Chapter 5
REBECCA
Mama called on Sunday mornings the way the sun came up over Caton's Chapel—without asking permission, steady and warm and completely indifferent to whether you were ready for it.
My phone lit up early, and I was already awake, lying on my back in the narrow bed in my narrow room, listening to the apartment breathe around me.
Tasha was still sleeping—I could tell by the quality of the silence on her side of the wall.
Devon had worked a closing shift and wouldn't surface until noon.
Geoff was the wild card. Geoff was always the wild card.
I picked up on the second ring.
"Hey, Mama."
"Rebecca Lynn." She said my name the way she always did, both words together, like they were one word, like she'd invented it. "I was thinking about you this morning during my coffee. How are you, baby? How's Charleston treating you?"
I pulled the blanket up to my chin and looked at the water stain on the ceiling that I'd decided, sometime in the second week, looked like the state of Tennessee if you tilted your head. "It's good. Real good. I played a wine bar the other night."
"You did?" The pleasure in her voice was immediate and uncomplicated, the kind that didn't have any ego in it.
My mama had never been to a wine bar in her life.
She didn't know what one looked like or what people did there or why a person would pay twelve dollars for a glass of something they could buy by the bottle at the Walmart in Sevierville for eight.
But she heard played and she heard the pride underneath my careful casual and she lit up for me the way she always had. "How'd it go, honey?"
"Good. Real good." I was repeating myself. I always repeated myself with her when I was trying not to say too much. "People seemed to like it. I made ninety-three dollars."
"Ninety-three dollars." She said it the way you'd say a miracle.
Which, to her, it probably was. To her, ninety-three dollars was a week's worth of groceries stretched careful, or the electric bill in February when the heat ran long.
To her, ninety-three dollars from singing was the kind of thing that happened to people on television. "Rebecca, that's just wonderful."
"It's a start," I said.
"It's more than a start. You always undersell yourself, baby.
Always have." She paused, and I heard the familiar sound of her coffee cup against the kitchen table, the one with the wobbly leg Daddy had been meaning to fix for years.
"Your daddy will want to hear about this.
He's out in the yard right now, but I'll tell him when he comes in. "
I smiled at the water stain. "Tell him I said hey."
"I will." Another pause. The comfortable kind, the kind that meant she was settling in, getting ready to stay awhile. "Clayton called the other day."
There it was.
She didn't mean anything by it. She never did. She mentioned Clayton the way she mentioned the weather—as information, as fact, as a thing that existed in the world and therefore deserved acknowledgment. She had no idea what his voice did to the inside of my chest, the way it rearranged things.
"Yeah?" I kept my voice even. "How's he doing?"
"Oh, you know Clayton. He's got a new thing.
" She laughed, soft and fond. She was always soft and fond about Clayton.
He was her baby boy, the one who'd needed her most and longest, and she'd poured herself into him the way mothers poured themselves into the child who asked for it most loudly.
"He's talking about starting a landscaping business. Got himself some brochures printed up."
"That's good," I said.
"He asked about you."
I waited.
"Said to tell you hey." She paused. "Said he heard you were down in Charleston singing for tourists."
Singing for tourists. I felt it land the way I always felt Clayton's words land—quiet, precise, in exactly the soft place he'd always known to aim for. He probably hadn't even meant it that way. That was almost the worst part. He didn't have to mean it for it to work.
I was quiet long enough that my mama said, "Rebecca?"
"I'm here." I smoothed my voice out. "Yeah, tell him hey back."
We talked for another twenty minutes—about my younger sisters, about the church roof that needed repairing, about a woman down the road who'd had a baby early and was doing fine now, thank God.
My mama's world was Caton's Chapel, wholly and completely, and she reported on it with the thoroughness of a woman who understood that the small details of a small place were the whole world to the people inside it.
I loved her for it. I ached over it. Both things at once, the way it always was.
When we hung up, I lay still for a moment with the phone on my chest.
Singing for tourists.
The ceiling stain looked less like Tennessee now. I turned onto my side and looked at the wall instead.
By mid-morning, the apartment had come alive around me.
I heard Geoff before I saw him—the rhythm of his movements in the kitchen, efficient and unhurried, the sounds of a man who'd grown up in a place where kitchens had more than four feet of counter space.
I'd noticed that about him early. He cooked the way people cooked when they'd been taught how, when someone had stood beside them and shown them the order of things.
He didn't fumble. He didn't approximate. He just—knew.
I showered and dressed and told myself I wasn't arranging my exit from my own bedroom around his schedule, and then I did it, anyway, waiting until I heard him move toward the living room before I opened my door.
