Chapter 25
REBECCA
The double shift started the way double shifts always started—with the resignation of a body that knew what was coming and had decided to be professional about it.
I tied my apron at the server station and thought about Tommy.
I'd been thinking about Tommy since the lobby of The Palmetto Rose, which meant I'd been thinking about Tommy for approximately three hours, which was three hours of a mental conversation that kept arriving at the same two places: I love you and I can't let you pay for everything and the tension between those two things that I didn't know how to resolve yet.
He'd said I'll see you tonight and I'd said it back and I meant it and I thought he meant it and the fight—if it had been a fight, it had been the quietest, most honest fight I'd ever had with anyone—hadn't changed the underneath of things.
It had just added a layer of complicated on top of the something true.
I refilled water at table four and smiled at the couple there and thought about what my mama would say.
My mama would say baby, a good man who loves you isn't the same thing as a man who wants to own you. She'd say it while rolling out biscuit dough, not looking at me, because my mama delivered her best wisdom sideways. She'd say the trick is knowing the difference, and the knowing takes time.
I was taking the time. That was what I'd told him.
I just needed him to let me have it.
The call came in during my break.
I was in the back alley behind The Carolinian with a cup of Luis's coffee and my coat on, watching the Charleston pigeons do their business on the cobblestones, when my phone buzzed with a number I didn't recognize. Something in my stomach said answer it.
"Hello?"
"Is this Rebecca Myers?" A woman's voice. Warm, professional, with a slight Georgia softness under it.
"Yes."
"Rebecca, this is Wren Calloway. Southern Frequency. I'm returning your call."
I stood up straighter, which was instinct, which was ridiculous because she couldn't see me.
"Oh—yes. Hi. Thank you for calling back."
"Of course. I'm so glad you reached out." I heard papers, a chair, the ambient sound of someone settling in. "I was at The Carolinian for a client lunch the day you played. I have to tell you, I stayed through your entire set. I canceled my afternoon."
I opened my mouth. Closed it. "That's—thank you."
"The originals especially. That last song." A pause. "Where did that come from?"
"I—" I thought about the apartment in Pigeon Forge. The kitchen table in Key West. The song I'd written just yesterday that I hadn't played for anyone yet. "I've been writing since I was fifteen. It just—comes from wherever things come from."
"That's the right answer," she said, and I heard a smile in it. "Rebecca, I want to have you on the podcast. A full episode, your story, some live playing. I think our audience is going to love you. But before we do that—and I know this is fast—I want to put you in front of some people tonight."
I stopped walking.
"Tonight?"
"Southern Frequency is a presenting sponsor of an indie artist showcase.
The Revel Room, on upper King. It's a real venue—three hundred capacity, proper sound system, mixed bill.
We had a cancellation this morning. One of the performers dropped.
I've got a forty-minute slot and I'd like to give it to you, if you're interested. "
Three hundred people.
The Piazza held maybe sixty on a full night. The Carolinian's lunch crowd had been half that.
Three hundred people in a real venue with a proper sound system.
"I—" I started.
"The bill is well-promoted. Good crowd, music people, some industry adjacent. And there's a door split for performers—you'd walk away with somewhere between two and four hundred dollars, depending on the night."
More than a waitressing shift. Potentially, much more.
"I'm working tonight," I said.
"Can you get out of it?"
I looked at the door to the kitchen.
I thought about Luis's face when he'd slid the business card across the bar.
I thought about he seemed like he knew what he was doing when the flowers arrived.
I thought about I'd like to put you on the schedule beginning next month and the way his face had looked when he said it—a man making a long bet.
"Give me ten minutes," I said.
Luis heard me out without interrupting, which was how I knew he was taking it seriously.
When I finished, he looked at his reservation sheet. Then at me. Then at the sheet again.
"Three hundred capacity," he said.
"That's what she said."
"Industry adjacent crowd?"
"Those were her words."
He tapped his pen on the bar once. Twice. Three times.
"If you become someone people know," he said, slowly, like he was thinking it out loud, "and they know you play here—"
"That's what I was thinking."
"I'd want it on the poster. The Carolinian, in the bio. That she plays here."
"I'll make sure of it."
He looked at me for a long moment. The manager look—the one that calculated risk and return and the math of a small business that ran on reputation.
"Go," he said. “Priya can cover your section. Don't make me regret this."
"I won't," I said. "Thank you, Luis."
"Go call her back before she gives your slot to someone else."
I went.
I texted Tommy from the alley.
I have a gig tonight. A real one. Three hundred people. Podcast producer connected me to an indie showcase. I'm terrified.
I stood there with my phone in my hand and looked at what I'd written and thought about the fight this morning and the edges still on it and sent it, anyway, because whatever we were working through, this felt like something he'd want to know.
Three dots appeared almost immediately.
That's my girl. You're going to be incredible.
I stared at that's my girl for a longer moment than was probably useful.
Then: Do you need me there?
I thought about it. Honestly, the way he'd taught me to think about things.
Not tonight, I typed back. I need to do this one alone first.
A pause.
Understood. Call me after.
I put the phone in my pocket and went back inside to finish the lunch shift with three hundred people waiting for me on the other side of it.
