CHAPTER EIGHT COEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
COEN
I don’t want to disrupt her life more than I already have, so when I lie awake at night and every mistake I’ve ever made runs through my head, I stay right where I am.
The first few nights go by like this. By the third night, I get out my notebook and sit on my bed, holding the pen but not writing anything.
I’ve never been the kind of writer who waited for the muse.
I read an article about how often creatives struggle with the constant pressure of their job and decided I would try to look at it more as a trade, where I did my work and shut my brain off.
Maybe if I clocked in and clocked out, I could hold my head together.
It hasn’t worked, but I still pretend it will.
There’s nothing to clock out of. My brain never stops churning. My work is on my phone, and my phone goes everywhere in my pocket.
So, I sit up and stare at the opposite wall, thinking about everything I did the first year, after Western Midnight Blues hit the charts.
The first day it happened, I was in a diner having a coffee, and Jamie appeared on the other side of the window.
I remember thinking something bad had happened, maybe his mom or his sister got hurt, but then he started jumping up and down on the salty, snowy street.
He tore inside and slammed a piece of printed paper on the table.
There it was, my work at number one.
The few months after that was the wildest time of my life.
I had a buzz in the back of my skull that wouldn’t let me slow down.
I don’t think I ate anything for two months, just cigarettes and stress.
Everybody wanted to talk to me. We didn’t have a team beyond the two of us.
Jamie didn’t have an attorney, so he had to find one through the whisper network, and he ended up with Johnny Rebmann from out of South Carolina, who was able to read through those contracts and keep us from getting eaten alive.
Even then, there’s only so much he could do. We signed some dud contracts, shit got stolen from us.
But that’s not what bothered me the most.
It was how one minute, I was a person. Then, I split down the middle and became two halves of myself.
I guarded the half of myself who sat in that diner and never worried about how people saw him, if they knew him, if they hated or loved him.
The other half had to be thrown to the wolves.
That was the man who hit the road, playing lead guitar for Dax Williams for two years straight, who ended every other night soaked in sweat and pacing backstage, unsure what to do with all the adrenaline coursing through his veins.
Nothing I learned in school, or anywhere, really, prepared me for this life.
So, I numbed it. Not with drugs or alcohol, though I did run the gauntlet briefly. I numbed it by working, because…this kind of opportunity is rare, and I wasn’t going to be so ungrateful as to throw it away.
Then, it was what’s next?
Next superstar?
Next person who wanted me to play with them on tour?
I was a hamster on a runaway wheel, just going hard and taking things as they came. It was hard when I wrote a dud, a song that just didn’t hit. It was even harder when I wrote a double platinum success.
I could brush off failure and move on, use it to do better the next time.
Success is a lot harder to grapple with, it turns out.
And along the way, I started writing about different things.
I remember when that started. I was on a plane with a pitch for an album in a folder on my lap, leafing through the concepts for it.
In the back of my mind, I knew I didn’t want to write this fucking album.
It felt plastic, commercial, almost like a computer had jumbled up the ideas and spat them out based on probability of success.
Nothing made sense. There was no theme, no real stories in here.
I wrote the album anyway, in two hours.
It was my biggest hit to date.
That kind of broke me. It also humbled me, because it was the first time I realized talent wasn’t everything.
It was when I had to understand the value of easy listening music, the kind you just flip on when you get in the car and relax as you run errands.
Nothing else. Nothing to echo in your head later.
When it locked in my brain, I wrote another album.
That was my summer of hits, just making money hand over fist. I don’t think Jamie took a single day off. I know I didn’t.
Producing came next, and that was a whole different beast.
That was when superstardom came. That was when I turned everything off, my own wants and needs, and cruised. That was the year I was the one on the cover of the album with my name across the top. It was my name in lights over my head when I played onstage. It was the brightest I’ve ever burned.
Until I burned out.
That led me here, sitting in a little house in the middle of Wyoming, trying to salvage anything left of myself. I’m a car that ran too far, too long, and now, I’m digging through for spare parts.
I draw lines in the margins of the notebook. Sometimes, when I write around the center of the page, I feel more comfortable.
