Chapter 28
After he finishes his breakfast, Will decides he’ll follow his mom’s advice and get out of the room. He doesn’t like the idea of missing Rachel if she were to come back, but she’ll call if she does. He needs to do something before he sees her, anyway.
He needs to face his dad. And he needs to do it on his own.
Based on the location of the hotel on the outskirts of the city—Will could see the skyline in the distance from his room—and Rachel having the car, he’s going to have to get an Uber if he wants to do anything more ambitious than go to the Waffle House across the street.
The elevator opens onto the lobby, and he uses his phone to request the car. Three minutes. He’d remembered a bakery he saw on Yelp when researching breakfast spots before they got to Nashville. All the reviews raved about the doughnuts. He’d take the car there and then, if needed, look for somewhere a little quieter to make the call.
The sun is blazing, the kind of day where you hope your Uber driver likes air-conditioning as much as you do. When Shayla pulls up in her silver Mitsubishi Montero and he climbs in, he is grateful to discover that she does, which more than makes up for the subtle yet persistent strength of the air freshener.
“How’s it going?” Will says after he shuts the door.
“Good.” Shayla is probably in her early 40s but has the voice of a smoker and seems older. If he had to describe it, he’d call the SUV’s scent Marlboro Meadow.
“Long Night?” she asks.
“Huh?” he says, startled.
“The bakery? That’s where we’re going, right?”
“Oh. Yeah.”
“Good choice.”
She shifts into drive, and he looks down to see if Rachel’s texted, even though he’s had the phone in his hand the entire time. When he sees she hasn’t, he starts tapping in his passcode with the aim of jotting down what he wants to say to his father.
“You ever been to Nashville before?” Shayla asks while he’s still typing in the six digits of his and Rachel’s anniversary.
“Nope, first time.” The screen unlocks, and he opens his Notes app.
“Business or pleasure?” Shayla follows up.
“Uh, pleasure. Vacation.” He starts his first bullet point, about how much it hurt that his dad hadn’t come to their wedding. Hadn’t even responded to the invitation when he should’ve felt lucky to be invited in the first place. Shayla at first seems to recognize that Will’s doing something, but the pause in her questions proves temporary, likely brought about by her needing to shift her focus to the semi bearing down on them as she merges onto the highway.
“Vacation by yourself?” Shayla looks at him with a grin in her rearview mirror once she’s successfully punched the Montero past the truck. “You know, I had a lot of bachelorette parties last night. I bet you could find yourself a bridesmaid.”
This causes him to look up from his phone.
“I’m with my wife, actually.”
“Where is she?”
“Sleeping in,” he says, realizing that he’s going to have this conversation whether he wants to or not and that his newfound commitment to not lying doesn’t extend to Uber drivers. He notices Shayla’s wearing a Gretchen Grayson concert T-shirt, another painful reminder that while he may want to call his dad on his own, he’s not alone by choice.
“I like your shirt. Rachel—that’s my wife—she’s a huge fan.”
“Oh yeah? I haven’t listened to her new album, but I need to. I just really love her for how unafraid she is to speak up. Country music has this history of treating women like props, you know? Then it tosses them out if they go off script. It’s like, ‘We know this is your dream, so if we’re gracious enough to let you pursue it, you better be so damn grateful that you don’t dare have an opinion about what you do with it.’”
Will watches out the window as Shayla blows by a slow-moving RV. A sympathetic way of reading what he did with this interview for Rachel is that it was the exact opposite of making her choose between her dream and the other things in her life that are important to her.
But he did kind of tell her what to do with that dream.
“I wish Rachel were here,” he says in the understatement of a lifetime. “You two would get along great.”
Shayla must have heard the sadness in his voice because, as she moves them into the right lane so she’s ready for the approaching exit, she catches his eye in the rearview again.
“She’s not sleeping in, is she?”
He’s a little thrown that she saw through his lie, and even more that she’s called him on it.
“That obvious, huh?”
“Well, when you’ve been driving people around as long as I have, you notice things you might not otherwise.”
Will nods but leaves it at that. Shayla gets quiet, too, and he thinks his inability to mask his emotions has succeeded where his more direct efforts to kill the conversation failed. He’s about to start on the list for his call again when Shayla asks:
“So how long ago did she die?”
Will looks up from the phone again, a sign for Belmont University passing by outside his window.
“I’m sorry, what was that?”
“Your wife, Rachel—when did she, you know, pass?”
Yup, that’s what she said.
“Uh, no, Rachel’s very much alive.”
