CHAPTER EIGHT COEN #3
Bill laughs, stepping inside and hitting the light switch. “Yeah, I might have a little problem with throwing shit out. I just didn’t want to let go of any of the girls’ things as they got older.”
“You kept everything?”
He leans on his cane, eyes narrowed. “Yeah, every Barbie, every plastic horse.”
I scan the cardboard boxes stacked along the wall.
Everything is labeled, black Sharpie scrawled across the side.
The closest box says: Sabrina, fourth grade, coats.
I shift it to the side, revealing another.
Serena, tea sets, second grade. My stomach lurches.
Bill really loves his kids, and it’s making me miss my mom.
That wound will always hurt, even after a decade and a half.
I’m just…stuck, forever living in a post-Mom world, where things like tea sets in boxes hurt a little bit.
“Here it is.”
I turn to find Bill shoving a few boxes aside and pulling one labeled Scott Iron—that’s Jamie’s dad—out.
Stepping through the piles, I help him set it on a folding table.
He leans on his cane with one elbow and opens the box with the other hand.
Inside is a pile of photographs, a baseball glove, a stack of records, and a baseball with a signature scrawled across it.
“Scott didn’t keep much,” he rumbles, taking out a collector’s card.
He holds it out. I take it, turning it over. It’s a Babe Ruth reproduction.
“It’s nice,” I say. “How’d you end up with Scott’s things?”
“He came over to the house a lot when the girls were real little. Left stuff over here and there. When he and his wife split up, I think he was real lonely. Maybe we were both lonely.”
I haven’t been divorced myself, but I wrote a divorce album for an unnamed star whose philandering husband stepped out on her.
It was about anger and revenge, about doing better now that he’s gone, but these bits and pieces aren’t like that.
They’re leftovers from something happy, resigned more than anything else.
Shreds of the family Jamie had, the one he rarely talks about.
He’s always putting on a brave face. Maybe that’s why I want to work so hard.
We both have struggles, me and Jamie, deep down. A bit of darkness handed to us by others, brought along in our suitcases when we came to Nashville seventeen years ago.
I think that’s what made us so good at what we do.
We both kind of get it.
“You want to take it back to Jamie?” he asks.
I clear my throat, struggling to know what to say. It’s rare Jamie talks about these things. He’s a head down, get his work done and leave the personal issues at home kind of guy. When hard things come up, he deals with them, and then he moves on.
I hate it. I know he hurts a bit too, and it hasn’t done us any favors when it comes to dealing with everything we’ve been through.
“I can, yeah,” I say.
He pushes it toward me and heads to the back of the storage unit. I step in, and my eyes adjust a bit. Bill is against the back wall, tugging something closer. I blink, and a guitar in a dusty brown leather case swims in my vision. Right away, I know it was Scott’s.
My body goes still. My chest compresses.
At first, I think I’m feeling fear, and then I realize it’s a mix of that and excitement.
“You want to play a song, cowboy?” Bill grunts as he pulls the guitar down and makes his way back over, shoving it onto the table.
I gaze down at the guitar. All I can think about is the way Jamie looked at me when he told me it was time for a break. How the diner smelled, like burnt coffee and familiarity. How I felt like sheer emptiness in my chest.
“You good?” Bill asks.
I shake my head, blinking. “I’m good, but I’m gonna have to decline, Bill. I’m supposed to be on break.”
He looks at my face, and there must be something there I should be better at concealing, because he backs off right away. Instead, he slaps his hand on the case, and a puff of dust filters through the air.
“That’s alright,” he says. “I’ll leave this here, and when Jamie comes out to get you at the end of the summer, he can check it out. But let’s take the box of things with us.”
I try to respond, but nothing comes up. I’m as bone dry as the bed of a creek in the dead heat of August. Deep in the back of my brain, I squirrel that little line away. The dead heat of August…I can use that.
A tingle moves through my chest.
I haven’t hit on a good line in a long time. Maybe I'm already starting to bounce back.
In the truck, I put the box in the back seat while Bill pulls a few other things from the unit.
Then, I lock it up while he gets into the truck, and I slide behind the wheel.
When I turn on the engine, it connects to my phone.
Hank Williams starts playing—Hey, Good Looking—and Bill taps the dashboard with the handle of his cane.
“Good one,” he says.
I swing out onto the road and turn back the way we came. This song used to be one of my go-tos back in the day. If I’d had the courage to play for Bill today, I just might have picked it.
“Yeah,” I say. “Good one.”