The Revel Room was on upper King Street, above a furniture shop, up a flight of stairs that opened into a long, low-ceilinged space with exposed brick and a real stage at the far end and a sound board on a riser in the middle of the room and a bar along the left wall already doing business when I arrived for sound check.
It smelled like a real venue. Old wood and sound equipment and the charged air of a room that had heard a lot of music.
I stood at the bottom of the stage stairs and looked out at the empty seats.
Three hundred chairs. Half of them already filled by the time the first act went on, which meant by the time I went on—third, forty minutes in—the room was going to be close to full.
I did my sound check. The sound guy was efficient and kind, the kind of professional who put performers at ease by treating the technical part like it was ordinary, which it was for him and which helped me pretend it was for me.
He set my levels. He tested my monitor. He pointed me toward the green room, which was a small, cluttered room behind the stage with a folding table and a bowl of pretzels and two other performers who nodded at me the way musicians nodded at each other—a brief acknowledging nod that meant I see you, I'm nervous too, we don't have to talk about it.
I sat in the corner with my guitar across my knee and ran through the set list in my head.
I'd built it on the walk over. Six songs.
Open with something familiar, something that gave the room permission to settle.
Two originals in the middle. Close with the Dolly, because Dolly was always the right way to close, because Dolly knew how to send people home feeling like they'd been somewhere.
And the new song. The one I'd started yesterday. The one about a road I hadn't known was there.
I was going to play it.
I'd decided on the walk. It wasn't finished—the bridge was still a ghost—but the verse and the chorus were real and true and they were the best thing I'd written in two years and I was going to play it in front of three hundred people while it was still new because Dolly would and because the decision to want it out loud was a practice and not a destination. I needed to practice it tonight.
The second performer finished to warm applause that I could hear through the green room wall.
The stage manager knocked on the door. "Rebecca? You're up in five."
I stood.
I walked to the side of the stage.
And then I looked out at the room.
Three hundred people was a different thing from sixty.
I had known this, intellectually. I did not know it in my body until I was standing in the wing of a real stage looking at three hundred faces in a real room with real lighting and a real sound board and a real microphone stand at center stage.
The waiting crowd was silent. They had just finished applauding the last act and were now looking at the stage expecting the next thing.
Expecting me.
The noise started in my chest.
Not Clayton's voice—not words, not anything that specific.
Just the noise. The old, familiar noise that lived below the words, the feeling the words had left behind, the residue of you think you're something that had worked itself into my grain so thoroughly I sometimes forgot it was there until a moment like this one reminded me.
Three hundred people.
I walked on stage.
The light hit me and the room registered me and a ripple of anticipatory quiet moved through it, the kind of quiet that was its own form of attention, and I stood at the microphone and looked out at the room and opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.
Not nothing—I made a sound. But the sound was wrong, pale and thin, a sound that didn't belong to me, a sound that lived at the surface of the thing and couldn't find the place underneath where the real voice lived.
I played the opening chord and it rang out fine through the monitors, but my voice when I came in on the first line was the voice I used at the beginning of a set at The Piazza when I was background music, when I was being unobtrusive.
This room was not a room for unobtrusive.
My body knew it, and my body was deciding, in real time, in front of three hundred people, that it wasn't going to do this.
I got through the first verse.
I don't know how. I was outside myself watching it happen, the way people described car accidents—the strange slow detail of a thing going wrong before you've understood that it's going wrong.
My fingers found the chords. My voice found the notes.
But the space between what I was capable of and what was coming out of me was a distance I could feel with my whole body.
The room felt it, too—I could see it in the way attention shifted, the way phones came up, the way two people at a table near the front began talking quietly to each other in the way people did when what was happening onstage wasn't holding them.
The song ended.
I stood at the microphone.
I said thank you quietly into the darkness beyond the lights.
I picked up my guitar.
I walked off the stage.
I walked through the green room, stopping only briefly to pick up my case, past the two other performers who looked up as I came through, past the folding table with the pretzels, down the back hallway, and out through the fire exit into the cold Charleston night.
The door banged shut behind me.
I stood in the alley.
The cold hit my face and I stood there with my guitar case in my hand and my heart doing something that wasn't quite pounding and wasn't quite stopped but was somewhere terrible in between.
I breathed in the January air and breathed it out and did not let myself cry because I was in an alley behind a venue on King Street and I was not going to cry in an alley.
I pulled out my phone.
I looked at Tommy's last text.
That's my girl. You're going to be incredible.
I put the phone back in my pocket.
I wasn't ready to talk to anyone yet.
I wasn't ready to hear it's okay or you'll get it next time or any of the things that were probably true and were going to feel, right now, like kindness wrapped around a wound that needed a minute before it could be touched.
I stood in the alley for a long time.
The cold settled around me.
Inside, the muffled sound of the next performer starting their set came through the fire door—a man's voice, warm and confident, filling the room the way rooms needed to be filled, the way I had not done.
I put my guitar in its case.
I started walking home.
I was three blocks from the apartment when I stopped on the sidewalk and took out my phone.
I typed: I choked. I froze. I walked off the stage after one song. I'm such a loser.
I stood there with my thumb over the send button.
I sent it.
Then I kept walking, in the cold, in the dark, with the church bells somewhere behind me counting an hour I wasn't ready to name.
Maybe Clayton was right.