Chapter 67 Levi
The car came to pick me up at quarter to five.
Not here at Dante’s. No, the car’s idling at the house, waiting on a man who isn’t coming. I know the time without opening my eyes because I’ve been bracing for it. My body’s been saying get up, get dressed, go where you’re pointed.
I don’t move.
I lie in Dante’s bed and listen to his steady heartbeat under my ear.
The minutes go by. Somewhere out there a driver checks his watch and texts his dispatcher.
Somewhere the machine starts to sputter and stalls, because the man it needs isn’t in the seat.
I’m here instead with Dante’s even breath, keeping me calm.
The car comes. The car goes. Life goes on.
Nobody ever told me this. That I could just not get in the damn car. That I could lie in a warm bed at quarter to five, Dante’s arm over me, and simply let the car leave without me. The sun comes up anyway.
I drift back to sleep. Sometime later the bed shifts. Dante’s awake, rough with sleep, his mouth in my hair.
“Morning.” He nuzzles my ear. I can feel him smiling against my skin. “You getting on that flight this morning?”
I laugh. It comes up fast, out of somewhere I didn’t know still worked.
“Fuck no,” I tell him.
And that’s it. The revolution, right there, two words, before the sun’s even up. And the war for my own life comes down to a sleepy question and me laughing the answer back. He laughs into my neck and pulls me in tighter.
We get up at five-thirty, same as always. I guess that’ll be my new getting-up time now too. I’m on his clock, in his rhythm, and I don’t mind it even a little.
He makes coffee. I sit at his little table and watch him move around the kitchen wearing only a pair of shorts. It’s the most ordinary morning I can imagine. I’ve never had it, and I have to look away and blink my eyes a few times so I don’t lose it again because my heart’s so full.
He catches me at it anyway. He crosses the kitchen, takes my jaw in one hand, tips my face up, and kisses me. No hurry in it anywhere, like there’s nothing in the world scheduled for either of us.
“Hungry?” he says against my mouth. “Say yes. I’ve been wanting to feed you since Wednesday.”
“Yes.”
“Good answer.” One more kiss, on my forehead this time, and he goes to the stove.
Then the world shows up.
Last night is on every screen by the time the coffee’s done. My phone’s been buzzing face-down so long it’s walked itself a clear six inches across the table. Dante slides it over to me without a word, eyebrow up, and goes back to his coffee. Letting me decide what to do with it.
I turn it over.
I don’t even have to open anything. The lock screen can’t hold it all.
It’s a wall of it, scrolling under my thumb.
Lee Streeter everywhere, the name they built for me, except this morning it’s bolted to the truth for the first time.
Clips of last night. The guitar. Me looking at Dante.
Ninety seconds of me telling the truth, copied, shared, argued over a few million times while Dante held me.
My whole life I believed bone-deep, surer than I’ve ever been about anything, that the truth would be the end of me. I believed it because of what my father did to me in Tennessee a long time back.
And because I’m not stupid.
I know what country music is. I know there’s no place in it for a man like me. That’s a known fact.
I start scrolling, looking for the end of me.
I can’t find it.
Behind me the burner clicks and catches. Butter in the pan. Eggs cracked one-handed, the little knock of the spoon. The biggest scandal in American music is scrolling under my thumb, and three feet away Dante is making me breakfast. Every sound out of that kitchen is him telling me the same thing.
Whatever’s on that phone, this table holds for us.
The full song is up in countless versions, shot from phones. The count under the biggest one has more digits than anything the label ever posted with my name on it. Overnight. Trending number one. Not country music trending. Everything trending.
The last line is already a caption on more posts than I can scroll past.
You can’t hold your breath and sing — over a soldier coming off a plane into his family, over a girl pulling out of her hometown with the windows down, over two gray-haired men slow-dancing in a kitchen.
Overnight, strangers have decided what my line means to them, and they’ve decided it means every held-in life finally let out. I wrote it about one door. They’re using it for all of theirs.
And here’s the crazy part. The recorded song doesn’t exist. There’s nothing to stream, nothing to buy, no version of it anywhere but phone recordings of one take on one night. And people are begging for it.
Covers are up already. A kid at a piano, a girl with a banjo on a porch. Petitions tagging the label to release a song the label has never heard. My old records are spiking too, every one of them, people going back through every Lee Streeter record listening for the man hiding in him.
