“You mean ‘bull.’ ”
He got a mischievous look in his eyes. “Strike while the peppers are hot.”
Ellie didn’t bother to correct him this time.
“All right, already” she said. “No more mangled phrases. We’ll go tomorrow.”
“That’s grand. Maybe nothing’ll come of it. But maybe you’ll look back on this as one of those pivotal moments that changed your life.”
“For the better,” she said.
She was finished her meal now. Stacking her plate on top of Donal’s, she pushed them both to the edge of the table and looked around for the waiter, wanting a refill on her coffee.
“Well, of course,” Donal said. “I’m glad we got that settled.”
She turned to look at him. “Now why can’t I shake the feeling that I’ve just been manipulated into this?”
Donal would only offer her a look of perfect innocence in return.
“Admit it,” she said. “You just wanted to satisfy your own curiosity about this Kellygnow business, didn’t you?”
“I had nothing to do with your man Patterson going all mad on you.”
“I didn’t say you did. But I can tell by the tone of your voice that you’re pleased with how this all turned out, all the same.”
“What sort of tone of voice?”
“A satisfied one.”
“Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph.”
“And your accent gets stronger, too.”
“Will you give it a rest, woman.”
The waiter showed up at their table with a coffee pot just then, interrupting her attempt to get Donal to confess. She asked for some more coffee and her bill. Donal put his hand over the top of his cup when the waiter offered him a refill.
“Are you working for Angel tonight?” he asked when the waiter had left.
Ellie shook her head. “Tommy and I aren’t on again until Monday. Why?”
“It’s that gig of Miki’s tonight. She’s playing at the Crowsea Community Center—filling in for some band that was originally booked to play. We should go. There’ll be music and Guinness and all the finer things in life.”
“From the way you were going on earlier, I’d think seeing Miki play would be the last thing you’d want to do.”
Donal gave her a look of complete indignation.
“Jaysus, woman,” he said. “She’s my sister. And a bloody fine accordion player when she doesn’t mess around with all that jazzy shite. It’s my duty and pleasure to give her all the support I can.”
“We are talking about you and Miki here, aren’t we?”
“Unless the Queen of Sheeba’s taken up playing the box.”
Ellie gave up. “Okay. I’ll go already.”
“I don’t know,” Donal said, mournfully now. “Maybe you shouldn’t. You might find it so dreadfully dull you’ll barely be able to keep your eyes open. You could have the worst time ever and then you’ll have to blame it all on me.”
“What I should do,” she said, holding up a fist between them, “is give you a good solid bang alongside your head.”
Donal slid his chair back so that he was out of range. That rare smile of his lit up his face, and all she could do was laugh.
7
Miki had never understood the concept of stage fright. The only thing she liked better than playing her button accordion for its own sake was playing it in front of an audience. The larger the crowd, the better. It wasn’t that she had a big ego, though she certainly had more than enough confidence in her instrumental ability and knew she could keep an audience entertained. Nor did she need the additional validation of applause. That wasn’t the point of her love for playing music live. It was more that she didn’t consider the music to be real until it had made the circuit from player to listener’s ear and back again by way of the listener’s reaction—a circle that could push the music up another notch every time it came around, building through a performance until sometimes when she came offstage, she’d be almost staggering, drunk on the music.
It didn’t have to be a big audience—only one that gave the music a fair listen, and was willing to express how they felt about it.
So far as Miki was concerned, they had a grand audience at the Crowsea Community Center tonight. A dancing, foot-stomping, hand-clapping appreciative audience that was making the band work twice as hard since they’d started the set, just to keep the energy up. In short, the evening was unwinding exactly the way she liked it. She sat on a chair at one end of the line of four musicians that made up Jigabout, accordion bouncing on her knee, and was barely able to keep her seat she was having such fun, dancing on the spot, seated and all. Of course it helped to have musicians of this caliber to be playing with.
Jigabout was a pickup band, put together for tonight’s gig when the New-ford Traditional Music Society’s featured act for the evening fell through earlier in the week. Miki had gotten the call from the society on Thursday evening and hastily put Jigabout together—not quite as difficult a prospect as might be imagined since all the musicians she’d rounded up had often played together.
The other members included Emma Jean Wright from Miki’s regular band Fall Down Dancing on guitar. Unlike Miki, Emma Jean was a natural blonde, her corkscrew curls pulled back into a loose braid tonight. And she was tall—slender and wonderfully tall—a source of some envy to Miki, who got well and truly tired of her own diminutive size whenever something was out of her reach, which seemed far too often. Besides playing with Fall Down Dancing, Emma Jean doubled as a member of an all-female bluegrass group called the Oak Mountain Girls where she also played five-string banjo and provided vocals. She was one of the few guitarists Miki knew who could play as well in both styles, highlighting the proper accents of either a Celtic dance tune accompaniment or a flat-picked bluegrass breakdown as required.
Since the other members of Fall Down Dancing weren’t available for tonight, Miki had fallen back on the Wednesday night sessions at The Harp to find a couple of other players, enlisting Amy Scanlon on pipes, whistle, and vocals, and Geordie Riddell on fiddle and flute. Amy and Geordie often played together as a duo and all four of them shared enough material in common that the big problem in putting together the sets they needed for this gig had been in what to leave out.
When they’d arrived at the community center for their sound-check, the society members had been carefully setting out rows of folding chairs in front of the stage. By now, halfway through their first set, the audience had folded most of those chairs back up against the walls and the seating area had been turned into a dance floor. There was even a kind of mosh pit to the right of the stage, right in front of where Miki was sitting, where various punky-looking kids, all piercings and tattoos, and baggy-clothed skateboarder types were pogoing and generally carrying on, not even trying to dance, but having a great time.
Miki knew that the way they carried on bugged some of the more staunch traditionalists. This sort of thing didn’t show the proper respect to the music. But she didn’t care. So long as they were having fun and not interfering with the others who were dancing, let them do what they wanted. Why, she thought with a laugh, if the fancy struck her, she might even have a go at crowd-surfing herself.
When the set of reels they were playing came to an end, Miki grinned at Amy, sitting at the other end of the stage with her pipes across her knees. The two of them had brought the tune to a close with exactly the same twiddly-dum-dee-dum flourish. A wave of applause and stamping feet rose up from the dance floor, drowning out the band’s thank-yous. Looking down at the set list taped to the floor by her feet, Miki wished, and not for the first time, that she could bounce around the stage the way Geordie and Emma Jean could. But she and Amy were locked to their chairs by their instruments.