4. The Gap #2
Tommy called last night. The real numbers, finally laid out without the precise editing our father used to apply and without the softening Tommy has been doing since the estate settled.
The debt is larger than I understood. The deadline is tighter than I wanted to believe.
The bank has been patient, unlike institutions that have already made their decision and are simply letting the clock confirm it.
Tommy's voice had the flatness of someone who has been carrying something heavy for so long that the weight has become his posture. He did not ask me for anything. He told me the numbers and waited.
That was worse than if he had asked.
I drive with the window cracked and think about my father's hands.
The way they looked when he was working, rough and certain, the hands of a man who built something from nothing and intended to keep it.
It would not have occurred to him to doubt the permanence of what he built.
The land was the legacy. The legacy was permanent. That was how things were.
He was wrong about the permanent part.
I park at the studio and sit in the truck for a moment.
The session today is with a producer I have worked with before and a chart I can already play. I can do this without much of myself in it. That is useful on days when most of me is in the Texas Panhandle, trying to make numbers that don't add up work.
* * *
Few Hours Later
Three hours. I am efficient and precise, and I give the track what it needs, and the producer calls it on the second take. I load out and drive back on the highway with the window cracked.
My mind circles back to the drainage seam comment at breakfast, jaw tight as my fingers drum a restless rhythm on the steering wheel.
I don’t know why I’m thinking about the drainage seam comment, which is a separate and more complicated problem.
The thing about the breakfast conversation is that it was not for me.
Jake was not saying it to be useful to anyone in particular.
He doesn't know about the 400 acres, the bank notice, or the deadline.
He was answering Cash's question accurately because that is what he does: he states what is true, plainly, without strategy, because there is apparently no gap between what he knows and what he says.
I have been in rooms where men perform their knowledge of land and cattle the way musicians perform confidence before a room that is slightly too large for them.
The performance has a certain timbre. Louder than necessary.
Slightly ahead of the beat. Jake's breakfast observation had none of that.
It landed the way a true thing lands: quietly, with no need for the room to confirm it.
I need to be careful about how I use that distinction.
I have been away from that kind of directness long enough that it would be easy to mistake it for more than it is.
I drive, let the highway do what it does, and arrive back at First Note Farm without a conclusion, which is fine.
Some things don't need conclusions yet.
* * *
The late light is long and flat when I pull into the drive.
Jake is at the barn fence with Angel. Coffee cup. Talking.
Angel says something, and he laughs, not performed, just an actual laugh, the sound of a person who finds things genuinely funny.
Angel looks up, sees my truck, and lifts a hand. Jake turns.
I get out.
He raises the coffee cup in my direction. Easy greeting. No weight to it.
I nod and go toward the barn.
* * *
I sit on the tack room bench and pull my boots off. The session day is draining out of me.
Shadow shifts in his stall. Hay. Water. A settled animal.
There is a definite pattern.
The fence. The water trough. The east paddock rail, three mornings. The breakfast table. Coffee at the barn fence just now.
He keeps appearing, and an unwelcome flutter skips under my ribs.
Not in a way that crowds. Not in a way that is asking anything. He just ends up in the same spaces, does what he is doing there with full absorption, and if I happen to be nearby, that is apparently just how the property is laid out. He is not engineering the intersections.
I would know if he were engineering them. I am confident about that.
I am less confident about my count of how many times I have registered them.
I've watched Jake Wilder for days. So far, I've found only one gap between the man he shows everyone and the man he really is.
When someone asks how he is, he laughs and changes the subject: Cash, Angel, Kit, the woman at the feed store.
The laugh comes up, and the question dissolves, and the conversation moves on before anyone notices what happened.
He is very good at it.
Good enough that Cash doesn't appear to notice, which is significant. Cash is not an unobservant person. He sees things. He missed this one, or he has decided not to press it, which amounts to the same thing.
I recognize the technique because I use a similar version myself.
Mine is quieter, less warm, harder to clock as a deflection because it looks more like reserve.
But the function is the same. Someone gets close to a real question, and something comes up to fill the space before the question can land.
His version laughs. Mine goes still.
Neither of us has been asked how we are in a long time by someone who was going to wait for the real answer.
I don't know why I am sitting in a tack room thinking about what Jake Wilder and I have in common. I set that observation down.
Once, I would have noted the deflection pattern and moved on.
I have not moved on.
That is new information about me. I am choosing not to examine it further today.
I put my boots back on, pick up my clipboard, and step into the afternoon. My phone buzzes. Tommy again.