Big Sky Girl

In Livingston, Montana, the red brick storefronts look small under the mountains, and the mountains look small under the sky. Maddy ties up her hair and double-knots her apron and walks through the door of the brewery where she waits tables after school. It’s September, and business is slow. Summer was full of sunburnt families on their way to see geysers and bison at Yellowstone Park. Now she’ll be bringing burgers to ranchers and locals until ski season starts.

Trevor Sullivan, the other server, is late. He cut class today -- the weather was too good not to be on the river -- and when he shows up to work he sprawls in a booth and makes fishing lures out of slip knots and super glue instead of polishing silverware like they’re supposed to. But Trevor can get away with it. His parents own the restaurant, and, besides, people love him. He’s got a smile that makes girls leave their phone numbers on receipts and men lean over their beers to tell him stories.

“Hey,” he says to Maddy, as though there aren’t tables of customers between them. Now everyone’s listening. “What are you doing tonight?”

Maddy shrugs back.

Trevor walks closer so only she can hear. “You should come to Murphy’s,” he tells her. “We’re having a bonfire.”

Maddy leans to check if the couple dining behind him need refills. “Next time.”

“You always say no,” he says. He grins so she knows he’s teasing.

“Maybe I’ll stop by,” she replies. They both know she won’t.

She scribbles down orders and wipes tabletops all afternoon, and then it’s time for her cello lesson. Trevor balances four plates on one arm as he brings a family their food. “See you later, Yo-Yo Ma,” he calls. The bell on the door jingles as she leaves.

***

Maddy saw a cello in a bluegrass band when she was five and started playing when she turned six, the first in her family to learn an instrument. Her mother makes beds at the Murray Hotel. Her grandpa owns a tractor supply store and her father works there, too, and someday Maddy’s little brothers will join them. Maddy’s seventeen, a senior at Park High, and next she wants to go to college for music. Her parents won’t hear of it. Too much money, too little stability. Only her grandpa listens. When Maddy stops by his shop, they talk and eat the peppermints he keeps in a bowl on the counter until customers interrupt.

“Make sure you keep a journal,” her grandpa always reminds her. He has stacks of small black notebooks in his office, with pages he filled in Germany during World War Two, in the seventies when the Yellowstone flooded, in the hospital the day Maddy was born. Once in a while, he hands Maddy a blank Moleskine from the box next to his desk, and she tucks it in her backpack and takes it with her everywhere.

Inside, she’s written down the best schools in the biggest cities. She has to be good enough to get in, and great enough to get a scholarship. The chances are slim, but Maddy has a plan. She’s memorized the Dvorak concerto. It’s the hardest piece she knows, full of spiccato and ricochet bow strokes, double-stops and octaves, all the most advanced techniques. She sets her alarm to practice every morning and comes late to class with the nerves in her fingertips still buzzing. After her shifts at the brewery, she plays it slow with a metronome, over and over, learning the choreography of where her left hand and right arm should be for each note. Dvorak composed the solo when he lived in New York, homesick for the mountains and forests of his birthplace. Maddy might not have the fanciest education or the finest instrument, but she grew up exploring peaks and prairies and she can make the music as majestic as Dvorak meant it to be.

At her lesson, her teacher adjusts her wrist and tells her to place the bow closer to the bridge to help the high notes sing. Maddy jots it all down in her notebook. She hums to herself on the drive back, as telephone wires snap past out the window. She’s thinking of Trevor. When work is over and they stay late talking in the parking lot. When he leans on her locker and asks to copy her calculus worksheets even though he’s the one who’s better at math.

She drops her cello off at home and thinks she might miss curfew tonight. There’s smoke and happy shouting at the bonfire. She sees Trevor across the flames and moves so they’re standing next to each other. “Hey,” she says. He smiles and she smiles back.

***

Maddy sends out her audition videos in October, and over the holidays the responses roll in. We regret to inform you -- unfortunately -- many strong applicants, but -- rejection after rejection. The whole town is decked out in red and green and fairy lights, but she’s not celebrating. Her mother bakes apple crisp to cheer her up. Trevor brings carnations. Maddy sees him every day now, even when they’re not working. He teaches her to skip rocks on the river and they go ice skating when it freezes over, racing back to his truck and pressing their hands over the heating vents to warm up.

One morning, she’s studying at the kitchen table when she gets an email from a university in London. She’s passed the prescreening process and advanced to the next round, where she’ll perform for the judges live. There’s a list of dates when the audition committee will be nearby. Maddy types London into her search bar and sees the tower and the bridge and Westminster Abbey and thinks, I could do that. Snow falls on the pines outside and the whole world feels new and special.