He was on the sofa with a book and a cup of coffee, legs stretched out, entirely at ease. He looked up when I came in. He had the kind of eyes that registered things quickly—I'd noticed that, too. Quick eyes in a calm face.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning." I moved toward the kitchen, keeping my path simple and direct.
The refrigerator. The coffee maker. The cabinet where I kept my mug on the second shelf because the first shelf was where Geoff kept his, and I'd relocated mine without making a decision about it, the way you relocated yourself around people who occupied space with more certainty than you did.
"There's still coffee," he said. "I made a full pot."
"Thank you." I poured a cup and leaned against the counter and tried to look like a person who leaned against counters.
He went back to his book. The cover was something with a long title I couldn't read from here, and I didn't ask. I'd learned that not asking Geoff about his books was self-preservation.
The last time I'd asked, he'd talked for twenty minutes about something called post-colonial theory and I'd nodded in what I hoped were the right places and felt the shame of not knowing whether I was following or not, the kind of shame that came from not being able to tell the difference between genuinely not understanding and simply not having been given the vocabulary yet.
It was probably the second thing. That almost made it worse.
I drank my coffee by the window. Outside, a couple was walking a dog on the sidewalk below, the live oak across the street going silver in the winter light. I thought about what my mama had said. About Clayton.
Singing for tourists.
The thing was, he wasn't wrong, technically.
That was what I was doing. I was in a city I'd chosen partly because it was warm and partly because it was somewhere new and partly because the tip money was good, and I was playing my guitar in the background of other people's evenings while they drank wine and talked about things I didn't understand, and at the end of the night I counted my cash in the parking lot and walked home alone.
Was that different from singing for tourists in Gatlinburg? Was the distance I'd put between myself and Caton's Chapel meaningful, or was it just geography?
I didn't know. Honestly, I didn't know, and the not knowing sat in my chest alongside the rent money and everything else I'd learned to breathe around.
"You okay?"
I looked up. Geoff was watching me over the top of his book—not intrusively, just noticing. He had a way of noticing things without making you feel surveilled by it. It was different from being watched. I didn't know how to explain the difference, only that there was one.
"Fine," I said. "Just thinking."
"How'd your gig go? The wine bar, right?"
He'd remembered. I hadn't told him directly—I must have mentioned it to Tasha and he'd been in the room. I felt the small, complicated thing that happened when someone paid attention to something I'd said without me knowing they were listening.
"Good," I said. "It went good."
"Yeah?" He set the book down on his knee. "What kind of stuff do you play?"
And there it was—the question that was really a test, except he wasn't testing me, I was testing myself. Because the honest answer was Dolly Parton and Tom Petty and songs I wrote alone in apartments, and I never knew how to say that without hearing it the way Clayton would hear it.
Small. Regional. Unsophisticated.
"Country, mostly," I said. "Some folk. Some originals."
He nodded like that was a complete and sufficient answer. "Do you record?"
"Not really." I paused. "I've done some demos. Nothing serious."
Nothing serious. I'd said it before I'd decided to, the reflex of a woman who'd learned to make herself smaller before someone else did it for her. Clayton's gift to me, still giving.
"You should," Geoff said, simply. Then he picked his book back up.
I looked at him for a moment. He wasn't being kind in the way people were sometimes to make themselves feel good. He'd said it the way you stated a fact—you should, the way you'd say you should turn left here. Like it was obvious. Like the only question was why I hadn't done it yet.
I turned back to the window.
Below, the couple with the dog had stopped so the dog could investigate something at the base of the live oak, and the woman was laughing at whatever the dog had found, and the man was watching her laugh with the expression of someone who had decided, at some point, that watching this person was the best use of his time.
Something moved in my chest. Not sadness exactly. More like hunger—the hunger of wanting something you haven't let yourself name yet, because naming it makes not having it more real.
I finished my coffee.
I rinsed my mug and set it on the drying rack and went back to my room and picked up my guitar and sat on the edge of my bed and played the opening of a song I'd been writing for months and couldn't finish—a song about a door that wouldn't open no matter what was on the other side of it.
I played it through twice.
Then I played it a third time, slower, and let myself hear what it actually was.
It wasn't about a door.
I set the guitar on the bed beside me and looked at the ceiling.
You should, Geoff had said. Like it was simple. Like the only thing standing between me and the life I wanted was the decision to want it out loud.
Maybe he wasn't wrong, either.
Maybe the worst thing Clayton had ever done wasn't the words themselves.
Maybe it was teaching me to say them first.