The Happiness Pact. Liz Flaherty

bringing more coffee and assuring them the weather in Tennessee was going to be great today. She smiled at Libby’s drowsy expression and procured a blanket and pillow from the compartment above.

      “Do you want something more?” Tucker asked when the woman had moved toward the back of the plane. “More than fun, I mean.”

      “I do.” She drank, then set her cup down on the tray table and turned her head to look out the window. “I want to be something besides good old Lib to someone.”

      * * *

      “OH, RHETT!” LIBBY fluttered her eyelashes at Tucker as they toured the gardens at the Hermitage, the home of Andrew Jackson. “How you do go on.”

      “You’re in the wrong state, Miss Scarlett. I assume you know that?” He lifted his phone to take pictures of either her or the flowers in the beds behind her. In case it was her, she tried to straighten her hair a little and wished she’d freshened her makeup before they left the airport.

      “Of course I know that. I’ve read Gone with the Wind at least once a year ever since seventh grade. But I figure this is the closest I’m going to come to Tara in this lifetime.” She knelt to look at the crocuses peering out from between the tulips. The flowers were the same as the ones that grew at home, but Tennessee was well ahead of Indiana on the color scale. “It’s so nice to be here. I’m ready for a glimpse of spring, aren’t you?”

      More than a glimpse, she realized. The depression that was nipping at her heels was becoming frightening. She needed light, lots of light, and February in the Midwest offered very little. Spring tossed other demons in her path, but at least she got to fight them with sunshine in her arsenal.

      “I think the long winter is easier for me because I travel so much.” Tucker’s eyes were darker than usual, and he wasn’t smiling. “What’s wrong, Lib?”

      Am I trying too hard? “Nothing.” She kept her voice bright. “Except I’m hungry. You picked me up at zero dark thirty this morning and all I’ve had since the drive-through are those crackers on the plane, which I lost while we were landing in Detroit. I never knew Detroit was on the way to Nashville, did you?”

      “You learn new geography every time you fly.” He helped her straighten, then went on in a truly appalling Humphrey Bogart voice, “Stick with me, sweetheart, and you’ll be throwing up all over the world.”

      She laughed, elbowing him, and didn’t draw away when he pulled her in close and kept his arm around her as they went to the on-site restaurant for some lunch.

      “Where do we go from here?” she asked after they’d ordered and she’d consumed a small pot of tea.

      “Downtown.”

      They walked for miles, stopping to listen politely to every fresh-air musician they passed and leave generous tips in open guitar cases. They rode a tourist bus all over town, ending at the Grand Ole Opry.

      “This was the only place my parents ever went on vacation,” she remembered. “They never took us, but every couple of years, they’d hire someone to help with the milking and come down for a few days. Going to the Hermitage, walking around downtown and listening to the heart’s echoes in the Ryman just now—it felt as if I was with my mom. She loved it here. It was where she grew up, and even though she didn’t have any family other than us, she still felt at home here. Dad brought her down when she was sick. He always thought the trip shortened her life, but even if it did, it gave her joy she wouldn’t have found anywhere else.”

      Libby didn’t know how many years it had been since she’d wept. The losses were things she kept buried in a safe place. Arlie and Holly’s mother had once called that place a pocket behind her heart, because grief wasn’t measured by tears. Libby remembered feeling so relieved when Gianna said that, because maybe it meant the girl who’d stood dry-eyed at her parents’ funerals wasn’t broken after all.

      She didn’t cry tonight, either, sitting beside Tucker in the Grand Ole Opry watching some of the same artists her mother had loved in addition to ones Libby listened to. But her heart ached to a depth she’d forgotten existed. It was good to feel something other than numbness, she supposed, but she hadn’t thought feeling this much would be as heavy as it was. Not after all this time.

      Tucker laughed beside her, drawing her attention to the performer on stage. He’d been around since her mother’s time. Oh, her mother used to say, he’s a case, he is. He grew up on the same mountain as I did, only a little deeper in the hollers.

      And there he was, at least a decade older than Crystal Worth would have been, still singing the songs she’d sung as she cleaned the redbrick farmhouse where Jesse still lived and helped with the milking. Libby wondered if her mother had ever sat in this row when she came to the Opry. Maybe in this very seat.

      “Dad used to say—” Libby spoke before she knew the words were coming, and they stuck in her throat. She had to clear it before going on, leaning to speak into Tucker’s good ear under cover of the music. “He used to say Mom should have sung at the Opry, that her voice deserved a bigger audience.”

      Tucker took her hand. “He was probably right. Remember when all the churches had Bible school together in the clubhouse at the lake? Your mom always led the singing and she’d get us to sing, too, no matter how bad we were. I still know all the words to ‘Deep and Wide.’”

      Libby chuckled, the weight of old grief lifting a little. “Father Doherty said we created whitecaps on the lake when we sang. I don’t think he meant it as a compliment.”

      Tucker laughed, leaning his head back. She looked at the line of his throat above the sweater he wore and thought how handsome he was. How much she appreciated him holding her hand. And how good that felt.

      Something in the pool of too-intense emotions she was feeling right then warned her that maybe it felt a little too good. It was like sitting where her mother had been, listening to the songs her mother had heard—it was pleasure to the point of pain.