Chapter 17
REBECCA
He left mid-morning.
I knew it was coming, and I'd spent enough time in my own head to have prepared something reasonable. A casual goodbye. A smile that didn't ask for anything. The kind of exit that left a person their dignity and didn't make the leaving into a thing it wasn't yet.
What actually happened was that he pulled me into him in the doorway and held me for a long moment with his chin on top of my head and his hand flat on my back, and I pressed my face into his chest and breathed him in like I was making a record of it. Neither of us said anything for a while.
Then he pulled back just enough to look at me.
"Give me your phone," he said.
I got it from the counter. He put his number in, typed his name—just Tommy, nothing else—and called himself from it so he'd have mine. Handed it back. Simple and matter-of-fact, the way he did things he'd already decided.
"On the smartphone," I said, because something made me want to say it before he didn't say anything and I spent the rest of the day wondering if he'd noticed. "It's through a government program. Lifeline. For low-income—"
"Rebecca Lynn."
"I just wanted you to know I'm not—"
"I know what you are." He said it quiet and level, no pity in it, no performance of not-pity. Just fact.
I looked at him.
He kissed my forehead and said don’t go too far and walked down the stairs.
I stood in the open doorway and listened to his footsteps go.
Three floors down. The glass door. Gone.
I closed my own door and leaned my back against it and looked at the apartment—the two mugs still on the nightstand, the plate with the toast crumbs, my guitar leaning against the sofa where he'd set it—and I stood there until the standing still became something I'd done long enough.
Then, I went and made more coffee because that was the sensible thing and I was a sensible woman.
Mostly.
Tasha found me at the kitchen window a while later.
She didn't say anything at first. She just poured herself a cup from the pot I'd made and came and stood beside me and we looked at the live oak together, the way we did, and after a while she said, "He seems good."
"He is," I said. "I think."
"You think?”
"I don't know him very well."
"You knew him well enough."
I looked at her. She looked back without apology.
"Tasha."
"I'm just saying what's true."
I turned back to the window. "He travels for work.
A lot. He's been—" I tried to remember the places he'd mentioned and realized he hadn't really mentioned places.
He'd mentioned the Army. Valentine. The fact that his work took him places.
"He goes a lot of places," I finished. "He doesn't stay anywhere long. "
"Is that what he said?"
"It's what I inferred."
"From what?"
I thought about it. From the way he'd moved through The Carolinian like a man passing through, not a man in his city.
From the lightness of him—not emotionally, not personally, but physically.
The easy way he'd sat down to donuts with a stranger like a man who was good at making wherever he was into somewhere.
Like he'd practiced it. Like he'd had to.
"He's not from here," I said. "He's from Valentine, originally, but he doesn't live there. He doesn't say where he lives." I paused. "He just—appears. In cities. For his work."
"That could mean a lot of things."
"It could."
"Does it bother you?"
I held my mug in both hands and thought about it honestly, the way he'd made me get used to thinking about things. "I don't know yet," I said. "Ask me when I know more."
Tasha nodded. She sipped her coffee.
"He played your guitar beautifully," she said.
"I know."
"Devon cried a little."
"Devon did not cry."
"Devon's eyes got wet. He'd call it allergies. I call it crying."
I smiled into my mug.
I went back to my room after Tasha left for wherever Tasha went on her days off, and I sat on the edge of my bed and looked at the space where he'd been.
The pillow on his side still held the shape of him. I didn't fix it. I sat there and looked at it and thought about the kind of life that produced a man like Tommy.
I'd grown up with people who stayed. That was the fundamental fact of Caton's Chapel—people stayed.
They were born there and they married there and they died there and their children did the same, and the mountains held them the way mountains held everything, which was completely and without discussion.
My daddy had never lived anywhere but Sevier County.
My mama's people went back four generations in the same holler.
Even the ones who left—the ones who went to Knoxville for college or to Nashville for work—came back eventually, pulled by the gravity of the place that had their roots.
Tommy had roots in Valentine and then the Army had pulled him loose from them, and whatever came after had kept him loose. Now, he was a man who moved through cities with ease.
I didn't know what that looked like from the inside.
I knew what it looked like from where I was sitting, which was: a man who could be anywhere and had been here, in this small room, in this small bed, and had chosen to stay the night and the morning and had eaten my mama's raspberry jam off toast and pressed his forehead to mine in a shower like we were speaking the same language.
I knew what that felt like. I didn't know what it meant, yet.
I found myself thinking about money in a new way.
Not my money—I'd done that math so many times I could run it in my sleep.
His money. What it meant, in practice. Not in the abstract the way people talked about rich people, as a category, a condition, something that happened to other people and produced a kind of person you recognized on sight by their clothes and the way they moved through rooms.
