Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,55

a thicket of bushes.”

“I remember. You looked my way. But I didn’t know you saw me.”

“I did,” I said. “But just your face.” I looked into that face. “I still don’t understand why you didn’t show yourself.”

At which he ducked his head. “I’ve been sad for a long time.” He glanced at me and away again. “Making those little carvings. Leaving them for you.” He sighed. “Made me happy.”

I waited. I thought I understood. “So is it all right?” I said. “Or is it ruined now? Knowing me without the trees in between.”

He looked up at me, startled. “It’s not ruined.”

* * *

—

When we went back into the cabin, Cate was as she’d been, her face turned to the wall.

“I should have known she was your grandmother,” I said softly. “You’re so much the same.”

He liked that, I could tell.

I had already pried a lot out of him, and I didn’t want to push too hard, but there was a lot here that I still didn’t understand. “You said your mother’s afraid you’ll leave here, if you learn too much, if Cate teaches you too much.”

He nodded.

“But you actually get in trouble because you come up here? You have to sneak around, to see your own grandmother?” I said. “It sounds like your mother—” I stopped.

Larkin sighed. “She doesn’t like Cate.”

“But why not? Cate’s . . . wonderful.”

“It’s complicated.” He looked at the floor. “My grandmother grew up on this mountain, but she left to go to school, to become a nurse, and married a doctor and had a baby: my daddy.” Larkin glanced at Cate. “She brought him here a lot when he was a boy, and he loved the mountain, but he grew up in town and he went to college and he lived in a city and had a job in an office. All that. For a few years. Until he got sick of it.”

“The city?”

“And the job, too. And that life.” He looked around the cabin. “He liked it here. And he decided to come here to live.”

“By himself?”

“Yes, at first. He wanted to be a luthier, and he wanted to live with trees all around him. He—”

“What’s a luthier?” I said.

He looked surprised. “A luthier makes instruments.”

“What kind of instruments?”

“The kinds with strings. Guitars. Fiddles.”

“Mandolins?” I said, thinking of the one gathering dust in the corner near my father’s bed. I remembered the sound it had made in my mother’s hands. There was no finer sound. No better music than that, except her voice, which had also gathered far too much dust since my father’s accident.

“Especially mandolins,” Larkin said. “He was famous for his mandolins. He named them for my mother. Keavy. Every music shop for a hundred miles had them.” He looked proud, despite the bruises on his face.

“My mother has a mandolin.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Maybe my father made it.”

I thought about that. Pictured Larkin’s father up on this mountain, living with trees all around him. “He made them out of trees?”

Larkin nodded. “Sugar maple. Red spruce.”

I imagined his father waking the memory of wind and rain and sun and snow and starlight from wood otherwise mute.

I thought of my mother sitting by the fire, playing her mandolin, releasing all that rain and snow and sun and starlight. The thought made my bones hum.

“He must have been a very good musician,” I said.

Larkin sighed again. “Of all the things I miss about him, that may be what I miss the most. How he played. Which was why he was able to make such beautiful instruments. Because he understood what they could do, in the right hands.”

I looked at Larkin’s long, slender fingers. “Did he teach you?”

At which Larkin bowed his head. He didn’t look at me when he answered. “Of all the things I wish I’d done before he died, that’s the biggest thing. To spend more time at my lessons, learning to play. Though yes, he did teach me.”

I tipped my head toward the tools hanging on the wall. “He used those?”

“He did. And he made the glue out of deer hide.”

“Deer hide!?”

“Sometimes rabbit. Mostly deer. You cut it up and add a little water and boil it and it makes the strongest glue you could want.”

Which sounded awful to me. But if that was what it took to make a mandolin, then it couldn’t be all bad.

And that explained why Cate had given deer skins to his daddy.

But it didn’t explain the rest.

Chapter Forty-Two

“That still doesn’t explain why your mother