Chapter 3 #2
“You feeling okay?” I asked. Her face was almost totally drained of color.
I was feeling a bit nervous myself by this point.
What if she had a rough experience and never wanted to play again?
That would be okay, but I’d had such high hopes for her first bluegrass jam.
I wanted it to be fun for her. I told her, “It’s a tough day to perform.
If you’re not feeling up to it, I want you to know—that’s completely okay. ”
She sort of snapped out of her stupor and looked me right in the eyes then. “I’m up for it,” she said. “I’m fine.”
Then she walked onstage, and I said a little prayer under my breath.
Mari
Ryan had picked her outfit very carefully, but I don’t think any of us counted on the heat.
She’d worn a short-sleeve cotton dress with blue-and-white flowers all over, and a denim vest, which she handed to me before she went backstage.
I’d set it across my lap while we sat in the grass, and it felt like a lead blanket.
There was a guy older than us, maybe in his twenties, performing before Ryan went on, and he was good.
His fingers were flying on the strings, he was whooping and hollering, stomping his feet on the stage and everything.
The crowd was getting into it despite the heat too.
I was a little bit dazzled by him, I’ll admit it, but it also gave me this sinking feeling, of Oh shit. Ryan has to follow this.
And his set ended, and the crowd applauded and quieted.
Everyone waited, shifting on the lawn.
Suddenly this music started playing, and Ryan came onstage while strumming her first song, reaching the mic and pausing the strings just as her voice rang out sweet and clear across the park, singing about that lonesome road.
She drew it out a bit, letting the final note linger with her natural vibrato and giving a little whoop at the end. She called out loud and clear, “Well, hey there, River Rocks!”
Ryan restarted the first three notes of the song and came right back down on beat, stomping her leather-sandaled foot on the stage. A genuine, full-hearted cheer went up from the crowd, and they began clapping along with her.
There she was, looking completely at ease with her hair all around her shoulders, heavy and curly and thick in the humidity. I’d told her I could help her pin it up, but no, it was part of her look.
She was right to keep it that way. That hair became her signature.
Frank
I was real proud of her. So proud.
I hold that my encouragement didn’t make a bit of difference—Ryan pulled that confidence from somewhere within herself. You can’t teach stage presence like that.
She moved seamlessly from the first song to “Providence,” her own song.
I hadn’t coached her on the order, but she’d had the instinct to start strong, bring it down to something slow, and leave them on a high note.
She barely even waited for applause when she finished “Lonesome Road,” looking for a minute there as though she was entirely absorbed in her own world, picking out a little melody while she tuned a bit.
And when the audience was quiet, she began: These sunny days a stubborn shadow’s slipping ’cross my mind / The afternoon’s a dream when I’m with you. / But I can see the ocean calling through these Norway pines / And I know what it’s calling me to do.
Her voice was cool, haunting. After the lively first song, she had her listeners in the palm of her hand for that mournful little piece she wrote.
Watching from backstage, I swear I didn’t see a muscle move the whole three minutes she was singing.
Hell, even the guy in the taco truck back by the other vendors was leaning out to watch her, his elbows on his stainless-steel window counter.
You couldn’t look away when she was singing like that.
Mari
When Ryan finished “Providence,” I swear—no one moved. No one breathed.
And then she started “My Tennessee Mountain Home” just like the first one, a cappella, hands resting on the body of the banjo, using that same sort of lonely voice she’d used through “Providence,” drawing out the words about sitting out on a front porch in the summer.
But as she went, she let her voice warm and lighten. And then she began fingerpicking again, pushing the tempo faster. She leaped up an octave on the second chorus, and I got goose bumps even in that August heat. Some people broke out cheering just for that.
By the time Ryan had reached the final refrain, the audience was singing along—she was encouraging them. She picked the final notes on the banjo and got a standing ovation.
I saw the mask slip, just a little, as relief flooded her face. Then she recovered and took a deep bow, throwing her hair back once again.
Frank
I knew I’d created a monster when Ryan ran offstage with this huge grin and this look in her eye. She wasn’t just happy about the performance—she was hungry. She wanted more.
Mari
The heat didn’t seem to bother Ryan the whole rest of the day as we walked around the festival and watched the other acts. Nickel Creek was the headliner Saturday night, and Ryan sat there on our picnic blanket with her arms wrapped around her knees, drinking in every song.
We drove back to Hamilton very late that night. Between the excitement and the heat and being outside the whole day, I was exhausted. I fell asleep just about the second I plopped down in the back seat of the Holdings’ Toyota.
