was the musical connection, just as there had been with her.
Amy sighed. She didn’t know why she got to feeling the way she did at times like this. She wouldn’t even
Lucia reached across the table and put her hand on Amy’s, giving it a squeeze. “How’re you handling this, Amy? I remember you were pretty messed up about him at one point.”
“I can deal with it.”
“Well—what’s that line of yours? More power to your elbow then if you can, though I still can’t figure out how you got past it enough to still be able to play with him.”
Amy looked over to the bar where Matt was getting the girl a cup of tea. She wished the twinge of not so much jealousy, as hurt, would go away.
Patience, she told herself. She’d seen Matt with who knew how many women over the years, all of them crazy over him. The twinge only lasted for a little while—a reminder of a bad time, not the bad time itself. She was past that now.
Well, mostly.
“You just change your way of thinking about a person,” she said after a few moments, trying to convince herself as much as Lucia. “You change what you need from them, your expectations. That’s all.”
“You make it sound easy.”
Amy turned back to her friend. “It’s not,” she said in a quiet voice.
Lucia gave her hand a squeeze.
The girl was drunk on Matt, Amy realized. There was no other explanation for the way she was carrying on.
For the rest of the night, Amy could see Katrina sitting with Lucia at the back of the club, chin cupped in her hands as she listened to Matt sing. No, not just listening. She drank in the songs, swallowed them whole. And with every dance set they played, she was up on her feet at the front of the stage, the sinuous grace of her movement, the swirl and the lift and the rapid fire steps of her small feet capturing each tune to perfection.
Matt was obviously complimented by her attention—or at least whatever it was that he’d feel that would be close to flattered—and why not? Next to Lucia, she was the best looking woman in the club, and Lucia wasn’t exactly sending out “available” signals, not dressed the way she was.
Matt and the girl talked between each set, filling up the twenty minutes or so of canned music and patron conversation with a forest of words, his spoken, hers signed, each of them oblivious to their surroundings, to everything except for each other.
Maybe Katrina will be the one, Amy thought.
Once she got past her own feelings, that was what she usually found herself hoping. Although Matt could be insensitive once he stepped off the stage, she still believed that all he really needed was someone to care about to turn him around. Nobody who put such heart into his music, could be completely empty inside. She was sure that he just needed someone—the right someone. It hadn’t been her, fine. But somewhere there had to be a woman for him—a catalyst to take down the walls though which only his music dared forth to touch the world.
The way he’d been so attentive towards Katrina all night, Amy was sure he was going to take her home with him, but all he did was ask her out tomorrow.
Okay, she thought standing beside Lucia while Matt and Katrina “talked.” That’s a start and maybe a good one.
Katrina’s hands moved in response to Matt’s question.
“What’s she saying?” Amy asked, leaning close to whisper to Lucia.
“Yes,” Lucia translated. “Now she’s asking him if they can ride the ferry.”
“The one to Wolf Island?” Amy said. “That’s where you found her.”
“Whisht,” Lucia told her.
“We’ll do whatever you want,” Matt was saying.
And then Katrina was gone, trailing after Lucia with a last lingering wave before the world outside the club swallowed her and the door closed behind the pair of them.
Matt and Amy returned to the stage to pack up their instruments.
“I was thinking of heading up to The Harp to see if there’s a session on,” Matt said. He looked around at the other three. “Anyone feel like coming?”
If there were enough musicians up for the music, Joe Breen, the proprietor of The Harp, would lock the doors to the public after closing hours and just let the music flow until the last musician packed it in, acting no different on this side of the Atlantic than he had with the pub he’d run back home in Ireland.
Johnny shook his head. “I’m beat. It’s straight to bed for me tonight.”
“It’s been a long night,” Nicky agreed.
Nicky looked a little sullen, but Amy doubted that Matt even noticed. He just shrugged, then looked to her.
Well, and why not? she thought.
“I’ll give it a go,” she told him.
Saying their goodbyes to the other two outside the club, she and Matt walked north to the Rosses where The Harp stood in the shadow of the Kelly Street Bridge.
“Katrina seemed nice,” Amy said after a few blocks.
“I suppose,” he said. “A little intense, maybe.”
“I think she’s a little taken with you.”
Matt nodded unselfconsciously. “Maybe too much. But she sure can dance, can’t she?”
“Like an angel,” Amy agreed.
Conversation fell flat then, just as it always did.
“I got a new tune from Geordie this afternoon,” Amy said finally. “He doesn’t remember where he picked it up, but it fits onto the end of ‘The Kilavel Jig’ like it was born to it.”
Matt’s eyes brightened with interest. “What’s it called?”
“He didn’t know. It had some Gaelic title that he’d forgotten, but it’s a lovely piece. In Gmajor, but the first part has a kind of a modal flavor so that it almost feels as though it’s being played out of C. It’d be just lovely on the bouzouki.”
The talk stayed on tunes the rest of the way to The Harp—safe ground. At one point Amy found herself remembering a gig they’d played a few months ago and the story that Matt had used to introduce a song called “Sure, All He Did Was Go” that they’d played that night.
“He couldn’t help himself,” Matt had said, speaking of the fiddler in the song who gave up everything he had to follow a tune. “Music can be a severe mistress, demanding and jealous, and don’t you doubt it.
Do her bidding and isn’t it just like royalty that she’ll be treating you, but turn your back on her and she can take back her gift as easily as it was given. Your man could find himself holding only the tattered ribbons of a tune and song ashes and that’s the God’s own truth. I’ve seen it happen.”
And then he’d laughed, as though he’d been having the audience on, and they’d launched into the song, but Amy had seen more than laughter in Matt’s eyes as he started to sing. She wondered then, as she wondered now, if he didn’t half believe that little bit of superstition, picked up somewhere on his travels, God knew where.
Maybe that was the answer to the riddle that was Matt Casey: he thought he’d lose his gift of music if he gave his heart to another. Maybe he’d even written that song himself, for she’d surely never heard it before. Picked it up in Morocco, he’d told her once, from one of the Wild Geese, the many Irishin-exile, but she wasn’t so sure.
Did you write it? She was ready to ask him right now, but then they were at The Harp and there was old Joe Breen flinging open the door to welcome them in and the opportunity was gone.
Lucia put on a pot of tea when she and Katrina returned to the apartment. While they waited for it to steep, they sat on the legless sofa pushed up against one wall of the long open loft that took up the majority of the apartment’s floor space.
There was a small bedroom and a smaller bathroom off this main room. The kitchen area was in one corner —a battered fridge, its paint peeling, a sink and a counter with a hot plate on it and storage cupboards underneath and a small wooden kitchen table with five mismatching chairs set around it.
A low coffee table made of a plank of wood set on two apple crates crouched before the couch, laden with
