“He was born on a Sunday, and from the second he entered the world he started screaming his head off,” she chuckled. “My mother had been listening to something on the radio while I was pushing, a Sunday church service that was being broadcast live, and when they passed him to her, she turned it up louder to hear what was being said, but a gospel group were singing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot for one of their members who’d passed away. The second he heard it, he stopped trying to burst his little lungs and went silent. After that, whenever he was sick, upset, angry, feeling low, he’d either hum it or he’d listen to something else.”
I was trying to picture a little Jarrod doing that, but it just didn’t compute for me. I mean, I knew he used music to destress, but I didn’t know it was as deeply ingrained in him as this.
“At the age of eight, he came home from school, bursting with news about a guy who was teaching kids the guitar. He picked that instrument up and boom, he could play like that,” she clicked her fingers.
“Jarrod plays the guitar?” I asked, strangely not feeling uncomfortable anymore.
“Like he was Mozart with a piano,” she sighed, and then leaned into me. “But he’s rubbish at reading music,” she whispered. “You put sheet music in front of him and he can’t do a thing.”
“So how does he play the guitar?”
“He listens and figures it out on the guitar himself and then memorizes it so he can play the full song.”
Holy shit, that was freaking cool.
“And his voice,” she sighed, looking at the window. “His voice when he sings is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.”
She had that right. I got to hear it every day while he was working, even if he tried to keep it as quiet as he could, and I never got tired of it – which is what I told her, too.
After I’d done that, she sat and took me in more carefully. “My son is a special gift, Katy. He’s quiet, and he has no confidence, but he has so much that makes him the special gift that he is. The man everyone sees out there,” she waved at the window, “isn’t the one that’s inside him. If he gives you even a hint of the true depths of who he is, you’ll see that the world has a truly amazing man helping to make it the magic it is.”
Looking back over at the window she’d gestured to, I whispered, “I’m starting to see that.”
“He’s shown you parts of it then, I take it,” she said over the rim of her cup, her eyes smiling at me.
“I think so.”
Lowering the cup so that it was on her knee, she used her free hand to take the one of mine that was closest to her. “Then hold on, because you’re going to experience true happiness with him. It goes without saying that all of my sons have something to them, and God willing, when the time comes I’ll be able to share that with the women they choose to make permanent in their lives, too. But Jarrod holds everything deep, even music, and has always used it to establish his own rhythm and beauty.”
What could you say to that? Oh, Mrs. Kline, I get that. He’s the hottest guy I’ve ever met and I can’t wait to feel his rhythm? That was all kinds of wrong… but true. I wondered what kind of rhythm he had in…
“I see I’ve got you thinking now,” she chuckled, putting the cup back down on the table. “Well, let me just say, when my boys called me and told me Jarrod had someone special, I was shocked. He’s had girlfriends before, but not once have they involved me in it. Heck, one of them he had for two years and I never met her,” she muttered, her tone making it clear she still wasn’t happy about that. “Then they told me he was making a mess of it with you…” I’m thinking they’d used different words for mess, ones that included ‘fucking it up’, but ok, “and that I needed to fix it.” She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, “I didn’t come here to fix it, I came to figure out if you were worth as much as they were making out.”
I stopped breathing, not even realizing I’d done it until my brain started screaming at me to sort my shit out.
When I did, I whispered, “What?”
I mean, she was really nice, and she’d been that way since she’d come in. At no point did I think the visit was that deep. Then again, what did I know? I wasn’t a parent, and I’d never done the boyfriend/girlfriend parent thing, even with my ex in college. So this news made me panic that she was just being nice and that the second she left she’d tell her son to move the hell on and find someone better. That would not only mean losing Jarrod – even though I was still ticked at him about what I’d heard and didn’t understand it at all – but it would mean losing her other sons who I liked a lot also.