Epilogue
EMMY
The dogwood is blooming the way I drew it at nineteen. Just the tree I wanted, white petals opening over the porch steps, a little off-center in the yard.
I sit on the porch swing with my bare feet tucked under me and a mug of coffee cooling beside my hip.
The house settles around me in small sounds: wood warming in the afternoon sun, the old screen door clicking softly when the breeze catches it, Cade’s low voice drifting from the reading nook as he murmurs nonsense to the baby.
Cash is asleep against his chest. Cade is supposed to be asleep too, but he never manages it when he has that warm little weight tucked under his chin.
He sits in the nook over the kitchen, one knee bent, one hand spread carefully over the baby’s back, looking out through the windows at the dogwood like he still can’t quite believe he lives inside the promise he finally kept. I know the feeling.
In the kitchen below him, the counter has flour on it because June came by after the lunch rush with a pie she said was ugly enough to stay in the family.
That means one edge of the crust slumped, and she was personally offended by it.
She left it anyway, along with two bags from the Dogwood Diner and a kiss on the baby’s head that took her six tries because Cade kept saying, “Careful, June, you’ll wake—”
“Say wake one more time,” she told him, “and I’ll make you eat the questionable coleslaw at the next Sunday supper.”
He shut up. That, too, is family.
Cy’s steel case is leaning by the front door.
He started leaving it here six months ago, first by accident, then because nobody believed it was an accident.
He comes for supper on Thursdays now, complains about the chair Cade gives him, eats three helpings of whatever I make, and holds the baby with the tense concentration of a man defusing something delicate and armed.
Pop says Cy has been folded in whether he likes it or not. Pop says a lot of things now that he built me a studio and decided that national syndication gives him the right to act like my employee, my landlord, and my elderly problem child all at once.
The studio sits in town, two blocks from the diner, tucked behind WHLR’s old brick front. Pop had the wall knocked out and the booth rebuilt, then stood in the dust with a hard hat on backward and said, “Well, Em, reckon you’re too big for us now.”
I told him, live on air that night, that if he ever said that again, I would dedicate four hours of love songs to his ex-wife from 1987.
Every night, my voice leaves that little room in Harmony Ridge and travels farther than I ever imagined it would.
Truckers in Wyoming. Night shift nurses in Tampa.
A Vietnam Vet in Maine who calls every other Tuesday and pretends he has the wrong number.
People alone in kitchens, cars, break rooms, porches, and motel beds.
People who turn the volume up after midnight because the dark feels less empty when someone answers back. They know my name.
Not Mrs. Tyler, unless I choose to say it. Not Cade’s wife. Not the face in the third row. Emmy Sutton Tyler, behind the mic, saying, Good evening, wherever you are. I’m glad you made it.
Some nights, Cade sits on the other side of the glass with the baby asleep in a carrier by his boots. He brings coffee I didn’t ask for and never interrupts. If I look up between calls, he's there, reading or writing or simply waiting to drive us home under a sky with no flashbulbs in it.
He plays the Whip most weekends. Still.
The room holds ninety people if Hal ignores fire code, which Hal does only when he can pretend he isn’t.
Cade shows up in jeans and a faded shirt, carries his own guitar, plugs in his own amp, and passes the jar himself when Hal’s electric bill needs bullying into submission.
No posters. No label rollouts. No cameras waiting by the back door.
People still come from out of town, sometimes.
They hear the rumors and want to see the famous man in the tiny room.
The funny thing is, by the second song, he isn’t famous there.
He’s Cade. Hal yells at him for moving a stool.
Cy rolls his eyes from the corner. June sends over fries if she thinks he looks too skinny, which he never does, but she's become aggressive about feeding everyone connected to me by blood, marriage, or friendship.
Sometimes I go and stand in my old spot at the bar.
Not every weekend. I have a baby now. I have a show.
I have a life with more laundry than any reasonable woman should be asked to process.
But when I do go, Cade always sees me. First song, last song, middle of a chorus.
His eyes find mine like the whole room is only furniture. He doesn't stop playing.
He used to, at first. Like the sight of me still knocked the breath clean out of him. Now he smiles a little, rough and private, and keeps his hands steady on the strings. Changed is the currency, and he spends it quietly.
The porch boards creak behind me. Cade steps outside with the baby tucked against him, one big hand cupping the back of that tiny head.
“Your coffee’s getting cold,” he says.
“I've drank worse."
He sits beside me on the swing carefully, moving like the sleeping baby has turned his whole body into a church. I shift closer until my shoulder rests against his arm. For a while, we don’t talk.
The baby sighs in sleep. Cade lowers his mouth to that soft dark hair, and my chest does the thing it still does sometimes: the sudden ache of remembering how close we came to losing this.
Not the spotlight version of this. Not the story people wrote with our names when they thought pain belonged to them because they could replay it. This.
A porch. A tree. A cooling mug. My sister’s handwriting on a diner bag. Cy’s steel case by the door. Pop calling the studio “the empire” because he likes to annoy me. My husband’s ring warm against my hand where his hand rests beside mine.
No press. No Duke. No Wildfire.
Cade looks down at me. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“You got quiet.”
“I’m allowed.”
“Yes, ma’am.” His thumb brushes the back of my hand. “But I still like knowing where you went.”
I look toward the dogwood, all that white bloom against the blue spring sky. “I was thinking about nineteen-year-old me.”
"Think she'd be happy if she could see us now?"
I lean my cheek against his shoulder. The baby sleeps between us, warm and certain.
"I think she'd be tickled pink."
In a dark arena once, a camera found my face and held it up for strangers. It tried to tell the story for me.
Tonight, after the baby is down and Cade has washed the bottles, I’ll go into town. I’ll sit behind the glass Pop built for me. I’ll put on my headphones, wait for the red light, and speak into the dark.
Good evening, wherever you are.
I look at my husband holding our baby in the house I drew before I knew how long someday could take.
I’m glad you made it.