Epilogue
REBECCA
The plane was smaller than I'd imagined and larger than I'd feared.
I'd built it up in my head the way I built up anything I'd never done—into something enormous and theoretical, a concept more than a thing, the way flying had always been a concept to me.
Something that happened to other people in movies and in the departure gates I'd walked past in airports I'd only been inside to pick someone up.
I'd been in the Knoxville airport twice in my life, both times to collect someone, and both times I'd stood at the arrivals area and watched people come through the door from the secure side and thought: that's where the flying people come from.
Now, I was a flying person.
Tommy had his hand on the small of my back when we boarded, which was a thing he did without deciding to when he was aware that I might need anchoring.
I had not told him I needed anchoring because I was a woman from the mountains who did not admit to needing anchoring, and he knew that, which was why he did it without being asked.
The interior of the Dominion Hall jet was—I registered it the way I registered all of it now, with the slightly delayed, slightly sideways registration of a woman who was getting used to a world that kept presenting her with things she had no prior category for.
Cream leather. Recessed lighting. A galley with actual food on it, not peanuts in a foil bag, but small sandwiches and cut fruit arranged on a tray.
Windows that looked out at the tarmac at the private airfield outside Charleston where Dominion Hall apparently kept aircraft the way other people kept cars. Or in my world, bicycles.
"Okay?" Tommy said.
"Ask me when we're in the air," I said.
He smiled.
We were carrying guitars. Both of them—my J-45 in its case with the long scrape across the outside from the explosion on the lawn, and Tommy's guitar, which I had not seen until this morning when he'd brought it out from somewhere in the depths of Dominion Hall.
It was a Martin. Old, the way my Gibson was old, with the worn beauty of an instrument that had been played rather than displayed. He'd carried it out of his suite the way I carried mine—both hands, careful, like something he didn't let himself have often and wanted to be worthy of when he did.
I'd looked at it and looked at him.
"You never told me what kind," I said.
"You never asked."
"I thought you'd tell me."
"I was getting there," he said.
That had been this morning. Now we were on a plane to Texas and the guitars were in the overhead compartment in their cases and I was sitting in a leather seat that was wider than the bed in my apartment.
The engines were doing something I could feel in my chest, a rising, building thing, and then the plane was moving and then it was moving faster and then—
Then, we were in the air.
The ground fell away under my window and my hand found Tommy's armrest and gripped it. He turned his hand over underneath mine and held on without saying a word about it.
I watched Charleston get small—the harbor, the historic district, the gas lanterns invisible from this height but there, I knew they were there—and then we were in the clouds and then we were above them.
The sky was an impossible blue and the clouds were white below us like a second ground, a softer one, and I thought: I've been on the wrong side of this my whole life.
"Hey," Tommy said.
I turned.
His face was doing the focused, serious thing.
"You okay?"
"It's beautiful," I said. "That's all."
He looked out my window. Back at me.
"Yeah," he said. "It is."
I'd asked about his mother on the drive to the airfield, in the careful way I'd learned to ask about things that lived in the closed rooms.
"What's she like?" I said. "When she's—when she's there."
He'd thought about it for a long time. Long enough that I'd almost let him off the hook.
"She's the funniest person I've ever known," he said finally.
"And the strongest. Not in a loud way. In the way that just—held.
Everything. She held everything. Seven boys and a man who came and went and a ranch that ran thin some years and she just—held.
" He paused. "She used to hum while she cooked.
Not songs, exactly. Just sound. Whatever was in her head.
I didn't know until I was grown that it was something she did when she was happy. "
I thought about my own mama rolling biscuit dough. The sideways wisdom. The raspberry jam in mason jars.
"She's going to love you," he said.
"You don't know that."
"I do."
"How?"
He looked at me.
"Because I know her," he said. "And I know you. And I know that the two of you are the same person in different decades."
I looked out the window at the clouds below us.
I thought: I hope so.
I thought: Please.
Marfa was smaller than I'd expected and stranger than I'd imagined.
