Free Coming Home by Laurie Breton

and
anarchy.  It had never occurred to her to question their validity.  But now,
here stood Rob MacKenzie, daring to suggest that maybe, if she bent one of
those rules a bit, the sky wouldn’t tumble down on her head. 
    “Look,” she told him, “I come from a long line of staid Baptists. 
We don’t know how to break the rules.  That ability was bred out of us
generations ago.”  She smiled ruefully.  “Along with our sense of humor.”
    “So I should just stand by and watch you starve?”
    “It’s not your responsibility to subsidize us.”
    “It’s not a subsidy,” he said, “it’s a gift.”
    In exasperation, she said, “You are the most impossible man I’ve
ever met.”
    He grinned.  “I’m Irish,” he said.  “So sue me.”
    Giving up, she tucked the twenty back into her pocket.  “We will
not discuss this issue again.  Is that understood?”
    He saluted.  “Loud and clear.”
    And they never did.  But after that, whenever starvation loomed,
she would find money tucked into secret places.  Sometimes just a few crumpled bills
stuffed into her purse; sometimes a twenty in her bureau drawer, or two fives
in her jewelry box.  She never caught him at it, and after a time, she stopped
trying.  But she kept a running tally, because somehow, someday, she would pay
back every penny.
    As summer moved into fall, she and Rob spent several afternoons a
week writing songs together.  As he jokingly told her, “We make beautiful music
together,” and he wasn’t far from the truth.  But her woeful ignorance of the
technical aspects of music kept getting in her way.  Finally one day, she threw
down her pencil in frustration.  “I can hear it in my head,” she said.  “Why
can’t I put it on paper?”
    “Because you don’t have the skills you need to make the
transition.”
    “How can I get them?”
    He looked pensive.  “I could teach you.”
    “I couldn’t ask you to give me that much of your time.”
    “We could call it an investment.”  He leaned back in his chair and
crossed his bony ankles.  “I’ll get my payback when we win our first Grammy.”
    Her laughter was rueful.  “That’ll be the day.”
    But in the end, she recognized that if they were to continue to
work together, she needed to know what she was doing on a more technical
level.  She couldn’t continue indefinitely to let Rob carry her.
    Rob MacKenzie was a patient teacher with a vast wealth of
knowledge upon which to draw and the willingness to share with her everything
he had ever learned about music.  What started as a crash course in music
theory grew into months of intensive tutelage.  They studied chord progressions
and intervalic relationships, structure and tempo and style.  They stripped
other people’s songs down to the bare bones and then reassembled them to see
what made them work.  Over the months, he transfused knowledge to her as if by
an invisible bloodline.  Along the way, he taught her a healthy respect for the
great blues musicians of the past and present, from Robert Johnson to Billie
Holiday to B.B. King.  He played their music for her, traced for her the
genealogy of the music she heard on the radio every day.
    In the process, she learned a great deal about Rob himself.  He
had picked up his first guitar at the age of nine.  After that, he’d had but
one love in his life.  At seventeen, he’d been admitted to Berklee on a full
scholarship, and during his tenure there, he’d soaked up knowledge like a
sponge.  At nineteen, he and Berklee had parted amicably when he’d left to
pursue a career as a working musician.  He was tired of waiting, eager to jump
in headfirst.
    Rob became her mentor, her best friend.  It was a euphoric
experience, seeing something she’d worked hard to create come alive in the
hands of a group of talented musicians.  The music germinated somewhere deep
inside her, but she tailored it to Danny.  She knew his possibilities, knew