Chapter 27 #2
"I know I said something after," he said.
"That night on the tailgate." His voice had gone to a place I hadn't heard in it before.
Careful. Like he was handling something he understood was fragile.
"I was fourteen and I was—I don't know. Jealous.
Everybody was looking at you the whole time and I didn't—" He stopped.
"It was a shitty thing to say. I've thought about it. "
I pressed my lips together.
"Clayton," I said.
"I mean it. It was a shitty thing. You were good and I knew it and I said it, anyway, and—" He exhaled. "I'm sorry. Okay? I've been wanting to say that for a long time and I never figured out how to bring it up."
The harbor went blurry.
I blinked.
"Okay," I said. My voice came out smaller than I intended.
"You're really good,” he said. "You know that, right? You're—you're the most talented person in our whole family by a long shot. You know that."
"Sometimes, I forget."
"Yeah." A pause. "I know. I think maybe I helped you forget. And I'm sorry about that."
I stood at the seawall with the wind coming off the harbor and my brother's voice in my ear and I let myself cry, finally, because I was outside and it was dark and the harbor was indifferent and sometimes you needed to cry at a seawall at midnight and that was just what it was.
Not loud. Not dramatic. Just the quiet kind that came when something that had been held a long time was finally let go.
"You still there?" Clayton said.
"I'm here."
"You going to be okay?"
"Yeah."
"Good." A pause. "Call me when you play next time. I want to hear about it."
"Okay."
"And Rebecca?"
"Yeah."
"Go inside. It's cold."
I laughed. It came out wet and real. "Yeah."
"Goodnight."
"Goodnight, Clayton."
I hung up.
I stood there for another minute. The harbor moved in its slow, dark way. The container ship had made its progress and was smaller now, further out, its lights growing distant.
I thought about what he'd said.
You're the most talented person in our whole family by a long shot.
It wasn't the choir teacher's yearbook. It wasn't Tommy's you play like someone who's been in school your whole life. It was Clayton, who had been the one voice I'd been hearing wrong for years, finally saying the thing he'd left out the first time. Finally completing the sentence.
It didn't fix everything.
But it was something.
It was a locked door opening, just a crack, just enough to let a little light through.
I took the long way home.
Because the night had become something I wasn't ready to step out of yet.
The crying had cleared something, the way crying cleared things when you let it rather than fought it, and I walked through the lit streets of the historic district with my coat buttoned and my guitar on my back and my face probably a mess. I didn't care.
I passed a restaurant still doing late service, couples at candlelit tables behind glass.
I passed a man walking a small dog who looked up at me with the dog's incurious eyes.
I passed a gas lantern flickering in the wind on a wrought iron post and stopped and looked at it for a moment for no reason.
I got out my phone.
I opened Tommy's text.
I looked at it for a long moment.
Three dots appeared. Then they disappeared. Then they appeared again, which was the texting equivalent of a man choosing his words carefully, and Tommy was not a man who usually chose his words carefully because he didn't need to.
Finally: I'm sorry, sweetheart. Are you home?
Walking, I typed back. I'm okay. Are you okay? You went quiet.
A longer pause than usual.
I’m at Dominion Hall. Something came up here. Something big. I can't get into it right now.
I stood under the gas lantern and read that twice. The tone of it was different. Something underneath. Something with weight that he was carrying alone in whatever room he was in.
Okay, I typed. Go do what you need to do. I'm fine.
I meant it, mostly. I was standing under a gas lantern in the historic district with a cleared-out chest and my brother's apology still warm in my ear, and I was going to be fine. Tonight had been a bad night. Bad nights ended.
Three dots again.
Then: Rebecca Lynn. Come here. I need you.
I read it once.
I read it again.
I need you was not something Tommy Dane said lightly. I understood that already, the way you understood certain things about a person after only days because the days had been dense and honest. He'd said I love you before he'd said I need you, and somehow, the second one landed harder.
What's the address? I typed.
He sent it immediately, like he'd been holding it ready.
I looked at the address. Then at my phone's map. Then at my own feet, which were already tired.
Dominion Hall was twenty minutes on foot. I could walk it. I'd walked further in worse conditions and the cold didn't bother me the way it bothered people who hadn't grown up in the mountains.
But Tommy had said I need you, and that was not a sentence that wanted a twenty-minute walk attached to it.
I flagged a cab on East Bay, which I had never done before in my life, not once, because cabs were not a thing people did in Caton's Chapel and I'd never lived anywhere else long enough to learn the habit.
I stood on the curb with my arm out feeling slightly ridiculous until one actually stopped, which surprised me enough that I almost stepped back.
I got in. I watched the meter the whole way there and told myself the tip money from tomorrow's shift would make up the difference, which was true, which was the kind of math I did automatically and probably always would.
The gate at Dominion Hall opened before the cab had fully stopped.
I paid, then stood on the drive and looked up at the enormous house.
It rose out of the Charleston dark the way things rose when they'd been built to stay.
Stone and shadow and the warm amber of lit windows on multiple floors, Spanish moss in the live oaks hanging slow in the January cold.
The kind of place that had absorbed enough history that it had stopped caring what you thought of it.
I'd never been anywhere like it.
I stood there a moment with my guitar on my back and my coat pulled close and I thought: this is the world he's in. Not the suite at The Palmetto Rose, which was beautiful and temporary. This. Permanent and certain and full of people I didn't know who did things I didn't understand.
The front door opened before I knocked.
A man with salt-and-pepper hair opened the door.
"Ms. Myers," he said.
I didn't ask how he knew my name.
"Tommy Dane," I said. "He asked me to come."
"Of course." He stepped back. "This way."