleasant,” I said, looking at Kyle. “‘You’re my ace of hearts’? From ‘Always You’? She wrote it about you. She was in love with you.”
He looked at me a moment. Then he looked down at his plate, dividing the bit of crust in half with his fork. “She wasn’t.” He didn’t look even the slightest bit surprised, which made me feel all the more vindicated.
“But those songs were about you.”
Kyle shook his head. “I didn’t say they weren’t.”
“Then she was in love with you.”
“No.”
“How do you know? I won’t—like, I won’t tell anyone, if it’s some big secret. I swear.”
Heather had turned around at the sink and switched on the faucet. She stood there for a moment, the tap running, and then she looked back at Kyle and nodded.
“I know because she didn’t write that song,” he said.
“What?”
He smiled a little, chagrined. “She didn’t write any of them.”
“Not true,” Heather said.
“None of the good ones, at least.”
Heather shook her head. “Not fair.”
I looked at her. “What do you mean?”
She sighed. She looked tired, suddenly.
“I guess that … basically”—a shrug—“I’m Megan Pleasant.”
fifty-one
“Wait, what?”
“Not like … I mean Megan is Megan, yeah. This isn’t like a Hannah Montana scenario. We are two distinct people. But. I wrote her songs,” Heather said. “Some of them.”
“A lot of them,” Kyle clarified.
“‘Gave You My Heartland’?”
She nodded. “Everything on the first album. Most of Letters Home.”
“After that?”
She shook her head.
“How?” I said.
Heather took a deep breath, and then began to talk.
* * *
“It was just a goof at first. All these songs we wrote freshman year of high school—Megan taking them to these producers in Nashville and these guys actually doing something with them. When they finished recording the album, she came back to town for the summer, and we just started up again. We had no idea how the first album would sell, and by the time it came out … she was in and out of school, I rarely saw her, but we had written all these songs in the meantime. Those became Letters Home. The producers changed some of them up a little, but … most of them started as ours.”
“Yours,” Kyle said.
“She didn’t actually grow up here, you know—her folks moved here when she was in seventh grade. But we became best friends. She always talked about singing, about becoming famous. I never … I can’t sing at all. But I liked to write. I mean, I think every kid has written some shitty lyrics or poems at some point. But to me … it was more than that, like I really genuinely liked it. So we would sit around her room and just … make stuff up.” She smiled a little, wistful, like she was transported back to that room with Megan.
“‘Gave You My Heartland’ started out as a joke … if you brought someone back to Acadia—like maybe you went away to school or wherever and met someone—how would you introduce them to the town … and then it just spun out from there.”
I shook my head. “But why …” Everything I had read. Singer-songwriter Megan Pleasant. The pen connected from her heart to the page. “Why didn’t you ever get credit?”
Heather looked away.