Tess
Sadie turns two in October and we do it in the backyard off Manor, because the lemon tree finally came back and he’s unbearable about it.
He plays about fifty shows a year now. Theaters, mostly, fifteen hundred seats, rooms where you can hear somebody set a glass down at the bar.
Rob told him that was career management for a man in decline and he said that sounded about right and signed the routing.
The nearby dates he does and comes home the same night.
The rest he strings into a two-week run in the fall, and I go for part of it now, which nobody saw coming, least of all me.
I’m shooting again. Real work. I kept the studio because it’s mine and because the little sign on the sidewalk still has my name on it, painted by a friend as a housewarming present.
I did a tour book for a band out of Denver in the spring, and twelve days with a documentary crew in Marfa in February, and I came back with three frames I’d have traded a year of my life for at twenty-five.
He had Sadie the whole time. When I got back the house was a disaster, there were four bath towels in the freezer, and my daughter had learned a song about a truck that I still cannot get out of my head.
He proposed in the kitchen after Sadie was asleep.
She’d just gone down. He was rinsing a bottle.
He turned around with his hands still wet and said it badly and out of order and then had to start over twice, and there was no ring for six days because he hadn’t wanted to buy one first in case that was presumptuous.
Nobody knows the date. There’s no photograph of it.
There was no camera in the room and there never will be, and when a woman from a magazine asked me about it at an event later that summer I said it was lovely and changed the subject, and she wrote that I was guarded, and I framed that.
My mother moved nearby in the summer, which she describes as a coincidence.
She has Sadie on Thursdays. She and Shane have developed an entire ongoing war about the lemon tree, and neither of them knows the first thing about lemon trees, and it goes on for hours.
There’s a photograph on the fridge from Christmas.
All of us in my mother’s terrible living room in front of the fake fireplace, taken by a neighbor on a phone.
Everyone blinking, Sadie mid-tantrum, Shane with a paper crown on sideways.
It’s the only picture of the four of us that exists and it’s never leaving that fridge.
Kendra comes to the party. She brings a present that’s too big and spends the first half hour near the fence talking to my mother.
We text now, twice a month or so, and we’ve had coffee four times in a year, and the last time we both cried in a parking lot and then said extremely normal things about a dog.
It’s not what it was and it isn’t going to be.
But she was the one driving on 12 while I bled through a fitting room, and she ran two red lights, and I’ve decided I get to hold both of those at once for as long as it takes.
Mitch sent a card after the engagement. Just a card.
Congratulations, signed with his whole name.
Shane read it twice and put it in a drawer and said nothing about it for four days, and then said one thing at midnight, which was, “He taught me to tune a guitar in a laundromat.” I let that be the entire conversation.
Sadie takes the cake apart with her whole forearm.
There are eleven people in that yard and every one of them was there in the worst year, and nobody takes a picture that goes anywhere.
Afterward we clean up in the slow way you do when you’re too tired to be efficient, and she goes down with frosting still in her hair, because I have picked my battles. He puts a record on in the kitchen, thinks better of it, and gets the Gibson instead. He plays the song.
Not all of it. He never plays all of it anymore.
He gets through half and wanders off into something else, which is what happens to a song that lives in a house instead of on a record.
It’s never been released. It never will be.
Every so often somebody asks, and the asking has gotten more polite over time, and the answer hasn’t moved.
There’s a line in the second verse about how she’d be safer if he were braver. He changed it about a year ago. He sings it differently now and I noticed the first time and didn’t say anything, and then I noticed again. I put my hand out and he sets the guitar down and comes over.
The kitchen light is on and the back door’s open and the folding table is still out in the yard.
I’ve got frosting on my shirt and there’s a two-year-old’s handprint on the leg of his jeans.
He kisses me in the middle of the room with the whole house lit up and the blinds not drawn, in front of a window that faces a street.
“Come to bed.”
“That’s your line.”
“It’s a good line. It’s worked twice.”
“Twice.”
“I’m being modest.”
I laugh into his shoulder and he picks me up, and I tell him he’s too old to be doing that, and he says to take it up with his back in the morning, and we make it about as far as we ever make it, which is not far at all.
It’s slow and it’s ridiculous and at one point we have to stop entirely because the monitor makes a noise and we both freeze like people committing a crime, and it’s nothing, and he laughs so hard he has to put his face in the pillow.
Nobody’s waiting for it to get light. Neither of us notices that until days later, which is how I know it’s real.
His phone starts going on the nightstand later.
Rob, then the tour manager, then Rob again, because there’s a thing about a room or a routing or a support act, and there always is, and it will still be there in the morning. He reaches over. He looks at the name on the screen for a moment. Then he turns it face down and comes back to me.
THE END