Shayla’s head pops back in surprise. “Really? Wow. You were giving off some serious widower energy there.”
It definitely isn’t a compliment, but he can’t tell if it’s all the way to an insult. It also makes him think of Lawrence and Josie.
Will bet that if you told Lawrence he could have one more day with Josie, but it had to be the day following the most he had ever screwed up in their marriage, whatever that was, that Lawrence would take that deal in an instant, even if it meant Josie being furious with him in that limited time they had together.
Will and Rachel didn’t have one day. They had the rest of their lives. No one had died here. They were going to figure this out. They had to.
“Nope,” he says, a little pep in his voice for the first time since Rachel left. “Just a fight.”
“Well, it must’ve been a bad one because I don’t normally make mistakes like that. Reading people is my superpower.”
That harshes his momentary high, and he wants to tell her that she sounds like the world’s worst Avenger. And mercifully, she gets a call and starts talking to someone through her Bluetooth, forgetting about him until they pull up outside Long Night Bakery in a neighborhood called 12 South. He thinks he’s going to get out without another word exchanged between them and opens his door.
“Hold on,” Shayla says to the person on the phone and then looks back at Will. “Try the churro doughnut. It’ll make you feel better. And good luck with Rachel. I’m sure it’ll work out.”
“Thanks,” he says, grateful for that bit of kindness and glad he didn’t say the Avengers thing.
The bakery is packed, way too crowded for a call, which is fine because he didn’t make it too far on his list. He gets in line and quickly encounters evidence of what Shayla talked about in regard to her fares from the night before, a handful of women in their mid-20s in line in front of him wearing matching Lexi’s Bachelorette: Day 2 T-shirts.
Even though he’s just used his phone to pay for the Uber, he checks for anything from Rachel on his way to the Notes app. But this time, when there’s nothing, his disappointment is tempered by his thoughts in the car of Lawrence and Josie and the realization that when he next sees his wife, he’ll at the very least know once and for all where he stands with his dad.
Whether that goes as poorly as Will expects it to or not, he knows it’s key to his and Rachel’s long-term happiness.
“Oh my God, did you see that guy Amy was making out with last night?” a member of Lexi’s crew asks about another, who clearly isn’t there.
“The guy in the Hawaiian shirt?”
“Uh, yeah. He was like fifty.”
The women erupt in laughter, and he feels a little bad for Amy, wherever she is. Hearing the name also reminds him of that composer Lawrence mentioned a couple of days earlier, the one whose name he was staying under, Amy Beach. Will leaves his list and does as Lawrence suggested and googles her. Turns out she was a child prodigy born in the 1860s who grew up to become the first American woman to publish a symphony. Despite not being given access to all the same opportunities a man of her talents would’ve had, she became a well-known composer, only to fade from the public consciousness following her death.
Will gets why Josie, the cellist who never got to pursue her performance dreams, would’ve said Amy Beach was one of her favorites. Lawrence said he regretted that Josie didn’t have that chance.
Will wishes he could ask Josie whether she did too.
He gets to the front of the line and orders his churro-inspired doughnut, which is handed to him in a pastel-colored box, and grabs a seat at one of the picnic tables outside. It is absolutely the best doughnut he’s ever had in his life, but he hardly even notices, the call that he came to make once again his focus.
The more he thinks about it, the less concerned he is about the list, which now has five items on it. Assholes, bullies, whatever you want to call them—they don’t respond to talking points. They respond when they know you’re not afraid of them. And Will has been afraid for way too long.
He throws out the box and takes the bottle of water he bought with him. The neighborhood is highly walkable, even if the humidity is making the doughnut feel like he swallowed a bowling ball. In between chugs of water, his gaze bounces around between all the local businesses, restaurants and otherwise, on either side of the street and the many stickers dotting the lampposts and other poles, his favorite being the one giving the patriarchy a one-star review. As on Mackinac Island, there are dogs everywhere.
Near the end of the block, he comes to a coffee shop. The boxy building is two stories, with outdoor seating in the shade under the overhang of the second floor.
He steps inside to recycle his bottle and get an iced coffee to replace it. He reemerges five minutes later and claims a two-person table at the far end of the seating area, next to one of the brick columns.
After taking out his phone, he sets it on the table. For the first time since Rachel walked out, he hasn’t done this to check for word from her. Instead, he closes his eyes and takes a long, deep breath.
When he opens them, he types in the number for his dad, which he got from his mom, hits the green call button, and starts counting the rings, waiting for an answer.