The big open space is intimidating.
During the day, there’s usually something to do without having to go looking for it.
Once, Serena has me unloading straw bales from morning to dinnertime.
It’s the best I’ve felt in a while. The work is too hard for my brain to talk to me.
The next day, Bill asks me to go into town and pick up an order from the feedstore.
That takes the better part of the day, because everyone has something to add onto my list. I’m glad they’re not treating me like I’m made of glass.
I need to do something that isn’t pushing words out of my brain onto paper.
I feel the sun on my face for longer than it takes to walk from one building to the next, from the tour bus to the venue.
I don’t go to interact with the wranglers. Right now, I can’t take the stare of recognition I always get when I show up.
About a week in, I start to feel a slight twinge somewhere beneath my ribs.
It first appears when I get up and go to the ranch house to find Bill sitting on the back porch with a cup of coffee.
He’s the quintessential grizzled rancher, squinting up at the sun.
But in this light, he looks so much like a musician I used to know who passed about five years ago.
He was a real Kris Kristofferson type, had some big hits in the eighties, and went on to produce after he stepped off the stage.
He never told me his surname. He toured under just Waylon, and it was he who taught me the rudimentary bits of producing.
Bill kind of looks like him.
“Hey,” I say, pausing at the bottom of the stairs.
“You got anything going on today, cowboy?” he rumbles.
I shake my head. “Figured I’d just help with the chores a bit. Maybe talk to Sabrina about giving me a chance to check the fenceline tomorrow.”
“You want to come into town with me?”
“Sure. Where are you going?”
“I got some stuff I want to get out of storage,” he says.
I go still, thinking hard. “Bill, I—”
He lifts his head, pushing back his hat a little. “The thing about running from something is that it’s gonna catch up to you at some point.”
“I’m not running.”
He gives me a look, lifting his arm and pointing to the right. “That way is Nashville. How’d you feel about going that way?”
I stare over the east field. My stomach tightens, but there’s also a ripple of excitement at the idea of getting back to work.
It’s been pleasant to be back here in Wyoming, but I’m not connecting with it the way I hoped.
Maybe I need to get in the truck and go find the house where I grew up, see if there’s anything left.
That might fit a piece of my disjointed puzzle into place.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“Do you want to?”
“Go back? No, I don’t think so.”
“Then you’re running.”
I don’t like that thought. He sighs, heaving himself off the steps. “C’mon, go with me to the storage unit. You don’t have to take nothing back with you.”
I dip my head, but not because he’s got me convinced.
No, it’s because Sabrina steps out onto the porch, and two thoughts occur to me in rapid succession.
Bill wants me to go to the storage unit with him, and I appreciate him wanting to be friendly and include me.
I’m feeling guilty because, secondly, I fucked his daughter, and I don’t think he’d take all that kindly to that. I don’t regret it, though.
Hell, against my better judgement, I’d do it again.
My eyes drift over Bill and fall on Sabrina.
God, she’s beautiful, in the same kind of frayed jean shorts and cropped shirt as she was when we met. This time, her shirt’s cut a little higher, and the faint line of her belly is visible.
I swallow hard. I kind of feel like I’m fucking Bill over, and, by proxy, Jamie, by feeling this fired up just looking at Sabrina.
I wonder what Jamie would say if he knew.
He’d probably be shocked I went so far as to sleep with Sabrina when I’m usually pretty risk averse these days.
And we had a conversation about this, one I dropped the second I saw her big blue eyes.
I blink, reaching for my sunglasses. “Let’s go. I can drive.”
It takes a while to get Bill rounded up and in the passenger side of the truck. Then, I have to stop halfway down the drive so Sabrina can run his thermos of coffee down to him. He thanks her, squeezing her hand, and she smiles back, the freckles across her nose wrinkling.
“You two have fun!”
We get on the road, and there’s a comfortable silence as Bill sighs and sinks back.
“They’re great,” he says.
“You’re very lucky,” I say carefully.
He thinks, gazing at the fields streaming by. “How’s Jamie doing out in the big city?”