“Let me know when we can hang out again,” Trevor texts her, after a few times of telling him she’s busy. But Maddy’s focused on practicing. In the spring, her grandpa drives her nine hours south to Denver, where a woman in a suit assigns Maddy a number and a room for warming up. He gives her a peppermint for good luck and hugs her tight. “Break a leg, honey.”

Maddy plays slow scales until it’s her turn. She steps on stage and blinks into the lights. She sees five people in the first row with clipboards and her grandpa’s baseball cap in the back. She sits down, extends the endpin, takes a deep breath, and begins.

The opening chords scratch and her fingers slip from the sweat. But she plays the next note, and the one after that. The air gets still and she nails the first run and crescendos through the melody before getting soft for the delicate moments. Then there’s the triumphant return to the theme, and it’s almost over and she’s having fun with it, taking the fast parts faster just because she can, climbing higher and higher until the highest trill, and she lifts her bow from the string. Her hair is wet against her neck and rosin dust coats her cello. She takes a bow. There’s polite clapping in the front and a loud whoop from the back.

Afterwards as she walks down the fluorescent hall, Maddy hears other students behind different doors playing the same piece. They’re hitting the chords she always misses and they make the measures she struggles with sound simple. She knows why the other schools said no, and she puts her cello away.

They sleep at a Motel 6 and have orange juice and oatmeal in the lobby before hitting the road. Her grandpa tells stories about her dad as a kid, and they sing along to Springsteen until the radio turns to static. Maddy uses the mirror in the sun visor to apply sparkles to her eyelids. Prom’s tonight and she’s getting ready in the passenger seat. She promised Trevor she would make it, but there’s construction and they’re cutting it close.

Trevor’s on the porch with her mother when she gets home. There are wrinkles in the knees of his rented tux from sitting so long. They’ve missed pictures and dinner, but the dance just started. Maddy watches lace and taffeta whirl around her, friends she’s known since kindergarten and classmates she might have been friends with if she hadn’t been so busy. People happy to stay and get married and grow old. This is life, she thinks, and she’s spent it hunched over a screen and stressed in front of a music stand, moving from worry to worry with creases under her eyes and nails bitten to the quick. And for what? A school with an impressive name, and years of uncertainty after that? Right now there’s punch and streamers and one more song, there’s giggling and cramming in a car, driving up the highway and leaning into each other as the rising sun colors the valley pink. This is what matters, and when Trevor whispers nice things to her, that feels real, too. By the end of the night, the days when she imagined any other future seem like a fever dream, a girl she used to be.

***

The letter from London has good, but not great, news. Maddy gets in, but she doesn’t get a scholarship, so she doesn’t tell anyone. She passes the tractor store on her way to work and looks away. The restaurant door’s propped open to let a warm breeze through, and there’s already a waitlist at the host stand. After the dinner rush, Maddy unties her apron and slumps on a barstool to count her tips. Her whole body goes cold. There’s a check for $20,000 under a receipt. It has her name on it, in handwriting she doesn’t recognize. She dashes to the bank around the corner, where the teller assures her it’s valid. Maddy walks out shaking and sits in her car for a long time, staring out the windshield at the streets she’s scraped her knees and learned to drive on. Then she pulls out her laptop and uses the brewery’s wifi to confirm her acceptance.

$20,000 means plane tickets for her and the cello since it’s too fragile to be stowed. It means an apartment with strangers she finds online. It means goodbye. Trevor would drive her to the shores of the Atlantic, but she doesn’t even let him come to the airport. Her arms hold him and her mouth says “I’m sorry,” but her head is in London, where she’ll have picnics in Hyde Park and good days and hard days and moments where she’ll wonder the same things she did at prom, if it’s worth it, but she’ll watch the sun slant across the columns downtown and there’s always a promise that it might be. She’ll go to the Royal Albert Hall and sit in the cheapest row, then practice and practice until she’s the one on stage.

***

The bell on the door jingles as Maddy leaves the brewery where she used to wait tables after school. She flew in from a concert in Berlin, where she sent her grandpa photos from the places he was stationed. She hasn’t been to Livingston in a while, and now she gets why Dvorak wrote symphonies about home. Lots of things have changed, but the mountains are here and the restaurant’s open, with the same leather booths and a server whose easy smile reminds her of a boy she used to know.

Trevor Sullivan’s oldest son watches the red taillights glow through the fogged-up windows as the woman with the instrument drives away. The receipts in his apron are covered in doodles of the storefronts outside. He wants to be an architect someday. He goes to clear her plate and clean up for the evening, then stops short. On the table is a check for $20,000, and a small black notebook for his sketches.