Chapter 9 #2
“He said it was for me.”
“It was,” I say. “Even when he pretended it wasn’t.”
The studio goes quiet around us, the kind of quiet radio makes when it's working. Not dead air. Listening air.
Mrs. Price cries without apologizing. I let her. Then I ask her what Harold took in his coffee, and for two minutes she tells me about a man who drank it black but put six sugars in hers because he said life was bitter enough.
When I play Patsy, I have to wipe under both eyes carefully so I don’t get raccoon eyes.
My phone lights up again.
June
You sound like you.
I put the phone facedown before I can cry harder.
The next caller is sixteen, maybe seventeen, though he says he’s eighteen in a voice that has never convinced a bartender in its life. His name is Mason. He can’t sleep because his parents are fighting downstairs and he has a math test in the morning.
We talk and I play an Alan Jackson tune for him I haven't heard in too damn long.
Hour one becomes hour two.
Somewhere close to 11, the show stops feeling like a thing I'm trying not to ruin and starts feeling like a room people are entering carefully, one by one. A night nurse on break. A divorced man making pancakes because he can’t sleep in an empty house.
A woman who quit her job that afternoon and is terrified she's destroyed her life.
A college student homesick in Knoxville.
A grandmother who wants to request a song for her grandson stationed overseas but spends five minutes telling me about his dimples first.
I know how to hold them. The knowledge comes back through my hands, through the lean of my body toward the mic, through the places where I let silence do its work.
I don’t rush people. I don’t make their pain smaller so the hour fits better around it.
I remember how to bring them back to ground without making them feel managed.
At 12:08, Pop slides a note under the studio door.
Phones are full.
Below it, in smaller writing:
You’re killing me, Sutton.
I look up. He's grinning.
I laugh on air by accident, soft and startled. “Sorry,” I tell the listeners.
At ten minutes to three, I lean into the microphone.
“All right, Harmony Ridge. We’re going to take one more before I send you back to the night.”
The last caller is an older man named Earl, which makes Pop throw both hands up because he thinks I can’t see him through the glass.
“Not you, Pop,” I say on air.
Caller Earl chuckles. “No, ma’am. Different Earl.”
“What can I do for you, Different Earl?”
“I just wanted to say welcome home.”
The words hit me in the center of the chest.
He clears his throat. “My wife passed last spring. I leave the radio on most nights now. House feels less empty that way. Tonight it felt like somebody turned a lamp on.”
I press my fingertips to the desk. For a second, I can’t speak.
Pop looks away, pretending to adjust something on the board.
“Different Earl,” I say finally, “that may be the nicest thing anybody’s said to me in a long time.”
“Well,” he says, “it’s true.”
I swallow. “Then I’m glad I came home.”
I play the final song for him. Not a hit. Not anything shiny. An old, warm thing with a guitar that sounds like it was recorded in a room where people were allowed to make mistakes.
When it fades, I give the station ID, thank the sponsors, and say goodnight.
“Take care of yourselves,” I tell the dark county. “And if you can’t do that, call me tomorrow and we’ll start again.”
The red light goes off.
For a moment, I just sit there. Then Pop comes through the door and folds me into a hug so fast the headphones nearly slide off my head.
"That's my girl.”
I shut my eyes. I'm thirty-two years old.
I'm sleeping in my sister's guest bedroom. My marriage is a public spectacle. My last name still feels like a house key to a place I can’t go back to.
But Pop is holding me in a dusty radio studio after midnight, and my voice is still warm from being used, and something in me that I thought had gone quiet is wide awake.
The road home is empty enough that the traffic light on Main switches for no one.
I drive Daddy’s old truck with the windows cracked, even though the air is cold.
My hands smell faintly like metal from the mic stand and cheap soap from the station bathroom.
My throat aches. My cheeks hurt from smiling in places I didn’t expect to.
Alive isn't the same as happy. I know that. But it's close enough tonight to scare me.
June has texted eleven times, each message more emotional and bossy than the last. Pop has already asked if I’ll come back tomorrow.
The station’s voicemail filled twice. Somewhere in the hills, people I've never met are going to sleep with my voice fading out of their kitchens and truck cabs and bedrooms.
Mine.
The word sits beside me in the cab, bright and unfamiliar.
Mine.
I make it as far as the curve past the closed bait shop before my stomach turns. Hard.
One second I'm breathing cold air and thinking about Different Earl’s lamp in the window. The next, I'm yanking the truck onto the shoulder, gravel snapping under the tires, one hand clamped over my mouth.
I barely get the door open. The nausea folds me over so sharply my eyes water. Nothing much comes up, just bitter spit and the coffee I drank because my hands needed something to do before the show. My body shakes with it anyway, elbows locked, hair falling around my face.
For a few seconds, I stay there with one boot on the pavement and one still in the truck, breathing through the aftermath. The night is very quiet.
“It’s nerves,” I say out loud. My voice sounds thin in the dark.
Of course it’s nerves. Nerves, coffee, no dinner, two hours of sleep, and the small matter of my whole life having been set on fire in public. A body is allowed to object.
I wipe my mouth with a napkin from the glove box and sit back behind the wheel. My hands rest on my stomach without permission. I move them fast.
“No,” I whisper, though I don’t know what I’m refusing.
I start the truck again. The headlights catch the road ahead, pale and narrow, leading me back toward June’s house, toward tomorrow’s show, toward whatever I'm becoming now that no one gets to use me as proof of somebody else’s story.
I pull onto the road slowly.
“It’s just heartbreak,” I tell myself.
The lie rides home with me in the passenger seat.