Chapter 4
The band takes a break around ten o’clock, and the energy in the bar shifts. People drift toward the bar for refills, cluster in groups to chat, or head outside to get some fresh air. The sudden relative quiet feels kind of strange after hours of constant noise.
Dolly appears at my end of the bar, sliding onto the stool beside me with a sigh of relief.
“Lord, have mercy, my feet are staging a rebellion.”
She kicks off one shoe and rubs the arch of her foot, completely unselfconscious about it.
“You must be Eleanor. I’m Dolly.”
“I figured. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Uh-huh.” She looks me up and down with a frank assessment. “Mavis said you’d be pretty. She was right. Got those family cheekbones.”
“Yeah, everybody keeps saying that. I didn’t realize our cheekbones were a known feature.”
“Mavis told us all about your family and even showed us pictures a time or two. Your grandmother and Mavis sure looked a lot alike.” Dolly points to Presley for a glass of sweet tea. “Mavis used to say her sister traded her soul for a Buckhead address. I mean, no offense.”
“None taken. I’m actually fascinated. No one in my family ever talked about Mavis. What was she like?” I ask. “Mavis, I mean. Everybody talks about her, but I never…” I trail off, not really sure how to finish that sentence.
Dolly’s expression softens.
“Oh, she was a force of nature. That’s what she was. Stubborn as a mule, generous as a saint, but absolutely terrible at minding her own business.”
She laughs, a warm sound that crinkles the corners of her eyes.
“You know, that woman would give you the shirt off her back and then tell you exactly what she thought of your life choices while helping you put it on.”
“Well, that sounds… intense.”
“Oh, it was. But here’s the thing you need to know about Mavis. She never told you anything she wouldn’t tell herself. She was much harder on herself than anyone else. She held herself to the same standards she held everyone else to.”
Dolly takes a long sip of her tea.
“When she got sick, she didn’t want anyone to know. Kept working right up until she couldn’t anymore. Wyatt had to practically carry her upstairs those last few weeks.”
I think about Wyatt’s face when he talks about Mavis, the grief that still looks so raw.
“He loved her.”
“Sugar, we all did. But Wyatt…” Dolly shakes her head. “He came back from overseas all broken up inside. Not physically. I mean, some of that too. But in his heart. In his spirit. And Mavis saw it. She gave him a job, a purpose, a reason to keep going. She saved his life, and he knows it.”
The band is returning to the stage, instruments being tuned and adjusted, and the noise level is rising again.
“Dolly, why are you telling me all this?”
She looks at me with eyes that have seen decades of joy and sorrow.
“Because Mavis believed in you. I don’t know why, ‘cause she never explained it, but she was convinced you were supposed to be here. That you needed this place as much as it needed you.” She pats my hand with fingers that are surprisingly soft, despite years of hard work.
“I’m just trying to help you see what she saw. The rest of it’s up to you.”
The band launches into their next set, and Dolly slips off her stool, sliding her feet back into her work shoes with a grimace.
“Duty calls, honey. You need anything, just holler.”
She is gone before I can respond, weaving through the crowd with her tray held high.
* * *
By midnight, I am exhausted in a way I have not been in years. I have spent the past four hours watching, listening, and trying to understand this place I have somehow inherited.
I have seen Wyatt break up two more potential fights, each time with that same calm authority.
I have watched Presley perform a song during one of the band’s breaks, her voice clear and haunting, and understood why Mavis encouraged her to pursue her passion.
I have seen Boone gently escort a drunk patron outside and then make sure he had a safe ride home.
I have watched Dolly comfort and charm her way through dozens of interactions.
And I have seen the customers. The regulars who greet each other like family.
The couples on the dance floor who have clearly been doing this for decades.
The young people who are learning the steps from their elders.
I have seen birthday celebrations and anniversary toasts, and what I am pretty sure was some kind of informal engagement.
I mean, the woman said yes, the bar erupted into cheers, and Wyatt poured free shots for everyone.
It is not what I expected. It is not the rough, dangerous roadhouse I imagined when I heard I had inherited a honky-tonk bar. It is something else entirely. Something I do not even have a word for.
The crowd is starting to thin out when Wyatt appears beside me again.
“Closing time is in thirty minutes. You’ve been here for hours. You must be tired.”
“I’m fine,” I say. And then yawn, my jaw cracking loudly.
