14. The Journalist
The Journalist
CASH
The Farmhouse — Morning
J ana calls at eight-fifteen on a Thursday.
I am at the kitchen table with my coffee and the guitar and the second verse, which is finally moving in a direction I can follow. I have been at this for an hour. The verse is close. Not finished, but close, when you can feel the shape of it even though you can’t see all the edges yet.
I pick up the phone.
“Tell me you’ve thought about it,” Jana says.
“I’ve thought about it.”
“And?”
I look at the verse on the page. At the window. At the field beyond it, where the frost is still on the grass, and at Angel’s truck.
“Yes,” I say. “Set it up.”
Jana makes a sound of barely contained relief. “I’ll call Bren today.”
“Jana.”
“Yes.”
“Sycamore Ridge is not part of the story.”
A pause. “Of course.”
“I mean it: the program, the property, none of it. The story is the music, the album, and the road back. That’s it.”
“Absolutely.”
I hang up and look at the verse for another minute.
Am I doing the right thing or making a significant mistake? The two have started to feel more similar than I am comfortable with.
* * *
Nashville — Monday
Bren Cole is exactly what Jana said she was.
Professional. Unhurried. The kind of thoroughness that announces itself in the quality of the questions, not broad strokes but specifics, the kind that requires actual answers rather than polished ones.
We meet at a coffee shop in the Gulch. She has a notebook and a recorder and the calm, interested expression of someone who has done this a hundred times and still finds it genuinely interesting. I respect that. It is harder than it sounds.
She is also, I notice immediately, very good at waiting.
She asks a question, then does the thing most people cannot do: stop talking and let the silence do its work.
I have met three people in my life who can do this effectively.
Two of them are therapists. One of them is sitting across from me, a notebook in hand.
She asks about Amarillo. The rodeo circuit. The injury. I give her the version I have given before, true in its facts, managed in its texture, the shape of a story that communicates the essential without requiring anything I am not ready to give.
She writes things down and asks follow-up questions.
I answer them.
“The bull riding ended abruptly,” she says. “That must have been a significant loss.”
“It was.”
“And music came out of that.”
“Music was already there. The injury just… made the space.”
She writes that down. I watch her write it and think about the fact that she is going to use it, which is fine, which is what I agreed to, which is what the label needs. It is true. It is also incomplete in a way that she cannot know.
Then she asks: “What changed in the last few months?”
She says it as if she already has a theory and is waiting to see if you confirm it.
I take a sip of my coffee.
“I took some time outside the city,” I say. “Rented a place. Got some distance from the machine.”
“Where?”
“Just outside Nashville. Somewhere peaceful.”
She makes a note. “And that’s where the new material came from?”
“That’s where I remembered how to write,” I say. “Which isn’t the same thing, but it’s close enough.”
She looks at me with the attention of someone who has just heard a real answer in a conversation full of managed ones.
I make a note to be more careful.
* * *
The interview runs for ninety minutes.
On the drive back, Bren Cole looms in my mind. And what she is going to do with ‘somewhere peaceful just outside Nashville.’
Thorough journalists find things. That is what thorough means.
Sycamore Ridge is twenty minutes from the Gulch. It has a website. It has program documentation. It has a gray horse that would definitely walk up to a journalist with a notebook and attempt to read it.
I call Derek before I hit the highway.
“The interview went fine,” I say.
“Good.”
“I need you to make sure the property address stays off any press materials.”
A pause. “The farmhouse rental?”
“All of it. The rental, the program, and any location details. If Bren Cole asks the label for background information, the answer is that I took time at a private property outside the city. Nothing more.”
“Cash, if she’s doing a thorough piece, she’s going to find —”
“Then she’ll find it on her own. I’m not handing it to her.”
Derek says nothing for a minute. He has worked with me long enough to know the difference between a request and a position.
“Fine,” he says. “I’ll handle it. But Cash, if this is about the program, they’re going to find it anyway. That’s how these pieces work.”
“I know how these pieces work,” I say.
“Then you know —”
“Derek.”
He stops.
“Handle it,” I say.
He handles it.
I merge onto the highway and drive back to the farmhouse, and think about the things I am trying to keep separate and whether that is possible, and whether I should have said yes to this profile at all.
The farmhouse porch light is on when I pull in.
I left it on this morning. That is not a new development.
* * *
Sycamore Ridge — Tuesday
The tenth session.
I arrive at nine, not early, which has become as automatic as breathing. Kit runs a groundwork check. Emmett is in his paddock doing his usual commentary. The session is good. It’s better than good, the kind where the work feels like work, not like managing work.
Lila Chen is finishing a late solo session when I come out of the paddock afterward. She is walking Clover on a loose lead along the south fence, and she looks over when she sees me and gives me the look she always gives me, the look of someone who knows something and has decided not to say it yet.
“Wilder,” she says.
“Chen.”
“How’s the album?”
“Almost done.”
She keeps walking Clover. Then, without looking at me: “You know what’s funny?”
“Something tells me you’re going to tell me.”
“I’ve been here five weeks. I’ve never seen Angel stay late just to watch a session wrap.”
She says this to Clover, not to me.
