“It’s kind of like you, Bonnie. You cut off your long hair too. Just like Rapunzel.”

“That’s right, Katy. That’s because a mean old witch locked me up at Tower Records, and I had to wait for my boyfriend to get out of jail and come rescue me.”

“What the fu—heck are you talking about?” Finn asked, amending his curse at the last minute for the sake of the little girl who was hanging on every word.

A little snort escaped out of my nose at the incredulous look on his face, and Katy giggled.

“Bonnie Rae,” Finn choked out, finally laughing, “can we please change the subject?”

“Well. Singing is what I do best. Why don’t you entertain for a minute, Clyde?”

“What are you good at, Clyde?” Katy asked sweetly.

“Finn’s good at math,” I answered for him when he stayed silent.

“Oh, yeah? What’s twenty times twenty” Katy challenged.

“Four hundred,” Finn answered. “But that one wasn’t very hard. I bet you knew that one too.”

“Ask him one you don’t know. Something really hard,” I instructed.

“What’s six hundred and ninety . . . five,” Katy scrunched up her nose trying to make the number as complicated as she could. “Times four hundred and . . . fifty-two?”

Finn hardly stopped to think. “Three hundred fourteen thousand, one hundred forty.”

Katy and I both stared. I’m sure my face resembled Shayna’s stunned expression of not too long ago. I should have known.

Katy was immediately digging in her mother’s purse, rifling through wadded-up receipts and hair bands until she pulled out a dinky, red calculator that looked as if it had come out of a kid’s meal. She asked Finn several more problems, checking his answers on the little device. One time she crowed that he was wrong, only to realize she’d entered the numbers incorrectly.

She kept at it for at least a half hour, and Finn answered correctly, and quickly, every time. Katy was blown away. I was blown away. She continued grilling him until Finn shot me a sideways glance and mouthed, “Help.”

“What’s infinity plus one?” I interrupted Katy, asking Finn my own question.

“It’s still infinity,” Finn said, sighing.

“Wrong. It’s two.”

“Oh yeah? How do you figure?”

I pointed at Finn and said, “Infinity.” Then I pointed at myself and said, “Plus one. That’s two, genius.”

“I really wish I hadn’t told you my name.”

“Ha. Gotcha! You think you’re so good at math, but I just stumped you.”

Katy clapped, and I distracted her further by saying, “Here Katy. I have a cooler trick than Finn’s. I can show you how to write poop on a calculator . . . now that’s awesome.” I pulled the calculator from her little hands and proceeded to teach her some potty humor every kid should know.

Finn grabbed it from my hand and punched in some numbers and passed it back. When I turned it upside down it read “hILLBILLI.” Well, I definitely was that.

Chapter Nine

THE RIDE THAT should have taken three and a half hours took almost six. We rolled into Portsmouth after the sun had already gone down. Shayna lived in West Portsmouth, across the Scioto River, and she said you could still see what was left of the old Ohio-Erie Canal, but it was pretty overgrown, and in the dark it was impossible to see. I was too tired to care much about seeing any sights anyway. The baby had slept most of the way, which probably meant a sleepless night for her mother, but it had made the drive more bearable. Katy and Shayna had dozed off and on too, but I stayed awake with Finn, watching the Ohio landscape drift by, pondering the twists and turns of fate and fame, wondering how it all shook out.

We’d stopped once for a bathroom break and food, which I insisted on buying. Shayna let me. I could see there were things she wanted to say, but for whatever reason held back. With Shayna directing us the last few miles, we finally found ourselves in front of the Harris home at a little after six o’clock that night. I helped carry kids and luggage into the tidy rambler while Finn unchained the Fiesta from behind the Blazer. I referred to it as the “party in the back.” Get it? Fiesta? Yeah. Nobody else thought it was very funny either.

Katy was asleep by that time, and though she was too old to be carried to her bed, and it was still early in the evening, I scooped her up, cradling her slight figure in my arms, knowing that my tenderness for her was partially due to her illness. Minnie’s illness. I’d even slipped and called her Minnie once on the long drive. She’d looked at me blankly, and I’d stuttered and corrected myself immediately, but Finn had shot me a look. He didn’t miss much, but I really wished he’d missed that.

Shayna pointed me toward Katy’s room, and I swung through the opening, laid her on her bed, and untied her sneakers before I pulled a blanket up around her shoulders. I straightened, took a couple of steps back, and noticed the posters on the wall were mostly of me. Weird. And kind of cool. I found a black, felt-tip marker among a handful of colors protruding from a tin pencil can on a dresser littered with crayons and paints and drawings. I went around the room and autographed all of the posters.

“Bonnie Rae?”

I turned, and Katy was looking at me sleepily, trying to keep her eyes open. “I don’t want you to leave.”

“I don’t want you to leave.” Minnie had said the very same thing the night before I’d left for Nashville the first time. I had clung to her and she had squeezed me back.