But somewhere outside Boston, I woke up and looked over at Ryan. She was wide awake, staring out the window with her chin in her hand.
Three days later, she came over to me at lunch and smacked a folder down on the table. School started just after River Rocks, although it seemed to me that Ryan had hardly noticed we were back in the classroom. She said, “I made a deal.”
She was looking very smug about it. “With who?” I asked.
“My parents.” She opened the folder and showed me the pile of brochures and flyers she’d certainly taken from Frank’s shop, advertising different festivals and bluegrass events all up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
“The hell is all this?” I asked.
“They agreed that any event I can get into, they’ll take me. That includes all these fall festivals, the Salem Halloween ones, the holiday shows, and then next spring and summer when things start warming up again . . .”
I had stared at her. “You’ll never have time for all this,” I remember saying.
But I was wrong.
Justin
Things really started to ramp up after Ryan did that River Rocks festival. I feel like I hardly saw her that eighth-grade year, which was tough, since I’d thought we were about to get closer.
It was like every other week she was gone.
I still don’t know how she got her parents to agree to it, but maybe they were starting to see dollar signs in this thing.
Ryan wasn’t just entering in festivals, but in competitions—and she was winning the kind of money that was unthinkable to a couple of middle schoolers.
A hundred bucks at Salem Days. One-fifty at Long Island Sound for the second-place prize, three hundred for first at Raleigh Rumble. She let me tag along with her and Mari sometimes, which is the only reason I knew I wasn’t totally dumped—yet.
I’ll be real with you. She was . . . spectacular.
I remember watching with this sort of slack-jawed awe.
And I’m serious, I was happy to cheer her on.
That was my girlfriend up there, playing like her hands were on fire?
Hell yeah, it was. Mari and I made signs and got up in the front row.
She would blow me kisses, and I just felt .
. . yeah. I’ve never felt anything like that since then.
But that was only when she—and my parents—let me come with. When Ryan wasn’t going to Boston or Albany or Poughkeepsie, she was scrambling to catch up with schoolwork or preparing for another audition cycle.
It got worse in the spring. I should have seen it coming, and maybe I had, deep down, but when Ryan asked me if I wanted to go for ice cream at Crosby’s, I was just happy that she wanted to spend time with me again.
It was a sunny but cold spring day. I remember I was excited to see the leaves coming back on the trees because it meant that baseball season was coming. Ryan had come to a lot of my games the summer before River Rocks. I was hoping she’d do that again.
She was just as good at listening as she’d always been, but she’d become . . . I don’t know, distracted. Ryan used to ask about me, how things were going in my life, but she just sort of—stopped.
I know how it sounds. I can hear her legions of fans coming at me like little yappy rabid dogs—Oh, boo-hoo, he’s so sad a beautiful, intelligent woman wasn’t interested in him as a middle schooler!
Yeah, it did make me sad. I was a kid, and she was my first girlfriend, and I really liked her.
So it shouldn’t have surprised me when she had her mint chocolate chip, and I had my butter pecan, and we were sitting on top of the picnic table outside like we always did, that she turned to me with this really sorry look on her face.
“So . . . I’m going to compete in the Raleigh Bluegrass Festival in June,” she said.
I knew what that meant. More practicing, more traveling. But I wanted to be supportive. “Hey, congrats,” I said. “I know how hard you’ve been working for it. Can I come?”
“If you want.” She looked down at her sneakers.
“But the finalists go on to compete in Nashville in July. And . . . my dad is going to Austin for work—Austin, Texas”—I remember she said Texas like it was impossibly far away from where we sat on Walnut Road—“so I’m going to try to plan something there too. ”
I nodded. Tried not to look at her. “Going to be a busy summer.”
“Yeah.”
That summer had already been looming over both our heads.
We were going to start high school in the fall, and although that just meant moving to a different building down the street to Hamilton-Wenham, it felt like a huge leap.
Some of our classmates were heading to Bishop Fenwick or Salem Prep, and it felt like we’d never see them again. It was already a lot of change.
Ryan went on, “Look, William . . .”
I wanted to save face. I preempted her and said, “Okay, so I guess I might not see you that much. If you want to just call it for now, that’s—that’s okay with me. I’ll always be cheering you on from the sidelines.”
“I’m really sorry,” she said. “Maybe down the road, if things are different . . . we could try again someday.”
I nodded. She leaned over and kissed me on the cheek; I remember the way the cool mint smelled on her breath.
Then she got up and walked home without me. We didn’t talk again for years after that day.
But I held her to her word. I did.