Chapter 6 #2
I queue up a 4225 West track between callers.
“Lost in the Landing,” one of the ballads from the second album.
Harrison’s brush work on the snare, JD’s bass line walking beneath the verse, a quiet pulse.
My voice from twenty-some years ago, younger, rougher at the edges, singing about coming home to someone who left the porch light on.
I listen to myself sing while the track plays through the studio monitors. That guy had no idea what he was talking about. He’d left. Had changed his life. And hadn’t earned any of the words he was singing.
I know what those words mean now.
The song fades. Bex cues the next caller.
“Hi, Liam. I’m hoping you can help me think through something.
” Male and older, and the words come slow and careful, like he wrote them down somewhere and practiced them before calling.
“My wife wants us to move. Closer to her mother. Her mother is getting older, needs help, and my wife wants to be the one to give it. I understand that. I do. But we’ve been in our house for twenty-two years.
Our kids grew up there. I built a workshop in the garage.
I know it sounds stupid, a workshop, but that house is my life. ”
“It’s not stupid.”
“She says I’m being selfish.”
“Are you?”
He pauses. “Maybe.”
“Let me ask you something. What are you really afraid of losing? Is it the house? Or is it the life you built in it? Because those aren’t the same thing.
You can take the workshop apart and put it up somewhere else.
You can’t take apart twenty-two years of marriage and expect it to survive the rebuild. ”
“So you’re saying I should move?”
“I’m saying you should figure out what you’re protecting. If it’s the house, that’s one conversation. If it’s something else, if you’re scared that leaving means losing who you are, that’s a different conversation, and it’s the one your wife actually needs to hear.”
He’s quiet for a long time. I let him be quiet. Bex watches through the glass and doesn’t tap.
“Thank you,” he says.
“Thank you for calling.”
The line goes dead.
“As the show progresses, I find myself starting to relax a little, the process of playing tracks between calls becoming second nature. I look at the clock above the booth window and have no idea where the time went.
“That’s our show for tonight,” I say into the mic. “Thank you for calling in, for listening, for trusting me with your stories. I don’t take that lightly. This is The Love Line with Liam, and I’ll be here if you need me.”
Bex fades the outro music. The ON AIR light goes dark.
I pull the headphones off. Set them on the desk. My hands are still trembling, a fine vibration in my fingers that won’t quit. I press my palms flat against the desk surface and hold them there, feeling the cool laminate under my skin, waiting for my pulse to come down.
From the corner, Paige unfolds herself from the floor. She holds up her phone, screen facing me. A fifteen-second clip, my voice with the anniversary answer.
“Already edited. This is going up tonight.”
“Paige.”
“Dad. This is literally why you hired me.”
“I didn’t hire you. Bex hired you.”
“And Bex is smarter than you. Can I go? I want to get this posted before midnight.”
I wave her off. She slides her laptop into her bag and tucks her phone into her back pocket.
On the way past me she leans down and presses her lips to my cheek.
They’re cold. She must have had the window open during the show, the night air coming in while I talked.
Sixteen years old and she already runs a room the way her mother does.
I keep waiting to figure out where the time went.
Bex comes out of the booth. She has her notebook tucked under her arm and a pen behind her ear, and she’s smiling, though it’s a contained version of the full-beam one she uses when she’s excited. She leans against the doorframe.
“Good,” she says. “We can work with that.”
She taps the notebook against her thigh, nods once more, and heads back into the booth to start her post-show notes.
Six words and a nod. That’s all I get, and coming from Bex it’s enough. It feels about as good as the first time Josie heard me play and didn’t get up and leave.
I sit in the empty studio for a few minutes.
The sound panels eat everything. No echo, no hum, just me breathing.
On stage there’s always something after the last note.
The roar. The techs tearing down the kit.
Harrison spinning a stick between his fingers, asking who’s got the first beer.
Here, there’s nothing. The room goes dead the second the light does, and it’s just me and the callers and the question of whether I helped a single one of them or just liked the sound of my own voice.
I replay the calls. The anniversary woman.
The kid with the social media ultimatum.
The sister. The man with the workshop. I think about what I should have said to the kid.
I should have asked if the girlfriend had been cheated on before, should have dug deeper into why she was scared.
I think about the man with the workshop and whether I pushed too hard, whether I should have validated his attachment to the house before I pulled the rug.
I grab my jacket from the back of the chair and kill the lights.