Chapter 8 #2
The instrument settled in my hands and something in my chest did a thing it hadn't done in a long time.
The Gibson was the cousin of my guitar. Same family.
Same warmth in the back of the neck where the wood remembered being a tree.
I felt the weight of it the way you felt the weight of an old friend's body when you hugged them after a long time, the rightness of it.
I went to work.
She didn't watch me, at first. Then, she did.
I felt her watching the way you felt sun on the side of your face.
I kept my eyes on what my hands were doing—old string off, new string up through the bridge pin, threaded through the post, four turns down clean, the trick I'd learned from my mother where you locked it under itself so it wouldn't slip.
I hummed something while I worked. I always did. I couldn't help it.
I tuned the new string. Plucked. Adjusted. Plucked again.
Handed it back.
Our hands didn't quite touch.
I told her to play something good and stood up and went back to my table and sat down and picked up my coffee and tried to look like a man who was finishing his second cup at his own pace.
Then, she played.
And the voice that came out of her wasn't the voice she'd started with.
It wasn't louder. Wasn't bigger. Nothing that showy.
It was just true. Whatever quarter step she'd been holding herself off the bit on—she'd let that go.
The voice came out where it was supposed to come out from.
The chord under it had teeth. The line of the melody bent the way melodies bent when somebody who knew where the bend lived was driving them.
The room went a little still.
Most of the people in it didn't know why. They just knew.
I knew why.
I'd grown up knowing why.
I sat with my hands wrapped around a coffee cup that had gone lukewarm and I listened to a stranger sing a song in a Charleston restaurant on a random winter afternoon, and I went somewhere I hadn't been in a long time.
I went to a kitchen with a yellow curtain.
I went to the smell of pie crust and the sound of the screen door slapping the frame and seven boys' worth of running feet outside, and a woman at a table humming with no words.
I went to a hallway I hadn't walked down in years.
The night terrors had been bad, that one.
Bad enough that I'd come out of it shaking and hadn't been able to make myself stop.
I'd done what I always did—padded down the hallway to my parents' room and crawled into my mother's side of the bed, usually careful not to wake my father, but on that night, my father wasn’t there.
Mama'd put her hand on my hair. I'd settled.
But that one had been bad.
And after a while, when my breathing didn't slow, she'd sat up.
"Tommy. Get the guitar from the closet."
I'd been maybe eight. Maybe nine. I'd thought I was in trouble.
I'd thought the guitar was for somebody else, somehow, that I was about to be told to take it somewhere or do something with it.
I'd gone to the closet on bare feet and pulled out the case and brought it back to her and she'd taken it and uncased it on her lap, the room half lit by the hall light, and started to play.
Real soft. Just for me.
She'd played until the shaking went. She'd played until the part of me that was scared didn't know which note to be scared at anymore. And somewhere in the third song she'd looked at me in the bad light and said, "You want me to teach you a chord, baby?"
I'd said yes.
That was the night.
Not the last night I had a nightmare. But the beginning of the end of them.
The beginning of the long summer of nights when my father was gone—and he was gone often, and he was gone for a long time more than once—where Mama would pull the guitar out and we'd play together on the bed with the door closed.
Just us, baby. Just our little secret. She didn't have to tell me twice.
I'd kept the secret all my life.
I hadn't expected to have it cracked open by a girl in a Charleston restaurant with a Gibson and a voice she'd been hiding from her own self.
She finished the song.
The room clapped, real and warm. The manager—standing across the floor by the bar—gave her a small respectful nod and held up one finger.
One more.
I sat very still.
She thought about it for a second. I saw the decision move across her face. Then she put her hands back on the guitar.
She started low.
She sang about hollows. About creeks. About crickets going dark when somebody walked past them at night.
She moved up into smoky cloudfall and hawks riding wind off a ridge.
She built it the way you built a fire that was going to last. By the time she got to the bridge, there was something in her voice that wasn't performance anymore, something that came from a place I knew the shape of even if I'd never been in it.
Echoes. A man's hands. Daddy's hugs went around me twice when I was small.
She brought it home.
The room had gone quiet enough that you could hear the espresso machine ticking down behind the bar.
When the last chord landed, the applause came up out of the tables like it had been waiting under them.
A woman near the window was wiping her eye with the corner of a napkin.
The kitchen guys had come out to listen and were leaning in the pass-through.
Even the lush had set his wine glass down.
He was clapping with both hands like he'd forgotten to be a problem.
She gave a shy thank-you. Packed up like she'd been packing up since she was twelve.
The piped music came back on, and the room rearranged itself around the absence of her voice the way a body rearranged itself around a sudden missing tooth.
I paid my check. Wrote a tip on the line that was probably more than the meal.
I was sliding my wallet back into my pocket when I felt somebody by my elbow.
She was standing there.
She'd hung the guitar case on her shoulder. Her hair had come loose a little from the playing. Her face was doing the slightly unfinished thing faces did right after a person had been somewhere bigger than the room they were standing in.
"Hey," she said. "I just—I wanted to thank you again. For the string."
"Of course."
She started to step back.
"Hey," I said.
She paused.
"If I'd known you were going to sing like that, I'd have given you a whole spare set."
She blushed.
I'd known a lot of women in a lot of cities. I'd been around enough of them to know that women who blushed were rare, and women who blushed and didn't seem to know they were doing it were rarer still.
Something about it got me right under the rib.
Jeez.
She gathered herself.
"Can I get you something?" she said. "Another coffee, or—"
I tilted my head.
"Tell you what. Why don't we go somewhere else? There's a little donut place I saw on my way over. Couple blocks down."
Something flickered across her face.
I watched her work to put a name to it. Watched her almost manage. Watched her decide not to.
And then, I saw it.
She'd been about to offer something here. Coffee on the house, probably. The thing the staff could do for someone they wanted to thank. The free thing. The thing that didn't cost.
And I'd just walked her into a moment where she had to choose between the gracious thing she could afford and the polite thing she couldn't.
I caught it before her face had time to settle.
"My treat," I said, easy. "I eat too many of the things, anyway. You'd be doing me a favor sharing. Otherwise I'm liable to put down eight by myself, and a man's got to think about his future."
The line landed. She breathed.
"Okay," she said. "Yeah. Okay."
She led me out.
We weren't three steps from the table before a woman two booths over called, "Honey, you have a beautiful voice.
" The girl ducked her head, said thank you so much like it had cost her something to receive it.
A second voice from across the room. Darling, that was lovely.
A man at the bar lifted his glass to her without saying anything.
One of the waitresses caught her eye and pressed both hands over her own heart and shook her head, which was its own kind of standing ovation.
She took every one of them like a girl who'd been handed a wrapped gift she didn't know she was allowed to open.
I held the door for her. The bell above it gave the bright ring bells gave in old buildings. The Charleston light hit her long, brown hair.
She turned a half step to wait for me on the sidewalk. The strap of the guitar case crossed her chest the way a bandolier did on a soldier I'd known once who never put hers down even at meals because the gear was the part of her she trusted most.
I followed her out.
Who is this girl?