He almost smiles. “Okay. Right. Fine. You know, you can go upstairs whenever you want. The apartment is yours.”
I had almost forgotten about the apartment. The charming, eclectic space that was Mavis’s home. That is apparently now mine, at least for the next six months.
“I should probably just stay at the bed and breakfast,” I say. “I don’t want to impose.”
“Um, it’s not imposing, because it’s your apartment,” Wyatt says, shrugging. “But suit yourself. Mabel’s biscuits are worth the interrogation about your love life.”
“She asked me if I had a ‘special fella’ three times during breakfast.”
He laughs. “Only three? She must like you. She asked me seven times at church last Sunday.”
The image of this rugged, tattooed man sitting in a little church pew while an elderly woman grills him about his romantic prospects is so absurd, so unexpected, that I actually laugh out loud.
“You should do that more often,” Wyatt says quietly.
“Do what?”
“Laugh. You look different when you laugh. Less like you’re waiting for someone to grade you.”
The observation cuts a little too close to home. I look away, focusing on the last few customers gathering their things to leave.
“I should go,” I say. “It’s late.”
“It is.”
He does not move to let me pass.
“Ms. Whitfield. I mean, Eleanor. I know I’ve been hard on you tonight. I just, I need you to understand what’s at stake here.”
“I think I’m beginning to.”
“Good.”
He steps aside, finally giving me room to slide off my stool.
“For what it’s worth, Mavis was never wrong about people. And if she thought you belonged here, then maybe you should consider she knew something that you don’t.”
I do not know how to respond to that, so I just nod and make my way toward the door.
The night air hits me as I step outside, cool and clean, heavy with the scent of pine. The parking lot is nearly empty now, my Lexus looking lonely among the remaining trucks.
I am halfway to my car when I hear it, music coming from inside. It is not the band. They have packed up and gone home. This is softer, simpler. It is just a guitar and a voice.
I turn back and look through the window.
Inside the bar, it’s mostly dark, with chairs upturned on tables. But on the small stage, illuminated by one single light, sits Presley with a guitar, playing something slow and sad. Wyatt is behind the bar, wiping down the counter, but he has stopped to listen.
The song is about leaving home and finding your way back, and the people who wait for you, who keep the light on, who love you even when you don’t deserve it.
I stand in the parking lot of my great-aunt’s bar, in a town I had never even heard of a week ago, and feel something crack open in my chest.
I do not know what Mavis saw in me. I do not know why she thought I belonged here.
But standing here in the dark, under the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, listening to Presley sing about home, I feel something I have not felt in a very long time.
Hope.
* * *
The Copper Creek Bed and Breakfast has betrayed me.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” Mabel says, wringing her hands as if she is genuinely distressed. “The bluegrass festival starts tomorrow, and I’ve got folks coming in from three states. Every single room is booked solid through Sunday.”
I stand in her doily-covered parlor, my overnight bag at my feet, trying to process what she is saying. It is Saturday morning, and I have been in Copper Creek for less than forty-eight hours, but I am already homeless.
“Isn’t there another hotel? A motel, maybe?”
Mabel shakes her head, her silver curls bouncing. “Nearest one’s forty-five minutes down the mountain, and honey, they’ll be full up too. This festival brings in folks from all over. It’s our biggest weekend of the year.”
Of course it is. Of course, the one weekend I desperately need accommodation is the one weekend where every available bed within a fifty-mile radius is occupied by banjo enthusiasts.
“Okay, what about a vacation rental? Airbnb?”
“A what now?”
I close my eyes and try to count to ten in my head. When I open them, Mabel is looking at me with a sympathy usually reserved for lost puppies or people who have received bad medical news.
“You know,” she says slowly, “Mavis’s apartment is empty, and it’s yours now, isn’t it? It seems a shame to let it go to waste when you need a place to stay.”
The apartment. The charming, eclectic, aggressively quirky apartment above the bar that I am not sure I want to own. The apartment where my great aunt lived for thirty-five years, surrounded by cowboy boots, concert posters, and a life I cannot begin to understand.
“I couldn’t possibly.”
“Why not?” Mabel interrupts, tilting her head like a curious bird. “It’s got everything you need. A bed, a bathroom, a kitchen. And again, it’s yours, legally speaking. Harlan drew up those papers himself, didn’t he?”