19. Stir Crazy
STIR CRAZY
LUCY
Iam losing my mind staying home, especially now that I’m feeling better, and my ribs have settled into a dull, manageable complaint.
My head is clearer as I’m off the heavy pills and onto something mild enough that I can think in complete sentences and stay awake past seven.
“I need to get out,” I all but shout at him when he comes back from work that I made him go to.
He smiles. “Where would you like to go?”
“Why do I have to figure everything out?” I whine. “You find a place to take me to.”
He continues to smile. “Alright, sweetheart.”
He surprises and charms me.
The next day, he takes me to Bells Bend—a neighborhood on the far northwestern edge of the city that the Cumberland River decided, at some geological point, to wrap itself around on three sides, creating a peninsula that feels nothing like Nashville.
Nothing like the Broadway honky-tonks or the rooftop bars or the bachelorette parade of Lower Broadway that tends to be the first thing people mean when they say this city.
It feels like the Tennessee that was always underneath—the one that was there before the cranes and the condos and the reinvention.
We park off Old Hickory Boulevard and walk slowly, because of my ribs, down toward the water.
The land here is open—working farmland, fields running toward the tree line with the unhurried patience of land that has not yet been convinced to become something else.
There’s a family farm stand, and Fox and I taste our way through jars of honey—light clover filled with sunshine, dark wildflower honey with a hint of earth and smoke, and thick golden sourwood that the woman behind the table tells us is a Tennessee favorite.
One spoonful is almost buttery, another sharp with the bite of late-season blooms, each jar faintly different depending on what the bees found that year.
“You brought me to a honey tasting,” I say, delighted.
“I....” He looks sheepishly at me.
“What?”
“I’ve been looking up places I can take you to when you feel better...you know, places you’d like.”
My eyebrows lift in quiet surprise. “You’ve never been here before?”
He shakes his head.
Fresh emotions unfurl in my chest. “Thank you.”
He wraps his arm around me and kisses my temple. It’s an unconscious gesture of affection, and everything inside me melts.
“The places I know, the restaurants, the venues—they have my family’s name on them, or my friends’ names, or my history. I wanted somewhere that was just Nashville. The actual city. Yours as much as mine.”
We walk closer to the water.
The Cumberland from here is not the river you see from downtown, all glass-reflected skyline and tourist boats. From here it is wide and brown, indifferent and old, doing what it has always done, long before there was a city named after anything.
We find a low spot by the water, a fallen tree, and we sit—Fox with his elbows on his knees, me with my face turned up to the late afternoon light, which is the long gold kind that makes everything look like it was decided on with care.
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
“Yes.”
“What was I like?” I keep my face up to the light. “Before. What was I like to be married to?”
I can feel his gaze on me, but I don’t face him; I can’t.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I finally have the courage to ask him and find out what he says.
“Honest,” he replies. “You were always honest. Even when it was inconvenient.”
Not anymore, not now. I’m not honest now, Fox.
“You made everything the best version of what it could be. Dinner, the house, the garden. You never did anything halfway.” He cups my cheek. “I didn’t tell you enough that I noticed.”
I absorb this and his touch.
“Were we happy?”
“Yes. But…not as much as we should’ve been.” His voice shifts, goes quieter. “That’s entirely on me.” He pauses. “I’m going to do better, sweetheart.”
You already are.
He just gave me a truth—a small revelation I hold close.