Chapter Twenty-Six
Traffic had been hellacious, and once more they were going to miss the opening of a festival.
After sitting on the highway going approximately zero miles per hour for hours, they called it quits.
They were only four hours from Atlanta, but the way things were going, they’d never make it in time to even see the last set.
Nashville it was.
The hotel lobby in Tennessee smelled of lemon cleaner and something faintly metallic—old radiator pipes, maybe.
Through the open front door, the late-afternoon heat poured in like the velvet curtains in Leanne’s mother’s living room, heavy and slow, the low hum of music drifting from down the street.
At the front desk, Leanne thumbed through a spinning rack of postcards with glossy, oversaturated colors and tongue-in-cheek sayings.
One caught her eye: “Wish You Were Here—But Then Who’d Feed the Dog?
” There was a cartoon guitar lounging in a hammock strung between two cowboy boots, with the neon lights of Nashville behind it.
She smiled at the silly image. Maybe if she couldn’t get Dean to answer the phone, she could at least make him laugh through the mail. If he even had it in him anymore to crack a smile.
“Do you have a pay phone?” she asked the clerk behind the desk, who was reading a paperback. The question was starting to feel like a mantra.
“Yes, ma’am.” He pointed around the corner toward the vending machine and the ice maker, which was humming like it might start randomly spewing ice at unsuspecting patrons.
“Thanks.” Leanne tucked the postcard under her arm and turned toward Nora, who balanced both their overnight bags and hummed a tune Leanne thought she recognized from the radio. Hendrix’s “Foxy Lady” maybe.
Their motel room was a worn-out relic from a glitzier time—maybe the early ’40s.
But the management had let it fade. Brown carpet with gold thread and matching curtains, and that unmistakable cocktail of stale beer and old cigarettes baked into the walls.
But it had two beds and a working air conditioner, so they couldn’t complain.
Leanne fished for the coins buried in the bottom of her purse, and Nora plopped on the nearest bed, bouncing once, like she was testing the springs, which screamed from overuse.
“It’s the Fourth of July. I can’t believe it. Should we go listen to some music? Grab something to eat?” Nora’s casual voice did not match her hopeful air.
Leanne glanced down at the coins in her hand.
At the postcard now perched on the dresser beside a maroon leather Bible.
At home she would have been working on preparing for a backyard barbecue.
Nora’s friends might have been over, the parents commiserating about losing them to college soon.
Dean would be handling his Weber, staring satisfied at his charred meat with a beer in hand.
A part of her wished they were back home doing the familiar, and yet, here was a chance to make a new memory.
She could call Dean. Wish him a happy Fourth of July. See if he’d been invited by a neighbor. Try to reach him for the tenth time this week. Or she could take this moment—this sliver of shared rebellion with her daughter—and say yes.
Time with Nora won. She dropped the coins back into her purse with a soft clink and smiled.
“Yeah. Let’s do it.”
Nora beamed, and in that instant, Leanne saw the shadow of the little girl her daughter used to be and the woman she was fast becoming. This rare, flickering beat between then and now felt precious. Sacred, even. Like the last song of a set, when the crowd leaned in, not wanting it to end.
She’d write the postcard tonight. Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe she’d leave it unsent, tuck it into her suitcase like a souvenir.
Because right now, her daughter was asking her to go out—to a bar, to dinner, to listen to music. Soon enough, she’d be gone to college, gone into the wide world of dorm rooms, academic degrees, and dances, doing these things with friends instead of her mother.
Leanne straightened her blouse in the mirror and swiped on a little lipstick.
“Let’s see what Nashville’s got for us tonight,” she said.
“Let’s put on something a little more…fun.” Nora was already elbow-deep in her suitcase, flinging shirts and denim and beaded scarves onto the bed like she was prepping for a photo shoot.
Leanne moved more slowly. She opened her modest floral-print overnight bag and sighed.
Everything looked like it came from a rack at Proper Woman Weekly.
Shift dresses in navy, beige, and one particularly sad pastel pink.
A-line skirts stiff from starch. Her low, sensible, nude heels were lined up like obedient little soldiers.
She picked up one of the dresses that looked very much like the one she already had on and held it against herself in the mirror.
The look said everything she’d been told a lady should be.
Polished, put-together, pleasant. But at a music bar in Nashville, it might as well be a Sunday school uniform.
“I don’t really have anything else to wear,” she admitted, still holding the dress like it might suddenly bloom into something daring. “Other than my pajamas.”
Nora glanced over from her suitcase, a wry smile curling at her lips. “We wear the same size. Try these.”
She tossed a pair of well-worn bell-bottom jeans across the bed, followed by a loose pink button-down blouse with pearl snaps and the faint scent of Nora’s perfume clinging to the fabric.
Leanne raised an eyebrow. “This feels…youthful.”
“It is,” Nora said, winking. “So are you. Sometimes.”
Leanne laughed, kicking off her shoes. She slipped out of her dress and tugged on the jeans, shimmying them over hips that hadn’t worn denim since she’d secretly tried them on in a dressing room at Gimbels last year, and just as quickly discarded them as inappropriate.
This time, though, when she buttoned Nora’s jeans and tucked in the blouse, something shifted.
Not just in how she looked but how she felt.
A small zip of energy coursed through her—a forgotten spark.
