17. The Drive Back
The Drive Back
CASH
Sunday Morning
M y father shakes my hand on the porch at six-thirty.
Jake is there too, leaning against the rail, holding a coffee he did not offer to share, which is Jake’s way of communicating affection.
“Sugar’s going to be alright,” my father says. Not to me. To Angel, who is standing beside me with her bag over one shoulder, looking at the yard in the early gray light.
“She will,” Angel says. “Call me if she gets this way again. I mean that.”
My father says okay. He has her number. She put it in his phone herself, standing in the barn yesterday evening, showing him what to watch for and how to handle it. He listened as if he intended to use it if needed.
Jake looks at me over Angel’s head. He communicates, without words, that he approves, that I should not mess this up, and that he is not going to say any of this out loud.
We say our goodbyes. We get in the truck.
The ranch gets smaller in the mirror. Then it is gone, around the bend in the caliche road. Then we are on the county highway heading east, and the Panhandle is enormous in all directions and completely indifferent to our leaving.
* * *
Angel has her book.
She does not open it for the first hour.
She looks out the window at the land going by, and I don't ask what she is thinking because I have learned that Angel’s silences are not invitations. They are the place she goes to process things. Coming in uninvited is the wrong move.
So I drive.
The weekend was very interesting.
Angel, at Sugar’s stall door, stood still for five minutes while my father and I stood back and watched the horse decide. Jake said Cash picked well to the barn, which was about as subtle as Jake gets, which is not very.
And the field at dusk.
Her voice going out into the Panhandle air.
I have heard a great many singers in my life. I live in Nashville. I know what a good voice sounds like technically and what a great voice sounds like when it is doing what it was made to do. I have heard both.
What I heard in that field was different from either of those things.
What I heard was about a person who had been keeping something in a closed space for 10 years and finally let it go. The voice itself is extraordinary. But that is not what stopped me at the edge of the field. What stopped me was its quality, the sound of someone reclaiming something.
I understood, standing there, that hearing it was a privilege. Not because she performed it for me. Because the Panhandle pulled it out of her, and I happened to be there.
She let me stay.
That matters more than the voice.
* * *
Somewhere around Shamrock, she opens the book.
I want to stop for coffee, but decide against it. Once is a ritual. Twice in the same weekend is a pattern, and patterns require explanation.
She looks up when we pass the gas station.
“No coffee?”
“I thought I’d spare you.”
She watches the gas station disappear behind us. Then back to her book.
“I wouldn’t have minded,” she says.
I look at her.
She is reading or looking at the page. With Angel, those are occasionally different things.
I turn the truck around.
She puts the book down when she feels us slow. Looks at me. Looks at where we’re going.
The corner of her mouth moves.
We get the coffee. It is exactly as bad as Friday. We drink it anyway, driving east on I-40 with the Panhandle going gray and flat around us and the sky doing its enormous thing.
“Thank you,” she says when the cup is empty.
“For the terrible coffee?”
“For turning around,” she says.
I look at the road.
“Yeah,” I say.
* * *
I-40 East — Texas to Tennessee
The Shelby memory arrives somewhere in the Texas Panhandle, which is where it belongs.
Not the festival. Not the dressing room. This one is earlier than all of that.
We had come to the ranch once, Shelby and I, in the second year of our marriage. I had not brought her before that. I told myself it was scheduling. I told myself a lot of things.
She stood in the yard and looked at the flat land and said:
“I don’t know how you grew up here. There’s nothing to look at.”
She meant it without cruelty. It was just her honest reaction. She had grown up in suburban Georgia, and her idea of open space was a golf course. The Panhandle was too much of nothing for her. The scale of it read as emptiness rather than freedom.
I remember standing beside her and feeling something close down without my permission. Not anger, but the sadness of showing someone the place that made you, and watching them not see it.
My father had been polite. Jake had been polite. Nobody said anything unkind.
But she had not seen it. And I had filed that away in the place where I put things I did not yet know how to think about, and left it there for two more years while we lived a life that looked right from the outside.
The ranch had known before I did.
It had known the first time I brought her.
I think about that for a while. About what it means to bring someone to the place that made you. It is not a test. I have never thought of it as a test.
But it is something.
It is showing someone the true self that existed before the performance, the one who is still there underneath all of it, and seeing whether they recognize it.
Shelby had not recognized it.
She had been kind not to recognize it, which made it lonelier, not less.
I look at Angel in the passenger seat. Her book face-down on her knee. Watching the land the same way she watched Sugar, with complete attention. Nothing managed about it.
She had said the horizon felt theoretical. Like the world making a point about its own size.
She had seen it immediately.
The ranch knew that too.
I drive east and let the Panhandle tell the truth.
* * *
Angel falls asleep somewhere in Oklahoma.
Not dramatically. She just stops reading, her head tipping back slightly against the headrest, and she is out, comfortable enough in a space to let her guard down.
I turn the radio on low. Something instrumental, nothing with words. The kind of music that fills a truck cab without asking anything of anyone.