A station in northwest Georgia announced this morning they’re pulling my records, real proud about it, and got buried under their own comments. Two names in Nashville big enough that I sang their songs into a hairbrush as a kid posted the clip. One wrote a single word under it. Finally.
Last night didn’t end me. It’s the most valuable card I’ve ever turned over. Years of songs built by committee, focus-grouped down to generic, meaningless music, and the biggest moment of my career is the ninety seconds I went off the script and meant it.
Maybe they don’t want the wholesome boy. Maybe they never did. Maybe they want the truest part of me. The part I was beaten as a child for having and paid as an adult to hide. Maybe it turns out that was the winning hand all along.
I set the phone down and look up. Dante’s watching me over his coffee, careful.
“You see it,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “I see it.”
“Are you hungry?” he asks.
“I can always eat.”
He sets a full plate in front of me. Eggs fried hard, edges gone brown and lacy, and instead of sitting he stands behind my chair and wraps both arms down over my chest, his chin on top of my head, and just holds on a minute.
I close my eyes, lean back and drink him in. To think that I almost didn’t get this.
“Whatever comes out of that phone today,” he says into my hair, “you don’t do one minute of it alone. That part’s already settled. I’m with you and I’ve got you now.”
The phone buzzes in my hand again. Freddie. The first one came in at four fifty-two, seven minutes after the car gave up on me.
Freddie: Where are you??? The driver says you weren’t there!
Then, over the next hour, the rest of them, a man’s grip slipping one message at a time.
Dante’s hand settles on the back of my neck, warm and heavy, and stays there while I read. “Eat something between catastrophes,” he says, and pushes the plate closer.
Freddie: Levi answer your phone.
Freddie: The label is calling me at five in the morning. Do you have any idea what is happening right now?
Freddie: This is a nightmare. We have to get ahead of it. I need you on a plane.
Freddie: We say it was a stunt. An artistic statement, taken out of context. We get you to Nashville and we control the story.
Freddie: LEVI. Call me now.
I drink my coffee. That phone has made me physically flinch so many times. The buzz of it in my pocket could stop my heart and send me hunting for the exits. This morning it’s a rectangle on the table, buzzing. A frightened man on the far end of it who used to own me and doesn’t anymore.
I type back.
Levi: I’m not flying back today.
The reply comes so fast he must have been staring at the screen.
Freddie: You don’t understand. This isn’t optional. The label, the studio, the schedule. You cannot just disappear. Get to the airport, there’s a late flight this morning I can still get you on.
I look at it a while. That voice, still talking to me like an asset it schedules. No idea the program quit working at quarter to five this morning.
I don’t argue. Arguing is for when the other fella holds a card you need. I type it out, and I call my own play.
Levi: I’ll be at the house by noon. See you then.
Then I turn the phone face-down again and finish my coffee. Dante comes around the counter and presses a kiss to the top of my head, right where the shouting used to land. When I look up, he’s beaming at me like he’s never been prouder of anything.
We take our time eating. And then we spend the morning doing nothing at all. The phone buzzes itself out somewhere around eight and neither of us turns it over. I stretch out on the couch with my head in Dante’s lap while he reads listings, and it’s the finest few hours I can remember.
Around eleven, noon starts pulling at me.
Dante feels me go quiet and squeezes my arm.
But instead of reaching for his keys, he goes to the bedroom and comes back with a folder.
Manila, thick, tabs down the side in three colors.
He sets it in my lap and sits down on the coffee table facing me, knees to my knees.
“Before Freddie,” he says. “You need to know what you’re walking in there holding.
You know I flew to Miami Wednesday to catch up on my office there.
What I didn’t tell you is why I picked this week to go.
The lawyer who read your stack works out of Brickell.
Entertainment law, twenty years of it. While I was down there, I pushed my way into her schedule, and I spent most of Thursday at her conference table going through your life, line by line.
” He taps the folder. “It’s all in there.
What the pages actually say, next to what Freddie’s told you they say.
She flagged every gap. Starting with the fact that half of it was signed by a seventeen-year-old. ”
I look at the folder. Then at him. “You flew to Miami to do this for me? Why didn’t you tell me before now?”