The drive from the airfield took us through a high desert that was nothing like the Smokies—flat and wide and bone-dry, the sky enormous in the way Tommy had described, pressed down low over a landscape that didn't apologize for its plainness.
I looked out the window of the car and understood something about him that I hadn't been able to understand before.
This was what made a man like Tommy. Not the mountains with their softness and their green, but this—the exposure of it.
The way there was nowhere to hide out here, no fold of ridge or valley to duck into.
You were just a person under a sky, and the sky was not interested in your feelings about it.
"It looks like your soul," I said, and then felt embarrassed about it.
He looked at me.
"Yeah," he said. "I think that might be right."
The memory care facility was called Sunrise at Marfa, which was the kind of name these places had, soft and misdirecting, designed to make everyone more comfortable about what the place actually was.
It was clean. The staff knew Tommy by name and lit up when he came through the door, which told me he came as often as he could and that they'd noticed.
A woman named Deb walked us back.
"She's having a pretty good day," Deb said quietly, which was the phrase the staff at places like this used when they meant the fog is lighter today than some days. I had learned, from Tommy on the plane, to hear the hope in it.
The room was bright. A window that faced west, which the brothers had apparently requested and paid extra for, so she'd get the afternoon light.
Photographs on a dresser—seven boys at various ages, stair-stepped, loud even in photographs.
A quilt on the bed in a pattern I recognized as the kind of pattern women in communities like Caton's Chapel made, the kind that had a name that meant something to the family.
Elaine Dane was in the chair by the window.
She was smaller than I'd imagined—Tommy's descriptions had made her enormous in my head, the way the people who shaped you were always enormous in your head.
The woman in the chair was fine-boned and white-haired and had the quality of stillness that came to people when the world had quieted around them in ways they hadn't asked for.
She looked up when we came in.
Her eyes found Tommy first.
Something moved across her face—a slow, warm illumination, the way a lamp came on in a room that had been dim. Not full brightness. But light.
"Tommy," she said. His name in her mouth was the same two syllables but different in quality than any other voice that said it. It was the voice that had made him.
"Hey, Mama." He crossed the room and bent down and kissed her forehead and took both her hands in his. "I brought someone."
Her eyes moved to me.
I stood in the doorway with my guitar case at my side and her son's whole life behind me and I said, "Hi, Mrs. Dane. I'm Rebecca."
She looked at me for a long moment.
"Rebecca," she said, trying it out.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Are you Tommy's girl?"
I looked at Tommy.
"Yes, ma'am," I said. "I am."
Something settled in her face. A satisfied settling, like a thing that had been waiting in the right place for something to arrive.
"Good," she said.
The guitars had been Tommy's idea, and I had not understood it until we were in the room and Deb had quietly pulled the door mostly closed and it was the three of us and the afternoon light coming through the west window, and Tommy had unlatched his case.
"Mama used to play," he said to me, low. "She can't anymore. But she remembers music." He paused. "Better than she remembers most things."
He lifted the Martin out.
He sat down on the edge of the bed facing her chair, the way he'd sat on the floor of my apartment that first night—easy, natural, like a man returning to something.
He ran his thumb across the strings once, checking the tuning, the same gesture I made with my own hands on my own guitar, and I felt something move through me at the sight of it.
I got my Gibson out and sat in the other chair.
"What does she like?" I said quietly.
He smiled. "Old stuff. Country, mostly. She had a record player and a stack of albums when I was growing up. Dolly was in the stack."
I looked at him.
"Of course, she was," I said.
He laughed—the surprised, real laugh.
He looked at his mother.
"Mama," he said. "We're going to play you something. Okay?"
She had drifted a little, the way Deb had warned us she sometimes drifted between moments of clarity—her eyes soft and unfocused, somewhere else. But at the sound of his voice she came back, partial, enough.
"Play," she said. Simple.
Tommy looked at me.
"You pick," he said.
I thought about it for half a second. Then I started the opening of Coat of Many Colors. The first song I'd ever played at The Piazza. The Dolly song about poverty and dignity and a mother's love.