“She takes comprehensive notes,” I say.
“She does,” Lila agrees pleasantly. “Very comprehensive. Starting around week three.”
She leads Clover into the paddock and doesn’t look back.
* * *
Angel is in the office, which I know because I have learned to track people's locations at Sycamore Ridge the same way I track the weather, not deliberately, just as a feature of paying attention.
I knock on the open door.
She looks up from the intake file she’s reviewing. “Session go well?”
“Kit says significant progress.”
“Kit doesn’t say that lightly.”
“No.” I lean against the door frame.
“My father called last night,” I say.
She sets the file down, and waits.
“He has a mare. She’s been off for a few months, not eating well, not engaging. Vet cleared her physically. Nothing wrong that medicine can find.” I pause. “But something’s wrong.”
Angel is very still, like she is still when she is listening at full capacity.
“She lost her companion last spring,” I say. “A gelding she’d been with for eleven years. Dad says she’s just closed off. Goes through the motions.”
A beat.
“You’re describing grief,” Angel says.
“Yeah.”
She looks at the window. Then back at me. “Horses grieve. It’s real and specific, and it doesn’t always resolve on its own. The wrong approach makes it worse. You have to go in very subtly.”
“I know.” I look at her directly. “I was wondering if you’d come take a look at her.”
A pause.
“Amarillo,” she says.
“Amarillo.”
“That’s not a day trip.”
“No. I was thinking of a long weekend. There and back by Sunday. My dad’s got a good spread, plenty of room. The mare’s worth the trip.” I pause. “So is your eye.”
I can see her thinking, not hesitating, but thinking, which, with Angel, are different things. She is assessing the horse. She is assessing the situation. She is assessing me.
I let her assess.
“When?” she says.
Something in my chest settles.
“Next weekend, if Ivy can spare you. I’ll call my dad tonight.”
She goes back to the intake file.
“I’ll talk to Ivy,” she says. “And Cash, tell her about Bren Cole first. Before the Texas conversation.”
“Already on the list.”
I push off the door frame and go.
I am halfway across the barn when I hear her voice behind me, not loud, not calling after me, just there.
“Cash.”
I turn.
She is still looking at the file. “The mare’s name?”
“Sugar,” I say. “I know.”
The corner of her mouth moves. She goes back to the file.
I walk out of the barn into the cold December afternoon, and I am, I realize, smiling.
Not the stage version.
* * *
The Farmhouse — Evening
I call my father at seven.
The kitchen is quiet. My guitar is on the table. Outside the window, the field has gone completely dark.
He picks up on the third ring, which is how he always picks up. Not the first, that would suggest urgency. Not the fourth, that would be rude. The third ring is the Wilder family’s way of communicating that they were available but not waiting.
“Cash.”
“Dad.”
“How’s Tennessee.” Not a question. A statement that means: you called, so something is happening.
“Good. Better than good.” I lean back in the kitchen chair. “I want to bring someone out next weekend. Someone who works with horses. She’s got a good eye with animals that are struggling.”
A pause. My father processes things at his own pace, which is the pace of a man who has been making decisions on a cattle ranch for forty years and has never once regretted a decision made by moving too fast.
“For Sugar,” he says.
“For Sugar.”
Another pause. I can hear the television in the background, the evening news, which my father watches every night at six-thirty, regardless of whether anything has changed in the world.
“Is she a vet?”
“Equine therapist, in training. Different thing. She works with horses the way…” I try to think of how to explain it to a man who has been ranching since before I was born. “She reads what they’re feeling, not just what’s physically wrong. The underneath of it.”
A long pause.
“Hm,” my father says.
What he really means is: That sounds unusual, but I’m going to withhold judgment.
“Sugar’s not sick,” I say. “She’s grieving. Angel will know what to do with that.”
Another pause. Longer this time.
“Angel,” my father says.
“That’s her name.”
“Hm,” he says again. This one means something slightly different. I choose not to examine what.
“I’d come, too,” I say.
“I figured,” he says. “Your room’s the same. Jake’s been using the desk.”
“Jake can move his stuff.”
“Jake will have opinions about that.”
“Jake always has opinions.”
My father makes a sound that, from him, constitutes a laugh. We talk for another ten minutes about the ranch, the cattle, and the winter so far. He asks about the album, directly, without cushioning.
“Almost done,” I say. “It’s the best thing I’ve made.”
“Good,” he says, just that.
Coming from my father, that is the equivalent of a standing ovation. I have spent thirty-something years learning to hear it correctly.
I hang up and sit at the kitchen table in the farmhouse.
Outside, the field is dark. The barn light across it has been off for two hours.
Next weekend, I am going to take Angel Harte to Amarillo, Texas, where she will meet my father, my brother Jake, and a horse named Sugar, and see the place that made me before any of the rest of it did.
I have not taken anyone to the ranch in a long time.
Angel in the open Panhandle air. The wide flat horizon. The open sky with nothing interrupting it.
I think she is going to like it. I think it is going to like her back.
I pick up the guitar and play the second verse through from the beginning.
It is finished.
I did not notice it finish. It was just done, like things are done when you stop forcing them.
I play it again.
Yeah.
That’s the one.