12. Where You Go When You Need Quiet
Where You Go When You Need Quiet
LILA
Wilder Ranch — Morning
Iwake up before five, and I don't go back to sleep. The floorboards are cool under my bare feet when I swing out of bed.
Sometimes, after a night with too much to process, my mind wakes up early. My mind wakes up early to finish the work.
I lie in the guest room in the Panhandle dark, and I let it work.
Jake named Matt last night in the truck. He didn't make it a thing, speaking with the same directness he uses for fence posts and drainage seams.
“Matt is why you don't do your own music for anyone.”
Not a question.
I said yes.
I have not said yes to that sentence before.
I have not said it out loud in any form, not to Angel, not to Ivy, not to Tommy, not to anyone.
I have carried my explanation without giving it to people because giving it would require trusting someone with the part of me that is still nineteen, standing in a room hearing laughter.
Jake named it in a truck in the dark on a Panhandle road, and I said yes, then went inside and fell asleep.
I am examining that this morning.
What I am examining is how it came out. Not after a long conversation. Not after he carefully built up to it. He said it the way he says everything, directly, because he had enough pieces and the picture was obvious to him.
And I said yes, the way you say yes to something that is simply true.
I did not think about whether to say it.
It came out before the thinking started.
That has happened exactly once before in my adult life, and it was also to a person I had trusted before I had decided to, and that time the trust was wrong.
Matt was the drummer I replaced.
That is the sanitized version. The real version is that Matt was the drummer I replaced, and then he was my boyfriend, and then he was both of those things at the same time for three years, and in that order, which is relevant.
I was twenty-two. He was twenty-seven. He had been in the band longer than anyone, and he moved through the touring world with the ease of a man who had already figured out which rules applied to him.
I was new to the road, new to the industry, and very good at what I did, and he noticed both simultaneously.
The first year was fine. Better than fine.
He was funny when he was sober and generous when he was high, and the music we made together was real.
I had never been in a room where something was being built that fast, and I did not want to leave it.
The second year was when I started to understand the shape of things.
He drank more after bad nights, which is common enough. He drank more after a good night too, which is less common.
He had moods that moved fast and without warning, and I learned to read the room the way you learn to read anything that you need to survive, quickly, by paying very close attention.
I stopped playing my own music somewhere in that second year.
Not because he asked me to. Because I had learned, without a single conversation about it, that the things I made for myself were not safe in his hands, I played him something once, three in the morning after a show, something I had been carrying for weeks.
He listened.
Then he said it sounded like something he had heard before. Then he went to sleep.
He used the melody in a song he wrote six weeks later.
He did not mention this.
I did not say anything.
That was the moment it shut. Not loudly. Not with a fight or a confrontation. Just quietly, the way a door closes when you have understood something you cannot un-understand.
The things I made for myself were not safe to give to another person. That was the lesson.
I had offered something real, and it had been taken and used without acknowledgment, and I had said nothing, which meant I had accepted the terms.
I left the band at twenty-five. I left Matt at twenty-five. Both at the same time, which should tell you something about how thoroughly he had wrapped himself around the thing I cared about.
Nashville was a clean start. Session work is its own discipline. You show up, you give the song what it needs, you leave.
Nobody is looking at you. Nobody takes anything. The exchange is simple, clear, and bounded.
I built a life out of that clarity.
The piano stayed private because private was safe. The things I made for myself stayed in the truck, the apartment, or the empty barn after everyone had gone. No one had access. No one could use it. No one could hear it, decide what it was worth, and be wrong.
That was six years ago.
I have been telling myself it was fine.
I am aware, lying in the Panhandle dark, that the door has been open a crack since the morning at the east fence when I said, “He checks you for that.” And Jake replied, “I wasn't doing anything specific,” and “I know, that's why he checked you.”
The conclusion I keep arriving at is that I trust him. My pulse steadies at the admission.
Not fully. Not yet. But enough that the word came out before I decided to give it.
That is new information.
I get up, make coffee, and sit on the porch in the dark before the ranch wakes up.