Tommy's money was different from the money I'd been around in Charleston—the old money in linen, the young money in denim at The Carolinian and The Piazza, the couples with the non-frizzing hair and the effortless restaurants.
Those people knew they had money. It was part of their presentation. They wore it.
Tommy didn't wear it. He just—had it, the way he had everything else, quietly and without making it the point.
He'd paid for the donuts without ceremony.
He'd left a tip at The Carolinian I'd noticed on the way out that was more than my best shift, and he'd done it the way you left a tip when you weren't thinking about the tip, when the calculation was automatic because the number didn't require deliberation.
That was the tell. Not the amount. The ease of it.
I thought about what that felt like from the inside—to move through a city without running the math.
To see a menu and just order what you wanted.
To book a flight the way I booked a bus, which was to say without checking the price four times and calculating how many shifts it would take to cover it.
To stay somewhere nice not because it was a treat you'd saved for but because nice was the default, because the alternative had stopped being relevant somewhere along the way.
I couldn't imagine it.
I'd tried before—tried to picture what it felt like to not feel the numbers—and I always hit the same wall.
The numbers were so fundamental to how I moved through the world that trying to imagine their absence was like trying to imagine a color I'd never seen.
I could understand it, intellectually. I couldn't feel my way into it.
And here was the thing that sat under all of that, the thing I wasn't sure I could say out loud yet:
I didn't want his money.
I knew that with a clarity that surprised me, actually.
I had grown up with so little that I might have been expected to want someone else's a lot.
Might have been expected to see a man like Tommy and feel the pull of what he could provide, the relief of it, the way drowning people felt the pull of anything solid.
I didn't feel that.
What I felt was more complicated and, I thought, more mine.
I wanted to close my own gap. I wanted to make my own rent.
I wanted the number to get manageable through my own work—through Luis's schedule, through The Piazza, through the podcast producer's card I hadn't called yet and was going to call, I'd decided, today.
I wanted to be the one who fixed the math, and I wanted to fix it with my voice, which was the one thing I had that nobody had given me and nobody could take.
What I wanted from Tommy was something else entirely, and it was harder to name.
I wanted to be known.
Not taken care of. Known.
The way he'd looked at me across the restaurant when I'd played.
The way he'd said you saw it about the ocean.
The way he'd held the Gibson back out to me with both hands, and again in the shower, hands moving over my shoulders like he was trying to learn me by feel, like he was making a record of a thing that mattered.
I wanted that.
Dolly would say that was either the bravest thing or the most foolish.
Dolly would probably say it was both and go, anyway.
My phone buzzed.
I picked it up. Tommy.
What are you doing tonight?
I looked at the ceiling. The Tennessee stain.
Nothing, I typed back. I get off work around 3. Lunch shift only today. Why?
Three dots. Then:
Come find me at The Palmetto Rose. Ask for me at the front desk. Seven o'clock.
I put the phone down on the bed.
The Palmetto Rose.
I’d heard the name. I suspected everybody in Charleston had heard the name—it was the hotel near the historic waterfront, the one with the gas lanterns and the wraparound piazza and the resort-style pool out back.
The kind of place I walked past on my way between shifts and admired in the abstract the way you admired things that had no particular relevance to your actual life.
I picked the phone back up.
That's a very fancy hotel, I typed.
They have good bourbon, he replied. And I have a suite with a balcony. You can see a piece of the harbor from up there, if you lean right. Free of charge.
I read that last part twice.
Free of charge.
He'd said it like a joke. Light and easy, the way he said most things.
But underneath it was the thing I'd been turning over all morning—the way he'd recognized my poverty reflex at the donut shop, the way he'd said my treat before I'd had to navigate it, the way he moved around my money the way you moved around a bruise you'd noticed on someone you were being careful with.
He'd known since the donut shop, probably before, and he wasn't making it a thing.
He was just—building the geometry of it around me so that the free things didn't feel like charity.
So they felt like what they actually were, which was a man who had a balcony that faced the harbor and wanted to show it to me.
I thought about the Battery. The free walk I'd catalogued. The harbor at dusk when the light went gold.
The harbor from a balcony at The Palmetto Rose was the same harbor.
Same water. Same palmettos going black against the sky.
Just higher up.
Okay, I typed. Seven o'clock.
I set the phone down and looked at the clothes hanging on the back of my door and thought about what a person wore to The Palmetto Rose when she was a waitress from the Smoky Mountains who owned one good pair of boots and was ninety-four dollars short on rent and was going, anyway.
I thought about Dolly.
I thought: the boots. Definitely the boots.