That day they spent with Dusty at the farm, Dusty and her Dad taking the kids for tractor rides. Tonight Della was making dinner for everybody. Mike had been working but from a text from Dusty he received fifteen minutes ago, he knew everyone was already there including Rees and No.
He hit the door and didn’t interrupt by knocking. He just walked right through and he did this quickly.
He didn’t want to miss another second.
He closed the door behind him quietly, turned and saw it. Everyone was in the living room, asses covering every seat available except Rees and Fin. Rees was sitting cross-legged on the floor. Fin was sitting behind her, his long legs cocked and surrounding her, his wrists resting on his knees, hands dangling, her back was resting against his chest.
But even his daughter’s intimate position with her boyfriend didn’t penetrate Mike’s attention to what was happening across the room from Reesee and Fin.
His eyes took it in and his chest tightened as he saw, sitting across from each other, Dusty perched on the arm of the couch, No opposite her on the arm of an armchair, his acoustic guitar on his thigh, his hands moving but his grinning face was turned to Dusty.
She was smiling back at him while singing.
Mike felt electricity prickle his skin as he moved to the double doors and leaned against the jamb to listen.
No had that guitar for years. It was the first one Mike bought for him. He got it when he was twelve, he started playing it immediately and not then or since had he had a single lesson. He just took to it. Mike didn’t understand it but the same happened the year after when Mike bought him the set of drums he’d been asking for. They set them up and No started banging immediately. Within minutes it sounded less like banging and more like music. He’d never had a lesson with those either. He just had it in him, it was his way. As with Reesee, their talent was natural.
And the same was true with Dusty.
He’d heard her sing, not recently but when she was younger he heard it all the time. Though he’d never heard her sing a song like she was singing now.
K’s Choice, “Not an Addict”.
It was an intense, seriously fucking fantastic song and Dusty’s pure voice made it sweeter.
What it was not was a happy song.
She always used to sing happy songs. He remembered once walking into the farmhouse decades ago and hearing her singing Katrina and The Waves, “Walking on Sunshine”, swinging her ass and singing loud as she washed the inside windows. It was a gray day, thundercloud hanging low, storms that would eventually come but at that moment were only threatening the sky outside.
The minute he’d walked inside, Mike remembered, hearing her voice singing that song, the world brightened.
But even though he knew the subject matter wasn’t something she had experience with, the song she was singing right then sounded like it was made for her.
Mike watched his woman and his son having their moment, eyes locked, mouths curved and everyone had melted away. It was just them, his strumming, her voice, in their element. As the song progressed, No’s guitar became more powerful and Dusty’s voice increased in depth, volume and they were both gently swaying their torsos simultaneously to a beat they felt internally seeing as they didn’t have drums.
All eyes in the room were glued to them. Even Rivera and Jerra’s kids were motionless and mesmerized.
As was Mike.
And it hit him then, something he’d known for twenty-five years about Dusty but something he only understood right at that moment about the three people most important in his life. Dusty’s voice, her pottery, her drawings, her writing. His son’s drums, guitar, keyboards. His daughter’s writing. He was surrounded by people who were extraordinarily gifted. Everything they did was beyond the pale. His life was touched all around with genius.
And Mike knew what he was seeing and how it made him feel was burning itself on his brain forever. Because in that moment, watching and listening, he was profoundly moved that God had seen fit to gift him, an ordinary man, an Indiana boy through and through, with these people in his life.
And he understood then what he never did. Why he called Dusty “Angel”. Because with her gifts given to her straight from God, that was precisely what she was.
The phone rang but the only one who moved was Fin. He got up and silently walked out of the room, catching Mike’s eyes and giving him a chin lift as he went to the table in the hall that had a cordless phone in a charger.
Mike looked from Fin back into the living room. No’s hand was a blur as he strummed the repeating chords to the end of the song then laid his hand against the strings, halting the music and he smiled huge at Mike’s woman.
“Sing it again, Auntie Dusty!” Adriana, Jerra and Rivera’s six year old little girl shrieked, clapping her hands.
Dusty started, Adriana’s voice reminding her there were people around and she turned her head to the little girl and smiled at her. Then her eyes tipped up, caught on Mike, he watched her face get soft and her smile got bigger.
Yes, God had been generous to Mike Haines.