The Panhandle dark at five in the morning is different from the Panhandle dark at midnight.
At midnight, it is full, complete, and settled.
At five, it has the atmosphere of something about to change, still dark, but with the awareness of light coming, the whole sky holding its breath before it opens up.
I sit in it, drink my coffee, and revel in the stillness of it.
I have been back in this light for eight days. I did not know, until I was back in it, how much I had been compensating for its absence. Nashville light is fine. Studio light is functional. The Tennessee hills are green and good. None of it is this.
None of it goes all the way to the horizon in every direction with nothing in the way.
I am going to have to think about that eventually.
Not this morning.
This morning, I am thinking about Jake naming Matt and me saying yes, and what it means that both happened in a truck on a dark road before I could decide whether to allow them.
* * *
Pete arrives at six-thirty instead of seven, the thermos lid clanking as he sets it on the porch rail and a spike of coffee aroma following him.
He comes around the side of the house with his thermos, stopping when he sees me on the porch.
"You're up early," he says.
"You're early."
"I'm always early. I'm just usually the only one out here." He looks at me with the assessment he applies to everything he encounters. "Good night?"
"Good night."
"Dusty's hasn't changed in thirty years."
"Doesn't need to."
He sits in the other porch chair without being invited, which is Pete's relationship with all chairs everywhere. He unscrews his thermos and pours, and looks out at the east pasture.
"He asked you about your past," he says.
I look at him.
"Jake's not subtle, and sometimes he speaks without thinking about the consequences," Pete says. "I could tell something got said in that truck."
"You weren't in the truck."
"Didn't need to be. I've known that boy since he was two years old. When something lands on him, it shows." He drinks his coffee.
"Cash told me about the program. What you do there. Didn't take much to put it together."
I look at the east pasture in the early light.
"He didn't say it unkindly," I say.
"No," Pete says. "He wouldn't." He pauses. "He wouldn't know how."
"What was he like?" I ask. "When he was young."
Pete gets an expression like he has been waiting for this question.
"Loud," he says. "Happy. The kind of kid who finds the fun in everything and drags everyone else into it. Even the stuff that wasn't fun, he'd make it into something."
He looks at his coffee. A slow breath steadies me, fingers tightening around my mug. "When Julia left, and Cash left the same year, something went quiet in him—not gone. Just quiet. He kept going, kept the ranch up, kept everybody else together." He pauses.
"He's good at that. Taking care of the thing. Not always so good at taking care of himself."
I hold my coffee mug.
"I'm not saying that as a hint," Pete says. "I'm just saying it so you know."
"I know," I say.
"Good." He stands. "Then I won't say it again."
He goes to find my father, and I sit on the porch in the Panhandle morning, and I visualize a twenty-two-year-old Jake Wilder going quiet and staying that way and choosing it every day because the ranch needed him to.
I know something about choosing the quiet.
I chose mine for different reasons, but the mechanism is the same.
* * *
Afternoon
The work today is lighter than it has been in the past few days. Jake and Pete take Cody through the cattle vaccination schedule, the last of the fall maintenance before the season turns.
Jim checks the hay inventory with focused attention, as if he's been doing this for forty years and still doesn't trust the numbers until he's seen them himself.
I watch Jim check the inventory. He goes through each stack methodically, counting and measuring, writing in a small notebook that is older than Cody.
He doesn't rush. He doesn't skip bales because they look fine. He checks every single one.
My father kept his books to himself.
Jim Wilder checks the hay inventory in front of everyone and writes it in a notebook anyone could read.
The difference between those two approaches is part of why one ranch is in crisis and the other isn't.
I add that to my notebook in the margin and don't examine it too closely to see how it makes me feel about my father.
I help where I am useful, and stay out of the way where I am not.
At noon, Pete says to no one in particular: "Fence looks good on the west boundary."
He is not looking at me when he says it.
I am not looking at him either.
Jake catches my eye across the yard, and his face says that Pete has managed him since childhood and has made his peace with never winning.
After lunch, I sit on the porch steps and go through my notebook.