The heater is running. The truck smells like coffee and the road. Outside the window, the flat land is going gold in the afternoon light.
I drive and let her sleep.
The miles go by. Oklahoma becomes Arkansas. Arkansas begins its slow turn toward Tennessee. The flat land folds back into hills, and the sky gets smaller, and the trees come back.
The last time I drove this road was with another person.
Shelby and I drove it together once, on the way back from a show in Lubbock, two years into the marriage.
She had slept most of the way back, too, curled toward the window, and I had driven, thinking about the album we were finishing, the tour schedule, and the next six months.
I had not thought about her sleeping beside me.
I didn’t notice the quality of that silence.
I notice it now.
I notice that Angel is asleep in my passenger seat, with her book in her lap and her window cracked slightly despite the December cold, which is completely unrepeatable. I am aware of it, and I am not doing anything with that awareness except holding it carefully.
That is new. Holding something carefully rather than managing it.
I have two sessions left in the program. Sixteen sessions in eight weeks, and then the formal structure of it is done.
The farmhouse rental runs through the end of December. January was supposed to be the studio in Nashville, the album push, the return to the life that was waiting.
I have not thought about that life in weeks.
Not because I forgot it. Because it stopped feeling like mine.
The studio date is real. The album is finished, the best thing I have made, and it deserves to be heard. Nashville is still there. The machine is still there. Derek, Marcus, and Jana are still there.
But I have been waking up at five AM to a silence that no longer feels wrong. I have been drinking coffee at a fence line with a woman who points out when my supplement containers are different colors. I have been saying goodnight to a gray horse who follows me along the fence like a dog.
I have been writing.
The life I assumed would be waiting is no longer the one I want.
That is worth saying out loud, if only in a truck on a highway in Arkansas with the person sleeping in the passenger seat who is, in large part, why it is true.
* * *
Tennessee — Evening
Angel wakes up when we cross into Tennessee.
Not because I say anything. She just does, like she crossed a threshold that matters. She straightens. Looks out the window at the hills.
“Sleeping Beauty,” I say.
She gives me a look that is not quite withering, but is in the neighborhood.
“How long was I out?”
“Couple of hours.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
She stretches and looks at the trees coming back in on either side of the highway. The sky is smaller. Everything is closing back in around the road.
“It’s different coming back,” she says.
“Always is.”
She looks pensively out the window.
“Do you miss it when you leave?” she asks. “The ranch.”
I ponder this, honestly.
“Every time,” I say. “Less than I used to. But every time.”
“I think that’s the right amount,” she says.
I turn towards her.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you left the right way. You took it with you instead of leaving it behind.” She pauses. “Some people leave places, and they just cut the line. They don’t want to feel it anymore, so they stop feeling it.”
Brad. The way he stopped mentioning Amarillo once the Nashville career began to take shape, like the ranch had been a costume he outgrew.
“Yeah,” I say. “I know the kind.”
Her look says it all. Not pressing. Just present.
We drive the last hour in the comfortable silence that has become ours, the radio low, the Tennessee hills coming back fully now, and when we pass the Gallatin Pike exit, she does not say anything, and neither do I.
However, we are both aware that this is her road home, and she is still in my truck.
She is still in my truck all the way to Sycamore Ridge.
* * *
Sycamore Ridge — Night
The farmhouse porch light is on when we pull in.
I left it on Friday morning. It has been burning across the empty field all weekend, which I understand is not remarkable. Porch lights get left on. It does not mean anything.
Except that I know when I left it on, why, and that it is not nothing.
Angel looks at it when we pull into the Sycamore Ridge drive. She does not say anything about it. But she sees it.
She sees most things.
We sit in the truck after I cut the engine. The barn is dark. Emmett is somewhere in the east paddock, probably at the fence rail, because Emmett has strong opinions about arrivals and departures and tends to supervise both.
“Good weekend,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“Sugar’s going to be okay.”
“I know. Because of you.”
She shakes her head slightly and decides whether to accept it.
“Because of her,” she says. “I just showed up.”
“Angel.”
That stare.
“Take the credit,” I say.
A pause. Then: “Okay.”
She gets out of the truck, gets her bag from the back, and walks to her car. She turns before she gets in.
“Two more sessions,” she says.
“I know.”
She looks at me in the dark, her face in the spillover light from the farmhouse porch. “Goodnight, Cash.”
“Goodnight.”
Her headlights sweep the field as she pulls out toward Nashville. I watch them until the road curves, and they are gone.
In the Sycamore Ridge drive in the December dark, I think about two sessions. About the end of December. About the life I assumed would be waiting.
And about what it means to want something you have not allowed yourself to want in a very long time. The vulnerability of it, and the cost of managing it, rather than saying it.
I have been managing things for two years.
I am done managing this one.
I go inside and pick up my phone.
I call Ivy Brooks.
She picks up on the second ring.
“I had a feeling you’d call tonight,” she says, which is exactly the kind of thing Ivy says, and which I have stopped trying to explain.
“I want to talk about the farmhouse,” I say. “And what happens after December.”
She pauses. Then: “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
So I tell her.