Like she’d accidentally put her finger in a light socket labeled freedom.
Her hand reached for her heels on instinct, habit from years of mothering and modesty. But Nora snatched one mid-reach.
“What are you doing?” Nora’s mouth was open in scandalized horror.
“I—”
“You cannot wear those,” Nora said, laughing. She dug into her things and pulled out a pair of leather sandals with tiny pink flowers embroidered on the straps. “These. Please.”
Leanne slid her feet in, surprised by how comfortable they were, how naked her feet felt not tucked into panty hose.
She wiggled her toes, the nails painted pink, and then turned toward the mirror, smoothing the blouse, her reflection slowly resolving into someone she half recognized.
The woman looking back at her had lines around her eyes, but they were laugh lines.
Her hair was up, but loosely, like she didn’t care if it came undone.
She looked…like someone who had stories to tell. Almost like a stranger.
Nora came to stand beside her, resting her head gently on her mother’s shoulder. Their reflections leaned into each other, two generations in sync for a rare breath of time.
“You look really pretty, Mom,” Nora said softly.
Leanne met her daughter’s gaze in the mirror. Her throat tightened.
“Thank you,” Leanne said quietly. “I needed a change.”
Nora simply nodded, a knowing smile tugging at the corner of her mouth as if she’d been waiting for her mother to catch up.
Outside, the Nashville evening buzzed with neon and twang.
American flags hung from balconies over the bars, and overhead fireworks randomly sparked.
Honky-tonk bars spilled music into the streets like broken water mains—steel guitars, fiddle solos, the occasional yeehaw echoing off the brick.
The air smelled of fried food, diesel, and something sweet—honeysuckle maybe, or the lingering perfume of a woman who’d just passed.
They strolled down the sidewalks, alive with laughter, patriotic pride, and stumbling boots.
Leanne had been worried she might feel out of place, but bell-bottom jeans were everywhere.
Finally, Nora pointed at a bar that had a line of twinkly lights strung across the doorway and a band they could hear clear as day from the street.
“This one,” she said with a decisive nod.
Inside, the bar was a motley buzz of voices and clinking glasses and a singer hollering into the microphone about heartbreak and the highway.
After a short wait, they slid into a sticky vinyl booth near the back, where the speaker above them crackled like it might give out at any second.
Photos of musicians hung on the walls, and in their booth was a singer named Jet Moon, wildly popular in the 1920s.
He had a fiddle propped on his shoulder, and a mega-watt smile that melted plenty of hearts.
The air was thick with the heat of bodies that an overhead fan did little to mitigate. The whole bar was unmistakably southern. Laughter everywhere. Beer in mason jars. A couple two-stepping between the tables ignoring the fact that it wasn’t a dance floor.
Leanne took it all in, trying not to look like a tourist in her borrowed blouse.
They ordered fried chicken and two draft beers because that’s what everyone else seemed to be doing.
Leanne had never been a beer drinker. Wine, occasionally.
A dainty sherry at Christmas. But beer? Beer had always struck her as the sort of thing that bloated you and made you burp—decidedly unladylike—and was relegated to men.
Still, when the waitress thudded the cold glass onto the table, Leanne lifted it like she knew what she was doing. She took a sip. Let it roll around her mouth like she was appraising it. Crisp. Bready. A little bitter. Kind of like life.
Nora took a sip and let out a low, satisfied “Mmm,” her eyes twinkling. “This is my first beer.”
Leanne looked over, genuinely surprised. “Really?”
“It’s not like they hand them out in the school cafeteria,” Nora joked. “And I didn’t exactly attend a lot of parties. And the ones I did, I was always too nervous about drinking. I had water or soda in my cup the whole time.”
Leanne laughed, then softened. “Like mother, like daughter, huh?”
No sooner had the words left her mouth than something inside her twisted.
She didn’t want that to be Nora’s future.
Playing it safe. Always waiting for permission.
Choosing sensible shoes over sandals with embroidered flowers.
She wanted her daughter to be brave, to feel the fire of life and run toward the flames—not hide behind a smoke screen, like Leanne had done for too many years.
They ate the chicken with their fingers, grease glistening on their knuckles. Nora picked hers clean to the bone. Leanne managed two pieces before her stomach reminded her she hadn’t eaten this kind of food in over a decade.
The band played on—twangy and alive—and Nora bobbed her head to the music, mouthing the words to a song neither of them had ever heard before.
She looked radiant, flushed from the heat, from the beer, from life.
Leanne couldn’t take her eyes off her. In the stillness between heartbeats, she wasn’t just a mother watching her daughter grow up.
She was a woman watching another woman become who she was meant to be.
Had her own mother ever looked at her like that?
And it struck her like a clap of thunder between the chords that time was a thief.
One day, this girl would be gone. Off to Yale.
Off to love. Off to heartbreak and discovery and God knew what else.
And this night? This night would be a sweet and sharp memory that might cut her mother when she thought of it too long.
But for now, it was here. A perfect night frozen in southern heat.
Her daughter was beside her, wearing a blouse she’d once bought on a whim and never worn.
Their laughter threaded through the music like harmony.
Time slowed, the world softening around the edges, like they’d stepped out of reality and into something eternal.
Leanne raised her glass and clinked it gently against Nora’s.
“To first beers,” she said.
Nora beamed. “To second chances.”